Comparison of APISIX and KONG API Gateways: Community Activity, Feature Richness, Performance Benchmarks, and Cloud‑Native Compatibility

API Gateway Overview

Traditional web architectures rely on Nginx for routing, reverse proxy, and load balancing, while upstream services handle authentication, rate limiting, and logging. As micro‑services and API counts grow, duplicating these common functions becomes inefficient, prompting the adoption of dedicated API gateways.

An API gateway acts as the traffic entry point, routing client requests to appropriate upstream services, ensuring security, reliability, and low latency, allowing individual services to focus on business logic.

Both APISIX and KONG are cloud‑native, high‑performance, extensible open‑source API gateways built on Nginx.

Community Activity

APISIX shows higher contributor count and faster growth than KONG. Monthly active contributors for APISIX generally exceed 20, while KONG’s active contributors range between 0 and 10.

Commit volume is comparable between the two projects.

Product Maturity

According to HG Insights, over 3,700 companies use KONG, while APISIX enjoys a large user base in China, with many domestic companies and concentrated traffic, indicating both gateways are mature with numerous case studies.

Feature (Plugin) Richness

APISIX offers a broader set of plugins across categories such as authentication, security, traffic control, serverless, observability, multi‑protocol support, and request transformation. While both gateways support core functionalities like routing, load balancing, and rate limiting, APISIX provides more plugin variants and some features (e.g., WebAssembly support) that KONG lacks or offers only in paid editions.

Performance Testing

Tests were conducted on Intel Xeon E5‑2630 v3 (32 cores, 64 GB) using wrk with APISIX 2.15 and KONG 3.0.0 under various worker counts and plugin configurations.

Results show that without plugins APISIX achieves roughly 1.3× higher QPS than KONG. With plugins enabled, both gateways experience performance drops, but APISIX’s degradation is modest while KONG’s is more pronounced.

Secondary Development Convenience

Both gateways allow native Lua plugins, offering high performance but requiring Lua expertise. They also support Plugin Runner for external plugins written in languages like Go, Python, Java, Node.js, and JavaScript, trading some performance for development speed.

WebAssembly (Wasm) plugins are supported by APISIX, enabling near‑native performance with language‑agnostic binaries, whereas KONG does not yet support Wasm.

Cloud‑Native Environment Adaptation

In Kubernetes, both gateways can serve as Ingress controllers. KONG requires an additional controller to sync Ingress resources, while APISIX provides its own APISIX‑Ingress‑Controller using declarative resources such as ApisixRoute and ApisixUpstream.

Both gateways integrate with serverless function compute platforms via plugins, allowing API requests to trigger functions and return results, handling authentication, traffic control, and data transformation.

Summary

1. APISIX’s community activity is slightly stronger than KONG’s.

2. APISIX demonstrates better raw performance.

3. APISIX offers richer functionality with more plugins.

4. Both support multi‑language plugin development, but APISIX’s progress is marginally ahead.

5. Both are cloud‑native gateways with good adaptability to modern micro‑service environments.