Kong
Open-source API and AI gateway with a plugin ecosystem and the Konnect cloud management platform.
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About Kong
Kong Gateway is one of the most widely deployed API gateways. It runs in front of your services to route traffic and handle authentication, rate limiting, transformations, logging and monitoring, mostly through a large library of plugins that can be extended with your own code. The core gateway is open source under Apache 2.0 and can run on Linux, in Docker or on Kubernetes through its ingress controller. Kong Inc. builds commercial layers on top: Konnect, a hosted control plane with a developer portal, analytics and service catalog, plus enterprise plugins and an AI gateway for governing LLM and MCP traffic. Teams can self-host everything, run hybrid with Kong-hosted control planes, or use fully managed gateways. Konnect has a free trial and usage-based paid plans; enterprise pricing is by quote. It suits platform teams that want a proven gateway with room to grow into full API management.
Best for: Platform teams wanting a battle-tested open-source gateway with an optional managed control plane.
Pros and cons
What works
- Open-source core under Apache 2.0
- Large plugin library for auth, rate limiting and observability
- Self-hosted, hybrid or fully managed deployment
Why people leave
- Many advanced plugins and the portal need a paid licence
- Konnect usage pricing has many moving parts
- More to operate than a single-binary gateway like KrakenD
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Kong: common questions
Is Kong free?
Yes. Kong is free, open-source software that you can host yourself.
Is Kong open source?
Yes. The source code is on GitHub at Kong/kong. You can also run it on your own server.
What platforms does Kong run on?
Kong is available for Web, Linux and Self-hosted.