Gloo Gateway vs Kong Gateway
On the evidence we track, Kong Gateway leads this comparison with a composite score of 54/100. Scores are only directly comparable because these tools share a category; the full breakdown and every source is below.
Capabilities
Feature-by-feature on the axes that matter for api gateways. “-” means undocumented, not absent.
What each one is
The product in its own terms, so the numbers below have context.
Gloo Gateway
A cloud-native API gateway built on Envoy that enables organizations to route, transform, and secure API traffic across multiple protocols. It provides enterprise security controls, developer portals for API discovery, and monetization capabilities for managing APIs as revenue-generating assets.
Kong Gateway
LeaderKong Gateway is a scalable API and LLM gateway platform designed for cloud-native deployments. It provides traffic management, authentication, rate limiting, request transformation, and advanced AI capabilities.
Pricing
List pricing as published by each vendor, with the date we read it. Always verify at the source before you buy.
Gloo Gateway
Free open source forever. Enterprise support available.
- Open SourceFree
- Request routing by path, header, method, query parameter, host
- Kubernetes Gateway API support
- Traffic splitting and transformation
- Multi-protocol support: REST, gRPC, GraphQL, WebSocket
- Active community with regular releases
- Solo EnterpriseContact sales
- 24x7 Support SLA with guaranteed response times
- N-3 Long Term Support with security patches and bug fixes
- FIPS Compliant Images
- Private Slack Channel with white-glove support
Kong Gateway
LeaderOpen source core; Kong Konnect cloud platform offers free trial and commercial subscriptions
Platform & deployment
Where each product runs and how it can be hosted. A dash means undocumented, not unsupported.
Integrations
What each product connects to. Counts come from the vendor's own integration directory where one exists.
- Kubernetes
- AWS Lambda
Gloo Gateway
- MCP
- Istio
- Kubernetes Gateway API
- Backstage
- LLMs
- AWS EKS
- AWS API Gateway
- OpenAPI
- OAuth 2.0
- OIDC
- JWT
Kong Gateway
Leader- AWS Bedrock
- Azure Content Safety
- Google Cloud Model Armor
- OpenAI
- Anthropic
- Llama 3
- Helm
- Git
- Stripe
- Twilio
- Llama
- DocuSign
- Insomnia
- Apache Kafka
- Redis
- Prometheus
- cert-manager
Gloo Gateway or Kong Gateway: which one depends on you
A composite score cannot know your constraints. Describe them and both get re-weighted against what you actually need, with the evidence behind every position.
Free to run, no account needed to start. How the evaluation works
Comparison generated from independently-sourced facts. Every value links to its source and retrieval date. See the method.