LLM gateways and observability · RankedKong AI Gateway
Kong AI Gateway is a connectivity and governance layer for AI-native applications, from Kong · konghq.com ↗
Read the same way at every company size.
The standing depends on who is buying. Every model is asked the same questions for each company size.
Portkey is first at 36%.
LiteLLM is first at 36%. 0 of 14 models made it the first choice when asked directly.
Bifrost is first at 23%.
Why models recommend it
“Kong, Cloudflare, Vercel, AWS, and Azure each make sense only when a gateway needs to sit inside infrastructure you already run.”Claude Haiku 4.5 · Comparative question · alternative
“If your enterprise already uses Kong for standard microservices, adding their AI Gateway module provides prompt routing”Gemini 3.5 Flash · Scale-constrained question · alternative
“Choose Kong or APISIX if your engineering team already manages API traffic with Kubernetes ingress controllers”Gemini 3.5 Flash · Comparative question · alternative
“Enterprise‑grade API gateways from major cloud providers (Azure API Management, Kong Enterprise, Tyk)”GLM 4.7 FlashX · Negative question · alternative
What gives them pause
“those tend to be harder to justify on a tight budget”GPT-5.4 mini · Budget-constrained question · warning
Also on the shortlist
The products named in the same answers as Kong AI Gateway, over the 91 answers that named it, and how often each was the first choice instead.
| Product | Named together | Picked instead | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 87 | 25 | View → | |
| 69 | 17 | View → | |
| 65 | 29 | View → | |
| 61 | 1 | View → | |
| 57 | 6 | View → | |
| 20 | 1 | View → | |
| 20 | 0 | View → | |
| 20 | 0 | View → | |
| 16 | 0 | View → | |
| 12 | 0 | View → |
What the models named instead of Kong AI Gateway →
A side-by-side page exists where both products are among a category's top eight.
At a glance
Stated on Kong AI Gateway's own site, not checked by Gane.
- For
- developers
- Free plan or trial
- demo instance of AI Gateway running almost instantly
- Also from Kong
- Kong AI, Kong API Gateway, Kong CE, Kong Community Edition, Kong Gateway
How this is measured
Fourteen AI models from 12 labs are asked the same buying questions six ways, for three company sizes. Standings refresh every edition.
Gane sells AI visibility software. No company can pay to change a result.
Read the method →Sources returned with these answers
Fourteen of the fourteen models returned a source list in this edition: five return the pages they cited and nine the search results they consulted. These counts come from 85 of the 91 answers that named Kong AI Gateway and are not a share of its labels.
Domains cited
254 of the 270 domain citations in answers naming Kong AI Gateway came from a third party's page.
Pages cited
Pages are listed as the models cited them.
By model
| Model | First choice | Alternative | Mention | Warning | Labels |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| GPT-5.4 mini | 0 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 3 |
| Gemini 3.5 Flash | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| Perplexity Sonar | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 2 |
| Grok 4.20 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 2 |
| Mistral Small | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 2 |
| Llama 4 Maverick | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| Qwen 3.7 Flash | 0 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 3 |
| Kimi K2 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| GLM 4.7 FlashX | 0 | 5 | 0 | 0 | 5 |
| MiniMax M2.5 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| GPT-6 Luna | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| Muse Glimmer 30B | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 2 |