API Umbrella vs Kong

Overview

Kong

Stacks671

Followers1.5K

Votes139

GitHub Stars42.1K

Forks5.0K

API Umbrella

Stacks27

Followers126

Votes0

GitHub Stars2.1K

Forks352

API Umbrella vs Kong: What are the differences?

API Umbrella and Kong are both popular API management platforms that provide various features for managing and securing APIs. However, they have distinct differences that set them apart. In this article, we will explore six key differences between API Umbrella and Kong.

Architecture: API Umbrella is a monolithic API management platform that is built with a traditional architecture. It includes all the necessary components like a proxy server, analytics engine, and developer portal within a single package. On the other hand, Kong follows a modular architecture and leverages a plugin system. It provides a lightweight core that can be extended with various plugins to add functionalities like rate limiting and authentication.
Scalability: When it comes to scalability, Kong has a significant advantage over API Umbrella. Kong is built on top of Nginx, a high-performance web server, and proxy server. It can handle a large number of concurrent connections and requests, making it suitable for high traffic scenarios. On the other hand, API Umbrella may have limitations in handling high traffic due to its monolithic architecture.
Ease of Deployment: Kong offers a more flexible deployment model compared to API Umbrella. It can be easily deployed as a traditional on-premises solution or can be containerized using Docker or Kubernetes. Additionally, Kong provides a cloud-native version called Kong Mesh that is designed for microservices architectures. API Umbrella, on the other hand, primarily focuses on on-premises deployments and requires more manual configuration.
Plugin Ecosystem: Both API Umbrella and Kong provide a rich set of plugins to extend their functionalities. However, Kong has a more extensive plugin ecosystem with a larger community contributing to the development of plugins. This allows Kong users to leverage a wide range of functionalities such as JWT authentication, response transformation, and caching. API Umbrella also offers plugins but the options might be more limited compared to Kong.
Developer Experience: API Umbrella emphasizes providing a user-friendly developer portal that allows developers to access and consume APIs easily. It provides features like API key management, documentation, and interactive testing. Kong, on the other hand, has a developer portal plugin called Kong Developer Portal that provides similar functionalities. However, the developer portal experience may vary depending on the specific implementation and customization.
Community and Support: Kong has a larger community and a more active open-source development community compared to API Umbrella. This means that Kong users can benefit from a wider range of resources, community support, and frequent updates. API Umbrella also has an active community, but it may have a smaller user base and community support compared to Kong.

In Summary, API Umbrella and Kong differ in terms of architecture, scalability, deployment flexibility, plugin ecosystem, developer experience, and community support, making them suitable for different use cases and preferences.

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Advice on Kong, API Umbrella

Prateek

Mar 14, 2020

Decided

Istio based on powerful Envoy whereas Kong based on Nginx. Istio is K8S native as well it's actively developed when k8s was successfully accepted with production-ready apps whereas Kong slowly migrated to start leveraging K8s. Istio has an inbuilt turn-keyIstio based on powerful Envoy whereas Kong based on Nginx. Istio is K8S native as well it's actively developed when k8s was successfully accepted with production-ready apps whereas Kong slowly migrated to start leveraging K8s. Istio has an inbuilt turn key solution with Rancher whereas Kong completely lacks here. Traffic distribution in Istio can be done via canary, a/b, shadowing, HTTP headers, ACL, whitelist whereas in Kong it's limited to canary, ACL, blue-green, proxy caching. Istio has amazing community support which is visible via Github stars or releases when comparing both.

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Detailed Comparison

Kong	API Umbrella
Kong is a scalable, open source API Layer (also known as an API Gateway, or API Middleware). Kong controls layer 4 and 7 traffic and is extended through Plugins, which provide extra functionality and services beyond the core platform.	API Umbrella is a proxy that sits in front of your APIs. It can seamlessly add common functionality like api keys, rate limiting, and analytics to any API.
Logging: Log requests and responses to your system over TCP, UDP or to disk; OAuth2.0: Add easily an OAuth2.0 authentication to your APIs; Monitoring: Live monitoring provides key load and performance server metrics; IP-restriction: Whitelist or blacklist IPs that can make requests; Authentication: Manage consumer credentials query string and header tokens; Rate-limiting: Block and throttle requests based on IP or authentication; Transformations: Add, remove or manipulate HTTP params and headers on-the-fly; CORS: Enable cross-origin requests to your APIs that would otherwise be blocked; Anything: Need custom functionality? Extend Kong with your own Lua plugins;	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars 42.1K	GitHub Stars 2.1K
GitHub Forks 5.0K	GitHub Forks 352
Stacks 671	Stacks 27
Followers 1.5K	Followers 126
Votes 139	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 37 Easy to maintain 32 Easy to install 26 Flexible 21 Great performance 7 Api blueprint	No community feedback yet
Integrations
Cassandra Docker Prometheus Kubernetes PostgreSQL NGINX Vagrant	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Kong, API Umbrella?

