Apigee AI Gateway vs Kong AI Gateway (2026)
Updated March 10, 2026
Overview
Google Cloud's Apigee includes AI gateway capabilities for managing and securing generative AI API traffic, with model routing, token-based rate limiting, content moderation, and comprehensive analytics.
Kong AI Gateway extends the popular Kong API gateway with AI-specific capabilities including multi-LLM routing, prompt engineering, semantic caching, rate limiting, and cost management.
Key features
Core capabilities each platform advertises.
- Google Cloud AI traffic management
- API analytics and monitoring
- Security and threat protection
- Rate limiting and quotas
- Multi-cloud support
- AI traffic management
- Multi-LLM load balancing
- Request/response transformation
- Authentication and authorization
- Plugin ecosystem
Strengths and tradeoffs
What each tool does well, and the limitations to keep in mind.
Pros
- Production-ready
- Good performance
- Active development
Cons
- Pricing varies
- Setup required
Pros
- Developer-friendly platform
- Production-ready
- Good performance
- Active development
Cons
- Enterprise pricing varies
- Setup complexity
- Learning curve
Apigee AI or Kong AI — which should you choose?
Choose Apigee AI if you wantChoose if you want
- Managing AI APIs on Google Cloud
- Enterprise API security for AI endpoints
- Usage metering and billing for AI services
- Multi-cloud AI API management
- Compliance and governance for AI traffic
Choose Kong AI if you wantChoose if you want
- Enterprise AI API management
- Load balancing across LLM providers
- AI traffic governance and security
- Multi-tenant AI access control
- API lifecycle management for AI
Compare Apigee AI Gateway and Kong AI Gateway on your own traffic
Respan lets you trace LLM and agent calls across any model or framework, A/B test prompts on production traffic, and route requests across 1,000+ models through one gateway.
Try Respan free