Overview

Rating

10.0 / 10

Rating

Best For

Enterprises using Kong who want to extend their API gateway with AI capabilities

Best For

Enterprises, especially in the EU and regulated industries, that need governed access to LLMs and agents with data residency

Product Summary

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.

Product Summary

Orq.ai is an EU-hosted AI gateway and LLMOps platform with routing across 500+ models, tracing, evals, prompt management, and agent governance.

Starting Price

$0Per month

Starting Price

Free to startPer usage-based

Free Trial

Yes

Free Trial

Free Version

Yes

Free Version

Website

konghq.com

Website

orq.ai

Key features

Core capabilities each platform advertises.

Kong AI Gateway

AI traffic management
Multi-LLM load balancing
Request/response transformation
Authentication and authorization
Plugin ecosystem

Orq.ai

AI gateway for 500+ models with fallbacks, retries, and load balancing
MCP gateway with tool-level access control and audit logs
Smart Router for per-request model selection by cost and quality
Tracing, online evaluators, and alerts

Strengths and tradeoffs

What each tool does well, and the limitations to keep in mind.

Kong AI Gateway

Pros

Developer-friendly platform
Production-ready
Good performance
Active development

Cons

Enterprise pricing varies
Setup complexity
Learning curve

Orq.ai

Pros

Gateway, observability, evals, prompts, and agent runtime in one platform
EU-hosted by default, with VPC, on-prem, and air-gapped options on Enterprise
Unlimited gateway seats, with usage billed by spans and data

Cons

A platform fee applies to model traffic: 4.5% on Orq credits, 4% on BYOK past 1M requests a month
AI Studio, the UI for prompts, agents, and experiments, costs €35 per seat per month

Kong AI or Orq.ai — which should you choose?

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

Choose Orq.ai if you wantChoose if you want

Governing every LLM and tool call across an enterprise
Meeting EU data residency and EU AI Act requirements
Attributing AI spend by team, project, or customer

Compare Kong AI Gateway and Orq.ai on your own traffic

10KFree traces/mo

1,000+Models

5 minSetup

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

Kong AI Gateway vs Orq.ai (2026)

Overview

Key features

Strengths and tradeoffs

Kong AI or Orq.ai — which should you choose?

Compare Kong AI Gateway and Orq.ai on your own traffic

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