Kong Gateway vs LangSmith
Kong Gateway
konghq.com
LangSmith
langchain.comSide by side
| Figure | Kong Gateway | LangSmith |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $39/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 7 | 3 |
| Spec score · LLM gateways | 8.2 (#13) | 9.3 (#2) |
| Deployment | Kong says the gateway can run on premises, in cloud, Kubernetes, or serverless environments, with or without a database and in hybrid or cloud-hosted modes. | Deployment provides managed or self-hosted agent servers with streaming, cron scheduling, authentication, MCP support and more than 30 API endpoints. |
| Founded | 2017 | 2023 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, USA | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Purpose | Kong Gateway is an open-source API gateway built for hybrid and multi-cloud environments and optimized for microservices and distributed architectures. | LangSmith is a commercial agent engineering platform for building, testing, deploying, monitoring, and improving AI agents. |
| Support | Konnect Plus includes email support with a two-business-day SLA; Enterprise lists dedicated customer success and technical account managers and higher SLAs. | The Developer plan includes community support, and the Enterprise plan lists a support SLA. |
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
Kong Gateway
Kong Gateway has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
LangSmith
LangSmith is a commercial agent-engineering platform for building, evaluating, deploying, monitoring, and improving AI agents. It supports offline evaluations on curated datasets and real-time scoring of production interactions. Evaluation methods include human review, heuristic checks, LLM-as-judge evaluators, pairwise comparisons, and custom Python or TypeScript evaluators. Annotation queues route runs to subject-matter experts for feedback that can calibrate evaluations, improve prompts, or augment datasets. The Playground compares prompt versions or model providers, and LangSmith chat can auto-improve prompts. Observability includes agent and retrieval tracing, token and general cost tracking, trajectory monitoring, online evaluations, and webhook or PagerDuty alerts. Traces can arrive through SDKs or an API from LangGraph, custom Python, or other stacks; SDKs are listed for Python, TypeScript, Go, and Java. Hosting ranges from cloud to hybrid and self-hosted Enterprise options. The Developer plan costs nothing, Plus costs $39 a month, and Enterprise pricing is custom.