Amazon API Gateway

Amazon API Gateway handles all the tasks involved in accepting and processing up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls, including traffic management, authorization and access control, monitoring, and API version management.

Tyk Cloud

Tyk is a leading Open Source API Gateway and Management Platform, featuring an API gateway, analytics, developer portal and dashboard. We power billions of transactions for thousands of innovative organisations.

Moesif

Build a winning API platform with instant, meaningful visibility into API usage and customer adoption

Ambassador

Map services to arbitrary URLs in a single, declarative YAML file. Configure routes with CORS support, circuit breakers, timeouts, and more. Replace your Kubernetes ingress controller. Route gRPC, WebSockets, or HTTP.

Azure API Management

Today's innovative enterprises are adopting API architectures to accelerate growth. Streamline your work across hybrid and multi-cloud environments with a single place for managing all your APIs.

Treblle

It makes it super easy to understand what’s going on with your APIs and the apps that use them. You can add it to any API using one of our SDKs for PHP, Laravel, .NET, Node, Ruby and Python. Once you add our SDK out of the box you get: real time API monitoring and logging, error tracking, automatically generated documentation, quality scoring and analytics. Essentially you get all the tools you need to build and ship APIs with ease. Treblle isn’t built just for back-end and API developers. You can invite team members to you project and they all get the same features.

Google Cloud API Gateway

It enables you to provide secure access to your backend services through a well-defined REST API that is consistent across all of your services, regardless of the service implementation. Clients consume your REST APIS to implement standalone apps for a mobile device or tablet, through apps running in a browser, or through any other type of app that can make a request to an HTTP endpoint.

Related Comparisons

API Umbrella vs Kong: What are the differences?

Architecture: API Umbrella is a monolithic API management platform that is built with a traditional architecture. It includes all the necessary components like a proxy server, analytics engine, and developer portal within a single package. On the other hand, Kong follows a modular architecture and leverages a plugin system. It provides a lightweight core that can be extended with various plugins to add functionalities like rate limiting and authentication.
Scalability: When it comes to scalability, Kong has a significant advantage over API Umbrella. Kong is built on top of Nginx, a high-performance web server, and proxy server. It can handle a large number of concurrent connections and requests, making it suitable for high traffic scenarios. On the other hand, API Umbrella may have limitations in handling high traffic due to its monolithic architecture.
Ease of Deployment: Kong offers a more flexible deployment model compared to API Umbrella. It can be easily deployed as a traditional on-premises solution or can be containerized using Docker or Kubernetes. Additionally, Kong provides a cloud-native version called Kong Mesh that is designed for microservices architectures. API Umbrella, on the other hand, primarily focuses on on-premises deployments and requires more manual configuration.
Plugin Ecosystem: Both API Umbrella and Kong provide a rich set of plugins to extend their functionalities. However, Kong has a more extensive plugin ecosystem with a larger community contributing to the development of plugins. This allows Kong users to leverage a wide range of functionalities such as JWT authentication, response transformation, and caching. API Umbrella also offers plugins but the options might be more limited compared to Kong.
Developer Experience: API Umbrella emphasizes providing a user-friendly developer portal that allows developers to access and consume APIs easily. It provides features like API key management, documentation, and interactive testing. Kong, on the other hand, has a developer portal plugin called Kong Developer Portal that provides similar functionalities. However, the developer portal experience may vary depending on the specific implementation and customization.
Community and Support: Kong has a larger community and a more active open-source development community compared to API Umbrella. This means that Kong users can benefit from a wider range of resources, community support, and frequent updates. API Umbrella also has an active community, but it may have a smaller user base and community support compared to Kong.

API Umbrella vs Kong

Overview