Kong is an open-source API gateway and AI connectivity platform used by enterprise dev teams. Compare Kong's features, Konnect pricing and top alternatives.
Kong began life in 2009 as Mashape, an API marketplace founded in Milan, Italy, by Augusto Marietti, Marco Palladino and Michele Zonca. The team open-sourced an internal API gateway named Kong in 2015, and as that gateway eclipsed the marketplace in importance, the company sold off the marketplace business and rebranded entirely to Kong Inc. in 2017, moving its headquarters to San Francisco.
Today Kong describes itself as an API and AI connectivity company. Its core open-source Kong Gateway handles routing, authentication and traffic management for APIs, while its Konnect SaaS platform layers on a developer portal, analytics, governance and, more recently, an AI Gateway for managing and securing traffic to large language models alongside conventional API traffic.
Kong Gateway is a plugin-extensible, Nginx/OpenResty-based API gateway that supports REST, HTTP, gRPC, GraphQL, Kafka and WebSocket protocols, handling authentication, rate limiting, load balancing and request/response transformation. Its open-source Community Edition is free to self-host and forms the foundation of Kong's entire product line.
Kong Konnect adds a hosted control plane on top of the gateway: a developer portal for publishing API documentation, centralized analytics across all gateways, a service catalog, role-based access control, and an AI Gateway that applies rate limiting, token quotas and prompt governance to LLM traffic from providers like OpenAI and Anthropic. The company also offers Kong Mesh for service-mesh use cases and Kong Insomnia, a standalone API client for designing and testing API requests.
Kong follows a freemium model: the open-source Kong Gateway is free to self-host with no functional limits, and Konnect offers a 30-day free trial with full enterprise functionality. Beyond the trial, Konnect Plus is billed per gateway and includes up to five serverless gateways, an AI Gateway supporting five LLM models, and one million monthly analytics requests, while Konnect Enterprise is custom-priced and billed annually with unlimited gateways, SSO and dedicated customer success support.
Kong Insomnia, the company's API client, is priced separately from the gateway products, with a free Essentials tier, a $12-per-user-per-month Pro tier, and a $45-per-user-per-month Enterprise tier that adds SSO/SCIM and Konnect integration.
Yes, Kong Gateway's Community Edition is open source and free to self-host with no functional limits.
Kong Konnect is Kong's hosted SaaS control plane that adds a developer portal, centralized analytics, service catalog and AI Gateway on top of Kong Gateway.
Yes, Kong's AI Gateway routes and governs calls to large language models, applying rate limiting, token quotas and prompt governance similar to how it manages conventional API traffic.
Kong originated as Mashape, founded in 2009 in Milan by Augusto Marietti, Marco Palladino and Michele Zonca, and rebranded to Kong Inc. in 2017.
Konnect offers a 30-day free trial, then a per-gateway-priced Plus tier and a custom-priced, annually billed Enterprise tier.
Kong Insomnia is a separate API client and testing tool for designing and debugging API requests, priced independently from the gateway with free, Pro and Enterprise tiers.