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As an alternative to Kong, developers choose Saaras EnRoute gateway for working with cloud-native architectures and unmatched performance.
Kong has a suite of products , including it's popular open source API Gateway, Kong Gateway. It is built on openresty with an extensible plugin based architecture. Kong also has the Kuma mesh and a managed Konnect product
Saaras EnRoute is a high-performance Ingress API Gateway that is both an Ingress and an API Gateway. It built specifically for cloud-native workloads. It is purpose built to work alongside all the Kubernetes tooling, observability and supports the latest standards including Gateway API.
Teams use Saaras EnRoute to build a highly resilient and performant architecture, while centralizing API security like authentication and authorization. Saaras EnRoute is extensible and programmable using an extensible filter architecture.
Being Kubernetes native allows it to follow all the GitOps practices with little to no technical debt.
There is no doubt that Kong is one of the most popular open source API Gateway projects with thousands of stars. This provides them the deep reach within the developer community. However, Kong is built when cloud-native adoption had not taken prominence. With the advent of Kubernetes, a new architecture is necessary to achieve developer velocity and making DevOps teams more efficient.
As modern software development has become more prominent, we see some key differences between Saaras EnRoute and Kong
Saaras EnRoute is Cloud-Native built from the ground up to be a part of Kubernetes ecosystem. It uses the CNCF graduated Envoy Proxy vs Kong that uses openresty on top of nginx. Envoy proxy is a popular choice for Cloud-Native use-cases over nginx because of features like service discovery, performance and extensibility
Additionally Saaras EnRoute readily integrates with Cloud-Native service meshes like Istio and LinkerD. Kong integrates with it's own Kuma mesh.
Saaras EnRoute is several magnitudes faster than Kong. The data path layer of Saaras EnRoute is built using high-performance Envoy proxy. Kong uses openresty based nginx, which runs a lot of logic in an interpreted language. This makes it slower
Saaras EnRoute has deterministic pricing options which makes cost efficient compared to usage based pricing. Also features like DevPortal are included with Saaras EnRoute, however they cost extra when using Kong
| Feature | Saaras EnRoute | Kong |
|---|---|---|
| Performance | Orders of magnitude faster | Slower performance with lua in nginx |
| DevOps Workflow | Enables DevOps workflow along with cloud-native workflows | Build technical debt to retrofit Kong Gateway |
| Support | Exceptional support | Expensive enterprise plan for support |
| Istio Integration | Readily integrates with Istio | None |
| LinkerD Integration | Readily integrates with LinkerD | None |
| Observability | Native logging, tracing, metrics with Extensive Envoy stats | Retrofitted stats not as extensive |
| Cost | Deterministic pricing | Limits on services and APIs. Additional cost for features. |
| Managed | Saaras EnRoute works in Kubernetes | Kong provides a managed version of it's gateway |
| Security & Authentication | Extensive | Extensive |
