Twelve of fourteen models named Kong Gateway first on the direct prompt; one named Tyk. Both were named by all fourteen models and Kong Gateway carries 79 labels and Tyk 51, so the shares are not directly comparable.
Named in three categories this edition.
Named in four categories this edition.
Share is the count of first choices across the direct, paraphrase, budget and scale prompts over all fourteen models, for a mid-market B2B company; rank is within the category; every quote names the model and the prompt it came from. Both figures come from the API gateways page.
Across every category in the November 2026 Edition, Kong Gateway and Tyk were named in the same answer 244 times, of the 444 answers naming Kong Gateway and the 271 naming Tyk. In those answers Tyk took the first choice twelve times and Kong Gateway eighty-four.
| Model | Direct | Paraphrase | Comparative | Budget-constrained | Scale-constrained | Negative |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | ||||||
| GPT-5.4 mini | ||||||
| Gemini 3.5 Flash | ||||||
| Perplexity Sonar | ||||||
| Grok 4.20 | ||||||
| Mistral Small | ||||||
| DeepSeek V4 Flash | ||||||
| Llama 4 Maverick | ||||||
| Qwen 3.7 Flash | ||||||
| Kimi K2 | ||||||
| GLM 4.7 FlashX | ||||||
| MiniMax M2.5 | ||||||
| GPT-6 Luna | ||||||
| Muse Glimmer 30B |
Bold names in an answer are the products the judge labeled a first choice; a model naming several gives each of them that label. The full answer text for every row is in the record.
Every negative label with a quote, up to three, then the highest-weighted positives, up to three. Four of four in this category shown.
“Kong without reviewing licensing and edition boundaries. Its plugin ecosystem is strong, but upgrades and custom plugins can add complexity” Perplexity Sonar · negative prompt · soft negative
“Kong community edition for missing vault/encryption features and for the high number of publicly exposed misconfigured instances” Muse Glimmer 30B · negative prompt · soft negative
“Most popular open-source gateway, extensive plugin ecosystem, mature community... Choose Kong Gateway (OSS) if: You need a proven, battle-tested solution” GLM 4.7 FlashX · budget prompt · first choice
“Kong is described as "the default self-hosted gateway, with an Apache-2.0 open-source core" and is positioned for cloud-native, Kubernetes environments.” Muse Glimmer 30B · comparative prompt · first choice
Every negative label with a quote, up to three, then the highest-weighted positives, up to three. Three of three in this category shown.
“Apigee, Tyk, Kong, and similar products can impose unnecessary operational and configuration overhead if you only need a reverse proxy” Perplexity Sonar · negative prompt · soft negative
“Complex initial setup: Configuration and onboarding are notoriously complex” DeepSeek V4 Flash · negative prompt · soft negative
“Start with a proof-of-concept of Kong or Tyk unless you're deeply tied to one hyperscaler.” Grok 4.20 · direct prompt · first choice
Comparisons are drawn for the top eight products in each category, each against each. The output is the models' output; nothing here is a recommendation by the index.