We compared Apigee and Kong Enterprise based on our users reviews in five parameters. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
The setup process for Apigee can be either straightforward or complex, while Kong Enterprise generally has a smooth and easy installation process, although some users needed additional support.
Apigee is notable for its robust capabilities, analytics functionality, developer portal, and pre-configured policies. It also offers sandboxing, scalability, and extensive customization options. In contrast, Kong Enterprise excels in plugin-driven network services, authentication and authorization features, and Lua script customization for observability. It also delivers strong performance and a route limiting feature.
Kong Enterprise has room for improvement in various areas such as pricing, automatic data API creation, customization for integration, solutions for east-west communications and Zero Trust architecture, scaling up process, and developer portal with isolated data plans for federated teams.
Apigee is known for its costly setup, including high licensing fees that may discourage certain users. On the other hand, Kong Enterprise's setup cost is influenced by factors like scale, licenses, and usage, but its licensing expenses are deemed reasonable when compared to other products.
Apigee is praised for its exceptional customer service, particularly in terms of technical support during the initial design phase. They go above and beyond by providing an architect to define the architecture. Similarly, Kong Enterprise also offers commendable customer service, with a responsive and helpful technical team.
Comparison Results
Based on user feedback, Apigee and Kong Enterprise have distinct strengths and weaknesses. Apigee is highly regarded for its robust features, analytics function, developer portal, and security measures. However, it requires enhancements in terms of user-friendliness, iPaaS capabilities, pricing, customization options, and documentation. Conversely, Kong Enterprise receives praise for its seamless installation process, plugin-based network services, authentication and authorization features, and customization through Lua script. It could benefit from improvements in pricing, automatic data API creation, customization for integration, scaling up process, and developer portal. Overall, Apigee offers a broader range of capabilities and features, while Kong Enterprise excels in providing a straightforward installation process and plugin support.
"The most important feature is the security capabilities and the way it integrates very quickly with other security providers. We have integrated it with Azure and it integrates quite seamlessly."
"Apigee provides out-of-the-box policies, so it is ready to use with minimal configuration to those policies. You can govern your API and manage the life cycle of the API completely with the Apigee tool."
"The initial setup isn't too complex."
"It's easy to use and the security features are valuable."
"The security that you have with Apigee is very good and aligns with compliance."
"The most valuable features of Apigee for me are analytics, security, ease of use, and integration capabilities."
"The ability to convert from language to language using a single tool."
"I simply like how you can personalize your products and put them into product categories. That's what I like the most."
"Kong Enterprise has excellent plugin support."
"We use the solution for load-balancing, caching, and rate-limiting APIs."
"I like everything about it. It provides the security we need."
"There are a few features that I like about Kong when it comes to authentication and authorization. Specifically, being able to use Kong for role-based access control (RBAC), and then further being able to integrate the RBAC mechanism with our enterprise directory, was very useful."
"This is a solid intrusion prevention system that combines a firewall and antivirus in a single solution."
"The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that it seamlessly supports a vast number of tools."
"The tool's feature that I find most beneficial is rate limiting. In our usage, especially in the financial sector, we prioritize limiting API usage. This is crucial because we provide APIs to other companies and must ensure they adhere to their allocated usage limits. Without rate limiting, there's a risk of excessive usage, which could result in significant costs."
"The solution provides good performance."
"It needs predictive analysis of consumption."
"Access restrictions can be improved."
"I would recommend this solution to those who want to start using it, but it depends on the requirements and automation."
"iPaaS is something that we would like to see. For example, MuleSoft is kind of an integrated platform as a service (iPaaS), and it provides a lot of out-of-the-box connectors and other such things. This is where Apigee lacks. I'm not sure if that's the roadmap for Apigee, but any improvements on those lines would be helpful where things become easier to implement."
"Better functionality for validating inputs and outputs would be helpful."
"Apigee's user interface could be more straightforward and have more options. Also, it would be nice if it were ready to work out of the box without so much configuration."
"The analytical aspect of it could be better. I think it is fair if Apigee lets you configure some of the metrics of the key details you want to monitor in terms of analytics."
"Apigee is demanding on the infrastructure so the setup cost is very high for an on-premises deployment."
"The solution should include policy features that are available in other solutions like MuleSoft API manager but missing in Kong Enterprise."
"We would like to see an automatic data API when we have a table in the database."
"We are facing issues with the solution's features like reports and traffic analysis."
"It becomes difficult if you try to scale it up to multiple clusters."
"The technical support team's response time needs to be improved."
"The developer portal needs to be improved."
"Kong Enterprise fails to provide live tracing of the APIs, which is possible nowadays."
"Understanding the configurations and knowing what needs to be done can be a bit difficult initially."
Apigee is ranked 2nd in API Management with 82 reviews while Kong Gateway Enterprise is ranked 6th in API Management with 18 reviews. Apigee is rated 8.2, while Kong Gateway Enterprise is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Apigee writes "Has a robust community and outstanding performance". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Kong Gateway Enterprise writes "Provides role-based access control and can be easily customized with Lua script". Apigee is most compared with Microsoft Azure API Management, IBM API Connect, Amazon API Gateway, WSO2 API Manager and Axway AMPLIFY API Management, whereas Kong Gateway Enterprise is most compared with Microsoft Azure API Management, WSO2 API Manager, MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager, Apache APISIX and Amazon API Gateway. See our Apigee vs. Kong Gateway Enterprise report.
See our list of best API Management vendors.
We monitor all API Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.