Reviewed by iTechGuides Editors · Editorial team · Updated Oct 2026
Kong Gateway is a cloud-native API gateway and reverse proxy for configuring, routing, securing, and observing APIs and microservices. It is aimed at platform teams, developers, and enterprises managing services across Kubernetes, on-premises infrastructure, and multiple cloud environments. Its scope covers API routing, authentication and authorization, configurable rate limiting, request and response transformation, load balancing, health checks, circuit breakers, analytics, logging, and observability integrations. The gateway supports REST, HTTP, Kafka, WebSockets, gRPC, GraphQL, UDP, TCP, and TLS.
Pricing is structured around a free trial, Plus, and Enterprise, alongside open-source and self-managed deployment options. The Free trial costs $0 for 30 days and includes Enterprise functionality, no Gateway limits, and analytics retained for 30 days. Plus includes up to 5 Serverless Gateways, up to 2 Hybrid Gateways, up to 2 Dedicated Cloud Gateways, and 1 million API requests per month; its pricing uses metered gateway and request charges. Enterprise adds no Gateway limits, fully self-hosted API Gateways, enterprise security and controls, dedicated support, and customer success. This makes the trial useful for evaluating the broader feature set, while Plus and Enterprise align with different deployment and governance needs.
Kong Gateway fits teams that need a broad integration and deployment ecosystem. It connects with Kubernetes, Kafka, Prometheus, StatsD, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, LDAP, and Vault, while supporting declarative configuration and CI/CD automation. Kubernetes ingress traffic management and hybrid deployment support are especially relevant for distributed platform operations. Teams seeking a gateway for multi-protocol traffic, Kubernetes management, and mixed self-hosted and cloud environments should consider Kong Gateway. Organizations needing only a narrowly focused gateway may find its wider feature and deployment scope unnecessary.
Kong Gateway pros and cons
- Where it wins
- Supports REST, Kafka, WebSockets, gRPC, GraphQL, UDP, TCP, and TLS
- Combines routing, authentication, rate limiting, transformations, and load balancing
- Offers open-source, self-managed, hybrid, and managed cloud deployment options
- Where it doesn't
- Plus uses metered gateway and request charges rather than one fixed listed price
- The Free trial retains analytics for 30 days
- Dedicated support and customer success are listed for Enterprise
Kong Gateway fact sheet, pricing and score →
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