News
October 1, 2021
4 min read

Kong Once Again Named a Leader in the 2021 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Full Lifecycle API Management

Marco Palladino
CTO and Co-Founder

We are thrilled to be once again recognized as a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Full Lifecycle API Management. We believe this recognition reinforces our commitment to our customers, who rely on us to continue innovating so they can build solutions that unlock growth, security and innovation for their companies.

Kong is the most adopted API gateway, with over 2.6M instances running worldwide. And our customers power every line of code, deployment and launch, and today, our customers have helped us reach another milestone.

Kong is recognized as a Leader among API management providers and is once again positioned furthest to the right for completeness of vision. We believe it is remarkable for a company as young as Kong to be recognized as a Leader, along with some of the largest companies in the world, two years in a row! This is both an honor and a feat; we couldn't be more proud of our team or more thankful to our dedicated users and customers who have made this possible.

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from https://konghq.com/reports/gartner-magic-quadrant-api.

Developer-Led Solutions

We know customers want developer-led solutions ‒ less is more ‒ and we’ve intentionally built our technology to meet this need.

Seeing this validated in the report shows us this investment is paying off for our customers and only encourages us to double down in this area. We have seen this with our customers like Verifone, a global leader in payments and commerce solutions at the point of sale.

"As we learned more, Kong really stood out for being able to support lots of use cases for us," said Hans van Leeuwen, lead architect at Verifone. "Kong's flexible plugin architecture meant we could pick and choose the functionality we needed for each use case, as well as manage APIs across modern and legacy systems."

Flexibility in Deployment

The Kong Gateway has superior deployment flexibility ‒ AWS, GCP, Docker, Kubernetes or VMs, which Gartner recognizes as a key strength. Kong is hyper-focused on developer experience, so providing our users with options, such as where and how to run the Gateway, goes into every product decision we make.

This was critically important for customers like Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited (ANZ), a multinational banking and financial services company headquartered in Melbourne, Australia.

"We felt that using Kong as our API gateway would give us the best opportunity to meet the needs of Open Banking at ANZ and prove out the technology for wider use," said Martin Brennan, technology area lead, Enterprise Integrations and Services, ANZ Bank. "We were able to take advantage of Kong's flexibility to quickly scale up and down to meet unpredictable traffic demand, while also keeping our existing platform operating at a healthy rate."

High Performance

We believe this recognition explains the rapid growth Kong has experienced over the last year, including over 30,000+ stars on Github and more than doubling our open source community.

Last month, Forbes added Kong to its annual Cloud 100 ranking of the world's top private cloud companies. Kong also ranked No. 69 on Deloitte's Technology Fast 500™, recognizing Kong for a 1,908% growth.

Read a Complimentary Copy of the Report

Gartner Magic Quadrants provide insights, in-depth analyses and actionable advice about the market's direction and its key players. The 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Full Lifecycle API Management uses a two-dimensional matrix that evaluates API vendors like Kong, based on their Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute.

We are happy to offer a complimentary copy of the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Full Lifecycle API Management. In it, you will learn from Gartner how API usage and the need to govern it is increasing rapidly, driven by remote working, platforms, ecosystems, innovations, digital transformations and regulations.

Read the complimentary 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Full Lifecycle API Management.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management, Shameen Pillai, Kimihiko Iijima, Mark O’Neill, John Santoro, Akash Jain, Fintan Ryan, 29 September 2021. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ct to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.Gartner and Magic Quadrant are registered trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.