Kong Gateway
High-performance, self-hostable API gateway for routing, auth, and rate limiting at the edge.
Self-hosted Open source Apache 2.0 api-gatewaymicroservices
Pricing
Free (OSS core). Enterprise custom pricing.
Kong sits in front of your services and handles the cross-cutting API concerns — routing, auth, rate limiting — that you’d otherwise reimplement in every service.
Key features
- Genuinely free, full-featured self-hosted OSS core
- Plugin architecture covers most gateway needs
- Handles very high request throughput
- Kubernetes-native via the Kong Ingress Controller
Self-hosted vs. cloud
Self-hosted OSS core is free; note the admin API has no built-in auth out of the box, worth locking down before exposing it. Enterprise tier adds RBAC and support.
Quick start
docker run -d --name kong -p 8000:8000 -p 8001:8001 kong:latest
Alternatives
Postman covers API design and testing pre-production; Kong governs traffic once services are live.