Digital CX API Solution: Kong vs Apigee

March 31, 2022

4 min read

Nishikant Singh

Exceptional digital customer experience is vital to building a successful business. A recent report from Forrester Research shows customer-obsessed companies reporting 2.5x higher revenue growth and 2.2x better customer retention. Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) play a key role in providing customers with stellar digital experiences.

Given the importance of APIs in creating a frictionless customer experience, it's paramount that organizations work with a visionary API management vendor they can trust and one that values partnership. Kong delivers a next-generation API management solution that delivers 446x faster and 31x higher throughput, along with dependable, best-in-class customer support.

In this blog post, we'll discuss how Kong can help your organization build a performant customer experience engine that traditional API management vendors like Apigee fail to provide.

Check out the entire Kong vs Apigee Report for a complete overview of all features and capabilities

Digital CX Starts With Partnership

A partnership is important on two levels: vision and execution. And this is where Kong stands apart from Apigee. Kong has the vision of an ever-evolving world, while Apigee is still using a core that was built for a pre-iPhone world.

Legacy API management solutions such as Apigee can solve basic connectivity and integration use cases. With the advent of microservices-based application architectures, containerized infrastructure and multi-cloud environments, enterprises have moved to more complex decentralized architectures. Legacy API management solutions lack the baseline performance, flexibility and extensibility needed to support an API- and microservices-led architecture at scale.

Kong's API management solution is built for complexity by design that easily integrates with your technology stack. Kong is focused on delivering the technology innovations that matter to our customers by offering solutions that support flexibility and need minimal replacement in your technology stack - future-proof. No wonder Kong has been recognized not just as a Leader but also as having the furthest completeness of vision in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Full Lifecycle API Management for the second year in a row.

Great Platform Support Leads to a Great CX

Most API management solutions in the market, such as Apigee, provide a predetermined SLA or time period that vendor support services will take before coming back to customers to help resolve any issues. Additionally, a customer raising a ticket with Apigee would either have to work via a third-party support service or a customer service representative who may be more generalist support POC. In contrast, Kong complements its industry-leading API management solution with predictable, best-in-class support services by offering different levels of Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) support to its customers. This means Kong customers will be connected to a highly qualified team of in-house subject matter experts (CRE and/or Field Engineer) in a span of a few minutes to troubleshoot code/config issues and help customers provide high-quality resolutions. This level of support and customer obsession shared by Kong is unparalleled in the API management space.

Performance and Operational Agility Powering CX

We live in a digital world, where microservices, containers, cloud computing and distributed systems are now commonplace in modern application development. Embracing these innovations requires that developers have a low-latency way to power internal as well as external communications. To ensure a seamless user experience even at peak traffic, your APIs should be both dependable and quick. To achieve this, your underlying API management solution must be able to scale to enable high volume and low latency API connectivity easily.

Kong Enterprise is based on a lightweight gateway known for its ability to support thousands of transactions per second at sub-millisecond processing latency with minimal memory usage and reverse proxy with caching. According to a recent benchmark test by GigaOm, Kong Enterprise delivered 446x lower latency and 31x higher throughput than Apigee.

Lastly, if your API management solution needs a lot of time to be installed, configured and made available, it would quickly lose its popularity with application development teams and end customers. Kong can be live in 5 commands, simplifying Day-1 operations. With Apigee, you're looking at days. Unlike Apigee, Kong enormously simplifies Day-2 operations with its modular architecture that includes a comprehensive catalog of out-of-the-box plugins, including API security, authentication, traffic control, analytics plugins and more.

Learn more about how Kong's modular architecture helped Kore Labs simplify the management of its highly regulated financial products.

Conclusion

Whether you are deploying Kong to multiple teams across a global organization or are getting started with the first use case for your department, Kong Support provides the timely technical support you need to ensure your project's success. Looking for a fast, lightweight, future-proofed API gateway with world-class support services? Contact us today!

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