Is Kong API gateway free?

Why Kong is the best API gateway?

If you're building a service and want to serve web requests to it, you may have thought of using Kong.

Kong is a reverse proxy server with a wide range of features including built-in support for APIs. You can also easily implement your own reverse proxy with the kong-backend and kong-proxy modules.

The fact that Kong supports a wide range of features makes it stand out from other options, but at the same time, that feature set makes Kong really complex. Not only that, Kong is not only the most well-known option, but it is also by far the most used, which is why I'm going to talk about this framework today.

I've been working with Kong for a while now and I decided to write this blog post to give you a clear picture of how the different options fit into the market and what Kong has to offer. The main goals of this post are: To understand the advantages and drawbacks of each option. To explain what you should be looking for when choosing a reverse proxy. To understand the specific features of each reverse proxy. To understand how Kong does more than just reverse proxy. To share my experience and knowledge about the different options and why Kong is the best choice. And if you're looking for something to do with your API-based business, then let's get started! Why Kong is the best reverse proxy? The most important question about a reverse proxy is which is the best reverse proxy? or which is the best reverse proxy in general? As stated above, there are a lot of options out there. This means that you might have some doubts about which one is the best. Let's have a quick look at how they all work:

Reverse proxy architecture (image credit: ). The core of a reverse proxy is just to act as a transparent gateway between a client and a service. There are no requirements, but it's best to use a reverse proxy because it will make things easier.

What is the difference between apigee and Kong API gateway?

Kong and Apigee are both API gateways, which provide APIs for your clients.

There's a small fundamental difference: Kong is a proxy (and not a gateway), so it sits in front of your APIs. Apigee sits at the back end of your APIs, so it sits in between the APIs and your clients. The former's primary function is to load balance calls, it supports multiple APIs or domains, and offers rate limiting, logging, and other tools. This makes it better suited for larger deployments where you might have multiple APIs and multiple versions of your API. Kong acts as a reverse proxy and supports SSL offloading, rate limiting, and many other features, though, in an opinionated design, that means it's sometimes not as great of a fit. Here are some key differences.

API Gateway - Kong. Key features. Rate limits - Kong and Apigee each offer different limits: Kong offers request rate limiting with request headers, while Apigee offers custom rate limiting with request headers, custom timeouts, and much more. You can also limit total API calls.

Load balancer - Kong loads balance calls using HAProxy or NGINX based on the path to the backend API. Kong has built-in load balancing as well for external services.

SSL offloading - There's no out of box support for SSL offloading with Kong, but you can use OpenSSL with any HTTP connection to add it yourself. Logging - Kong's logging is designed to make development easier, it logs the whole request by default with no config needed. Apigee's logging is designed to give you all the details about requests.

Rate limit per client - Kong has a concept of clients: an authenticated client must be allowed to create connections that bypass the rate limit. If there are multiple clients running behind a Kong proxy they'll each have their own connections. This is used for things like API chargebacks, where you allow a single client to do something for a limited amount of time (say 5 minutes) to avoid overspending, then you disallow them.

Deployment size and complexity. Apigee is recommended for large enterprise deployments and provides a much higher SLA than Kong.

Is Kong API gateway free?

Hey all, I have been using Kong for several months now and really love it.

What I wanted to know is if I can use the Kong API gateway free of charge? Or does Kong have a limit to how many API endpoints it allows? Kong is free and has no limitations on the number of API's you can use, however you have to pay for their APIM service. So while you may not be charged for your API endpoint, you will be charged a monthly fee for the use of their API Management service.

There's nothing wrong with Kong, but you'll need to do your own performance tests, etc. So that you know whether it's suitable for your application or not. In general though, I think they do a very good job.

Yes, you can use Kong in a free-tier. Please see -Johan. On Sep 12, 2025, at 9:56 AM, "Jens Kuperschmidt" <> wrote: yes, they offer a free version as well as a paid version, but it is only about 4k requests per day. I like how Kong is designed to work very well with other components (Redis, Memcached, Nginx, HAproxy, Elasticsearch). The API Gateway is very easy to configure and works quite well.

What is Kong API gateway?

Kong is the most popular API gateway for building microservices in cloud or on-premise environments.

It is open source and supports any language. Kong was written in Go, and it makes it easy to use a single toolset for multiple applications. Kong provides an API platform that has built-in security, authorization, logging, routing, rate limiting, and monitoring.

What is the Kong CLI? The Kong CLI is a command-line interface (CLI) that lets you perform actions on your Kong instance. It is available in many languages, including Java, Ruby, Go, Python, and PHP. For example, it's possible to use the CLI to provision and configure a new Kong API server, inspect your API server configuration, add health checks to your API server, debug routes, or even send a request to your API server. You can learn more about the Kong CLI in the docs.

How do I use the Kong API Gateway? In this tutorial, we will walk through a sample workflow to add authentication and authorization to an API gateway using Kong API Gateway. We will also use the Kong CLI to perform a few tasks. In the next section, we will start with the Kong API Gateway.

Getting Started With Kong API Gateway. Before we begin with anything else, we need to install Kong API Gateway.0 Make sure that you have the latest version of Composer installed. Adding Authentication and Authorization Using Kong API Gateway. Kong API Gateway supports user-based authentication, which means that all requests sent to your API gateway are signed using user-provided credentials. To add authentication to your API gateway, you need to specify the following in the allow section of the API's hosts section: When you add authentication to a Kong API, Kong will use this information to authenticate the request before it executes the route handler. You will need to authenticate each request sent to your API server. For example, you may want to use your AWS credentials to authenticate requests.