Kong Gateway: API Connectivity Foundation for AI | Kong Inc.
We're Entering the Age of AI Connectivity
Products & Agents:
- Kong AI Gateway
- Kong API Gateway
- Kong Event Gateway
- Kong Metering & Billing
- Kong Insomnia
- Kong Konnect
- Documentation
- Book Demo
Loved by developers. Trusted by enterprises.
Ridiculously fast
Ultra-lightweight, infinitely scalable NGINX engine with 50K+ transactions per second per node.
Always flexible
Kong Gateway delivers the architectural flexibility you need to operate across any cloud, platform, or protocol.
Deployed instantly
Configure Kong Gateway natively using an API, web UI, or declarative configuration to manage updates via CI/CD pipelines.
Built for hybrid and multi-cloud, optimized for microservices and distributed architectures.
01/ APIOps
- Automate each phase of the API and microservices lifecycle through declarative configuration.
- Easily apply proven principles of DevOps and GitOps to bring applications online faster.
02/ Installation Options
- Run Kong Gateway in any environment, platform, and implementation pattern — from on-prem to cloud, Kubernetes, and serverless.
- Flexibility to configure Kong Gateway with or without database, and in hybrid or cloud-hosted modes.
03/ Plugins
- Exercise granular control over your API traffic with out-of-the-box security, authentication, transformation, and analytics plugins.
- Easily extend Kong Gateway to support unique use cases with custom plugins via Kong's Plugin Development Kit.
04/ Kubernetes Ingress Controller
- Configure Kong Gateway the same way as Kubernetes with Kong Ingress Controller.
- Implement traffic management, transformations, and observability across Kubernetes clusters with zero downtime.
05/ Flexible policy design and execution
- Design flexible, granular policy flows.
- Drive internal auth, API mashing, and more data transformation use cases.
| Kong Gateway for Open Source |
Kong Gateway for Kong Enterprise |
Kong Gateway for Kong Konnect |
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| Fast, Lightweight, Cloud-Native High-performance proxying of APIs |
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| End-to-End Automation Drive a GitOps flow of API design and execution |
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| Kubernetes Native Deploy APIs to Kubernetes in a native fashion |
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| Gateway Mocking Mock API responses directly on the API gateway |
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| Plugin Ordering Declaratively configure the execution order of the plugins based on your needs |
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| Federated API Management Easily organize services & data planes (via control planes) for isolation based on environment or teams. |
Workspaces provide some isolation | Control planes provide strong isolation | |
| Data plane Resilience In case of control plane failure, new data plane node can boot by reading config file in S3-compatible storage. |
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| Consumer Groups Define any number of plugin tiers such as rate limiting and apply them to subsets of consumers. |
API Governance+
| Kong Gateway for Open Source |
Kong Gateway for Kong Enterprise |
Kong Gateway for Kong Konnect |
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| OpenTelemetry Manage the collection and sampling of tracing information. |
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| Developer Portal API Portal for external teams with the ability to link apps automatically to a 3rd party identity provider. |
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| Service Hub Global service catalog for internal teams. |
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| API Analytics Real-time visibility into all your APIs and gateway performance. |
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| Data Retention Period for Observability Gain insights, track trends, and make informed decisions based on historical data. |
Up to 1 year | ||
| Admin GUI Visually manage runtimes, plugins, APIs, and consumers. |
Self-managed Kong Manager | Self-managed Kong Manager | |
| Gateway Event Hooks Auto-logout or send web hooks on gateway changes, such as new admins added or rate limits exceeded. |
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| Audit Logging Maintain detailed cluster config records for enhanced security, compliance, debugging, and risk management. |
Operational Efficiency +
| Kong Gateway for Open Source |
Kong Gateway for Kong Enterprise |
Kong Gateway for Kong Konnect |
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| Hosted control plane Lower operational complexity and cost of managing the control plane |
self-managed | self-managed | |
| Hosted Database Lower operational complexity and cost of maintaining a database |
self-managed | self-managed | |
| SLA on Gateway control plane and database SLA for Developer Portal, Service Hub, API Analytics, Admin GUI and database |
self-managed | self-managed | 99.9% Uptime SLA |
| Full SaaS API Gateway | |||
| Effortless Upgrades Each runtime group can support multiple gateway versions ensuring seamless upgrade process. |
Traffic Management and Transformations+
| Kong Gateway for Open Source |
Kong Gateway for Kong Enterprise |
Kong Gateway for Kong Konnect |
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| Basic Traffic Control Plugins Manage ACME certificates, basic rate limiting, and lightweight caching. |
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| Simple Data Transformations Add or remove headers, JSON data, or query strings |
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| GraphQL Convert GraphQL queries to REST requests. Rate limit and cache GraphQL queries |
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| Kafka Integrations Transform requests into Kafka messages and send Kong logs to Kafka |
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| Multi-protocol Plugin Support Plugin support for a wide range of protocols including REST, gRPC, GraphQL, WebSockets, UDP, SOAP and Kafka. |
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| Request Validation Validate requests using Kong’s schema validator or a JSON Schema Draft 4-compliant validator |
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| Advanced Data Transformation Advanced JSON transformations of requests or responses with the ability to chain transformations |
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| Advanced Rate Limiting Enterprise-grade rate limiting with sliding window controls |
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| Routing Engine New routing engine to configure Routes using Expressions for handling complex routing requests |
Security and Compliance+
| Kong Gateway for Open Source |
Kong Gateway for Kong Enterprise |
Kong Gateway for Kong Konnect |
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| Basic Authentication Common methods of API authentication - Basic Auth, HMAC, JWT Key Auth, limited OAuth 2.0, limited LDAP |
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| Advanced Authentication Full OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, Vault, Mutual TLS, JWT Signing/Resigning, SAML2.0, JWE Decrypt Plugin, full LDAP and more. |
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| Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) Control gateway configurations based on a user's role in the organization |
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| Basic Authorization (Bot Detection, CORS controls, ACLs) Control access to APIs by rules of user behavior and control lists |
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| Advanced Authorization (OPA) Control access to APIs with complex, programmable, enterprise-wide rules |
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| OOTB integration with 3rd party secret management tools Securely store/manage sensitive keys, certs, passwords in tools like Hashicorp Vault, AWS Secret Manager, GCP Secrets Manager |
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| FIPS 140-2 Compliant Data Planes Configure Kong Gateway core in a FIPS 140-2 compliant mode |
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| Software Bill of Materials Visibility into the inventory of all software components (proprietary and open source), licenses, and dependencies in Kong |
Enterprise Support and Services+
| Kong Gateway for Open Source |
Kong Gateway for Kong Enterprise |
Kong Gateway for Kong Konnect |
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| Enterprise support 24/7 x 365 technical support SLAs |
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| Customer Success Packages - Add-on Accelerate time to value with dedicated Technical Account Managers and Field Engineers |
Kong is a natural fit for PEXA embarking on the modernization journey. It ticks all the boxes – scalability, security, and self-service – which takes the hassle of managing APIs.
Simon Vallegra
Technology Operations and Digital Delivery
Reduced Developer Onboarding Time from Days to Hours
Mercedes-Benz decided to focus on Kong as their recommended choice because it's suitable for both small and large instances providing simple configuration, operation, and monitoring.
Benjamin Bertow
Senior Technical Lead and Product Owner
Saw an 85% Reduction in Operational Overhead