Get Advice Icon

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

Kong

644
1.5K
+ 1
139
Vault

799
797
+ 1
71
Add tool

Kong vs Vault: What are the differences?

What is Kong? Open Source Microservice & API Management Layer. 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.

What is Vault? Secure, store, and tightly control access to tokens, passwords, certificates, API keys, and other secrets in modern computing. Vault is a tool for securely accessing secrets. A secret is anything that you want to tightly control access to, such as API keys, passwords, certificates, and more. Vault provides a unified interface to any secret, while providing tight access control and recording a detailed audit log.

Kong can be classified as a tool in the "Microservices Tools" category, while Vault is grouped under "Secrets Management".

Some of the features offered by Kong are:

  • 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

On the other hand, Vault provides the following key features:

  • Secure Secret Storage: Arbitrary key/value secrets can be stored in Vault. Vault encrypts these secrets prior to writing them to persistent storage, so gaining access to the raw storage isn't enough to access your secrets. Vault can write to disk, Consul, and more.
  • Dynamic Secrets: Vault can generate secrets on-demand for some systems, such as AWS or SQL databases. For example, when an application needs to access an S3 bucket, it asks Vault for credentials, and Vault will generate an AWS keypair with valid permissions on demand. After creating these dynamic secrets, Vault will also automatically revoke them after the lease is up.
  • Data Encryption: Vault can encrypt and decrypt data without storing it. This allows security teams to define encryption parameters and developers to store encrypted data in a location such as SQL without having to design their own encryption methods.

"Easy to maintain" is the top reason why over 28 developers like Kong, while over 11 developers mention "Secure" as the leading cause for choosing Vault.

Kong and Vault are both open source tools. It seems that Kong with 22.4K GitHub stars and 2.75K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Vault with 13.2K GitHub stars and 1.98K GitHub forks.

DigitalOcean, Redox Engine, and SoFi are some of the popular companies that use Vault, whereas Kong is used by Checkr, Policygenius, and Cuemby. Vault has a broader approval, being mentioned in 71 company stacks & 17 developers stacks; compared to Kong, which is listed in 50 company stacks and 14 developer stacks.

Decisions about Kong and Vault
Prateek Mittal
Fullstack Engineer| Ruby | React JS | gRPC at Ex Bookmyshow | Furlenco | Shopmatic · | 4 upvotes · 312.6K views

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.

See more
Manage your open source components, licenses, and vulnerabilities
Learn More
Pros of Kong
Pros of Vault
  • 37
    Easy to maintain
  • 32
    Easy to install
  • 26
    Flexible
  • 21
    Great performance
  • 7
    Api blueprint
  • 4
    Custom Plugins
  • 3
    Kubernetes-native
  • 2
    Security
  • 2
    Has a good plugin infrastructure
  • 2
    Agnostic
  • 1
    Load balancing
  • 1
    Documentation is clear
  • 1
    Very customizable
  • 17
    Secure
  • 13
    Variety of Secret Backends
  • 11
    Very easy to set up and use
  • 8
    Dynamic secret generation
  • 5
    AuditLog
  • 3
    Privilege Access Management
  • 3
    Leasing and Renewal
  • 2
    Easy to integrate with
  • 2
    Open Source
  • 2
    Consol integration
  • 2
    Handles secret sprawl
  • 2
    Variety of Auth Backends
  • 1
    Multicloud

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

171
778
143
316

What is Kong?

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.

What is Vault?

Vault is a tool for securely accessing secrets. A secret is anything that you want to tightly control access to, such as API keys, passwords, certificates, and more. Vault provides a unified interface to any secret, while providing tight access control and recording a detailed audit log.

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

Jobs that mention Kong and Vault as a desired skillset
Postman
Berkeley, United States OR San Francisco, United States
What companies use Kong?
What companies use Vault?
Manage your open source components, licenses, and vulnerabilities
Learn More

Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

What tools integrate with Kong?
What tools integrate with Vault?

Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

Blog Posts

What are some alternatives to Kong and Vault?
Apigee
API management, design, analytics, and security are at the heart of modern digital architecture. The Apigee intelligent API platform is a complete solution for moving business to the digital world.
Postman
It is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide.
Postman
It is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide.
Stack Overflow
Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about programming.
Google Maps
Create rich applications and stunning visualisations of your data, leveraging the comprehensiveness, accuracy, and usability of Google Maps and a modern web platform that scales as you grow.
See all alternatives