Best for — API Management
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High
Who is Kong best for?
Quick fit guide: Who is Kong best for, who should avoid it, and what typically forces a switch.
Sources linked — see verification below.
Freshness & verification
Best use cases for Kong
- Hybrid/multi-cloud organizations needing consistent policy across environments
- Platform teams that can standardize a gateway pattern (ingress, auth, quotas, logging)
- Internal API platforms where developer velocity and portability matter
- Teams that want extensibility and control at the gateway layer
Who should avoid Kong?
- You want fully managed enterprise governance outcomes without running a platform
- Your org is strongly cloud-native and prefers native IAM + managed control planes
- You can’t staff upgrades, incident response, and operational ownership for gateway layer
Upgrade triggers for Kong
- Gateway sprawl appears and you need standardized deployment templates and policy-as-code
- You need better auditability and governance visibility across teams
- You need stronger reliability/latency controls for high-throughput gateways
Sources & verification
Pricing and behavioral information comes from public documentation and structured research. When information is incomplete or volatile, we prefer to say so rather than guess.