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.
"It nice and easy for the clients and those using the product to access the product's help resources."
"It has all the features necessary to work in anything from a basic scenario to advanced applications."
"We use it to build API proxies for securing targeted back-ends with an emphasis on Continuous Integration/Continuous Development (CI/CD)."
"There are just a lot of security features in general."
"It's a good return on my investment."
"Apigee is an easy-to-use solution."
"The analytics function and the developer portal are the two valuable features of Apigee. The analytics part is very good, and the developer portal is quite rich in features."
"It is easy to deploy, configure, and monitor the APA."
"The solution's technical support is good and fast in terms of responsiveness and problem-solving skills."
"This is a solid intrusion prevention system that combines a firewall and antivirus in a single solution."
"In our buying companies' perspective, it was easier to use compared to other platforms. The markets were pretty familiar with the solutions."
"The most valuable features of Kong Enterprise are the out-of-the-box open source easy functionality."
"Good at intercepting traffic and modeling APIs around that."
"We use the solution for load-balancing, caching, and rate-limiting APIs."
"The route limiting feature is very valuable."
"Kong Enterprise comes with some ready plug-ins, which is very good for the customers."
"I see some lagging in regards to integration capacity"
"The pricing for the product was a bit higher. I also found it challenging to manage sometimes."
"The cost of the solution is quite high."
"I don't have any notes for improvement."
"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."
"Could be more user friendly."
"Technical support model for OPDK should be more exposed and mature in terms of providing support during installation, run, and debug of Apigee in production on OPDK mode."
"The developer portal's adoption of the OpenAPI standard needs to be improved. In the latest version of the developer portal, they have adopted the OpenAPI standard. This feature, however, can be improved by supporting more characteristics of the OpenAPI standard."
"Understanding the configurations and knowing what needs to be done can be a bit difficult initially."
"We would like to see an automatic data API when we have a table in the database."
"The developer portal needs to be improved."
"The OS upgrades are not as frequent as they should be and they are bulky."
"Kong Enterprise fails to provide live tracing of the APIs, which is possible nowadays."
"The tool needs improvement in UX."
"There should be an easier way to integrate with other solutions, even though it's the same API solution layer. Comparability will be a good improvement."
"Because it is open-source, it should be less expensive than others."
Apigee is ranked 2nd in API Management with 82 reviews while Kong Gateway Enterprise is ranked 6th in API Management with 20 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, WSO2 API Manager, Amazon API Gateway and IBM DataPower Gateway, whereas Kong Gateway Enterprise is most compared with Microsoft Azure API Management, WSO2 API Manager, Apache APISIX, Layer7 API Management and MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager. See our Apigee vs. Kong Gateway Enterprise report.
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