**Two runtimes, split automation, compounding licensing costs.**

Kong delivers a unified control plane for APIs, AI, and agents — across every cloud, every runtime, without the licensing complexity or ecosystem dependencies.

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### Low Migration Risk

MuleSoft migrations used to take consulting teams months or years. Kong Migration Services can do it in weeks or months, with one engineer. AI-assisted conversion, automated validation, and a rollback path on every cutover — risk addressed before it becomes a problem.

### High Return on Investment

Multi-dimensional API licensing gets expensive at scale. Kong's lightweight, consistent runtime cuts that complexity — one platform, predictable costs, across every cloud and deployment model.

### Keep Up With What's Next

Orchestration-layer AI governance only takes you so far. Kong enforces token limits, model routing, and guardrails directly in the request path — across any agent framework, any LLM, any runtime. No ecosystem walls.

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Capabilities

Kong

MuleSoft

Operational Flexibility

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Full SaaS offering
Deployment flexibility		Deployment options vary by region and hosting model
Multi-Cloud Support		Managed hosting is AWS-only; Azure and GCP require self-managed Runtime Fabric

Deployment options vary by region and hosting model

Managed hosting is AWS-only; Azure and GCP require self-managed Runtime Fabric

Performance

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Runtime performance	151,800 rps at 4.92 ms P95 latency ([_report_](https://portal.gigaom.com/report/gigaom-benchmark-kong-api-gateway-2)_report_)	46,300 rps at 8.31 ms P95 latency ([_report_](https://portal.gigaom.com/report/gigaom-benchmark-kong-api-gateway-2)_report_)
Automation of CI/CD pipelines		Inconsistent across runtimes
API Security		Inconsistent across runtimes
Dynamic scalability
Extensibility
K8s Native API management		Runtime Fabric runs on Kubernetes, but the MuleSoft runtime is not cloud-native by design.

151,800 rps at 4.92 ms P95 latency ([_report_](https://portal.gigaom.com/report/gigaom-benchmark-kong-api-gateway-2)_report_)

46,300 rps at 8.31 ms P95 latency ([_report_](https://portal.gigaom.com/report/gigaom-benchmark-kong-api-gateway-2)_report_)

Inconsistent across runtimes

Runtime Fabric runs on Kubernetes, but the MuleSoft runtime is not cloud-native by design.

Licensing & Support

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End-to-end API Platform

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Full API lifecycle management		Only for MuleSoft-native APIs
API client and testing tool		No standalone API client
Developer portals
Advanced API analytics		Requires third-party APM tools
Service Catalog		Federated catalog, but governance runs through the Anypoint control plane
Completeness of vision	Positioned furthest in Gartner MQ	Behind Kong in Gartner Magic Quadrant

Only for MuleSoft-native APIs

No standalone API client

Requires third-party APM tools

Federated catalog, but governance runs through the Anypoint control plane

Positioned furthest in Gartner MQ

Behind Kong in Gartner Magic Quadrant

AI Connectivity

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Unified Multi-Model Abstraction Layer
Unified AI Observability & Cost Analytics
LLM Guardrails		Input and output moderation, but configured in MuleSoft flows, not inline gateway policies
MCP Governance		Supported only within AnyPoint ecosystem
Automated RAG Enforcement		No dedicated gateway-level RAG enforcement policy
Advanced Cost & Latency Routing		Topic-based routing, not real-time cost-aware