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Akamai API Gateway vs. Kong Comparison

Which is the best API Gateway provider for you?

Written by
Louis-Victor Jadavji, Cofounder of Taloflow

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.

We put all the information below in an interactive quiz to make your API gateway choice easy.

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"Gotchas"

Feature Comparison

Integration With Other Services

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Compliance Requirements

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About the Author

Louis-Victor Jadavji (or "LV") is a recognized leader in the cloud services industry. He's helped 50+ digital native companies like ModusBox, Later, and NS1 choose the right cloud stack for their applications. His work has been featured in Forbes (30 Under 30 All-Star), HuffPost, The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, and Inc. Magazine.

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