Apache APISIX vs Kong Gateway
Apache APISIX
apisix.apache.org
Kong Gateway
konghq.comSide by side
| Figure | Apache APISIX | Kong Gateway |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 0 | 7 |
| Spec score · Rest Apis | 7.6 (#12) | 7.8 (#10) |
| Spec score · API Gateway Software | 7.6 (#18) | 7.8 (#12) |
| Spec score · Apis | 7.6 (#17) | 7.8 (#13) |
| Spec score · LLM gateways | 7.0 (#29) | 8.2 (#13) |
| Founded | 2019 | 2017 |
| Performance | The homepage reports about 18,000 queries per second per core and 0.2 ms added latency. | Kong describes its NGINX engine as ultra-lightweight and states it handles 50K+ transactions per second per node. |
| Plugins | APISIX offers more than 100 open-source plugins for traffic management, security, observability, and protocol handling. | Built-in plugins cover security, authentication, transformation, and analytics, and custom plugins can be developed with Kong's Plugin Development Kit. |
| Purpose | Apache APISIX is an open-source API gateway for routing, securing, and managing traffic to APIs, microservices, and LLM workloads. | Kong Gateway is an open-source API gateway built for hybrid and multi-cloud environments and optimized for microservices and distributed architectures. |
| Support | The project FAQ directs users to its Slack channel, mailing list, GitHub Issues, and GitHub Discussions for help. | Konnect Plus includes email support with a two-business-day SLA; Enterprise lists dedicated customer success and technical account managers and higher SLAs. |
Plans
Kong Gateway
- Free trialFree
- PlusPriced on request
- EnterprisePriced on request
- Kong Gateway Open SourceFree
- Konnect Free trialFree
- Konnect EnterprisePriced on request
- Konnect PlusPrice not published
In their own words
Apache APISIX
Apache APISIX is a free, Apache 2.0-licensed, self-hosted gateway for routing, securing and managing API, microservice and LLM traffic. It runs on bare metal or Kubernetes and supports HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, UDP, WebSocket, gRPC, MQTT, HTTP/3 and Dubbo, with HTTP-to-gRPC transcoding. More than 100 open-source plugins cover traffic management, security, observability and protocol handling. The project provides authentication options including API keys, JWT, Basic Authentication, OAuth 2.0/OpenID Connect, HMAC, LDAP, CAS, Keycloak, Casdoor, forward authentication and multi-auth, along with rate limiting and request transformation. Its NGINX-and-etcd architecture uses hot-reloadable plugins and distributes cluster configuration without restarts. AI gateway functions include multi-provider proxying, load balancing, retries, fallback, token limits, prompt security and transformation. Listed integrations include Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, Kubernetes, Redis, OpenAI, Anthropic and AWS Bedrock. Official source releases include detached signatures and SHA-512 checksums.
Kong Gateway
Kong Gateway has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.