Kong

Kong is the most widely adopted API gateway — 345k deployments, 37k companies, and an enterprise plugin ecosystem covering auth, rate limiting, logging, and service mesh. If you're managing 10+ microservices and need a central control plane for traffic, Kong is the proven choice.

Traefik is lighter and Kubernetes-native — a single Go binary with automatic service discovery and no external database required. Apache APISIX offers real-time configuration changes without restarts via etcd. For simple reverse proxying, Nginx or Caddy do the job without an API gateway's complexity.

Use Kong if you need enterprise-grade API management with a deep plugin ecosystem and your team manages multiple services.

The catch: Kong's free tier is limited — advanced features (RBAC, developer portal, analytics) require the commercial license. The Lua-based plugin system is powerful but Lua isn't a language most teams know. For Kubernetes-native environments, Traefik's automatic configuration is simpler than Kong's declarative configs. And if you only have a handful of services, an API gateway is overhead you don't need.