Akamai API Gateway vs. Kong Comparison

Who should you choose and why?

✋ Most important consideration

• Akamai has a great CDN, but its gateway service is much less feature-rich compared to Kong’s.

🤔 Strongly consider Akamai API Gateway over Kong if

• You integrate with Ping Identity for access management.
• You need to prioritize traffic based on the urgency of the API calls. 
• You want to have better token-based authentication and digest-based authentication.

🤔 Strongly consider Kong over Akamai API Gateway if

• You want better support for protocol conversion.
• You want better support for SAML (an XML-based open standard for transferring data between two parties).
• Securing SOAP-based web services using WS-security is a strategy you want to employ.

📝 Other Notes

• Given its dominance in the CDN space, Akamai’s API Gateway has very good support for tooling related to the Akamai CDN.
• Kong is better for gRPC (Google Remote Procedure Calls).
• Kong uses Nginx, making it a generally better performer compared to Akamai.