Product Comparison

Saaras EnRoute vs. Kong

As an alternative to Kong, developers choose Saaras EnRoute gateway for working with cloud-native architectures and unmatched performance.

What is Saaras EnRoute?

Saaras EnRoute is a high-performance Kubernetes-native API Gateway combining Ingress and API Gateway capabilities. Teams use it to build resilient architectures with centralized API security, authentication, and authorization through an extensible filter system.

Being Kubernetes native allows it to follow all the GitOps practices with little to no technical debt.

What is Kong?

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.

Kong is one of the most popular open source API Gateway projects with thousands of stars, providing deep reach within the developer community. However, Kong was built before cloud-native adoption took prominence.

Feature by Feature

Detailed platform comparison

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

Cloud-Native Architecture

Built for Kubernetes from ground up

Legacy nginx architecture

Plugin Ecosystem

Envoy filter architecture

Extensive plugin marketplace

Multi-Protocol Support

HTTP/S, gRPC, TCP, UDP, WebSocket

HTTP/S, gRPC

Core Differentiators

What are the key differences?

With the advent of Kubernetes, a new architecture is necessary to achieve developer velocity and making DevOps teams more efficient.

The Kong Legacy

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.

Complex Configuration

Pre-Cloud Era

The Architecture Gap

However, Kong is built when cloud-native adoption had not taken prominence. As modern software development has become more prominent, we see some key differences between Saaras EnRoute and Kong:

50x Performance

Cloud-Native Era

Cloud-Native architecture

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, limiting interoperability in diverse cloud-native environments.

Performance architecture

Saaras EnRoute is several magnitudes faster than Kong. The data path layer of Saaras EnRoute is built using high-performance Envoy proxy.

Additionally, one instance of EnRoute's control plane can scale to 250K CRDs making EnRoute highly scalable!

Kong uses openresty based nginx, which runs a lot of logic in an interpreted language. This makes it slower compared to EnRoute's compiled performance optimizations.

The performance difference becomes critical at scale, where EnRoute's architecture delivers consistent low-latency responses under high load conditions, while interpreted solutions face bottlenecks.

Total cost of ownership

Saaras EnRoute has deterministic pricing options which makes it cost efficient compared to usage based pricing models that can spiral unpredictably.

Features like DevPortal are included with Saaras EnRoute, however they cost extra when using Kong. This significant difference in pricing model can impact total deployment costs.

The predictable cost structure helps teams budget effectively and avoid unexpected charges as their API traffic grows, enabling better financial planning for infrastructure investments.