APIblazeAPIblaze
Comparison

APIblaze vs Kong

Two approaches to putting a gateway in front of your API.

Kong is one of the established API-management platforms: a fast gateway, a large plugin ecosystem, many ways to deploy it, and a deep set of enterprise capabilities through Kong Konnect. If you need a general-purpose platform to run every API in your organization, it is a serious choice.

APIblaze is built for a narrower job. You already have an API, and you want to turn it into a secure, multi-tenant API and MCP endpoint quickly, with tenants, keys, authorization and quotas already in place, instead of assembling and operating an API-management stack.

See the comparison Read the docs

At a glance

Yes/no cells would hide the real difference, so each one says how the capability is delivered: built in, a first-class workflow, or available through plugins, configuration, or an external engine.

Primary focus

APIblaze

Opinionated

Turning an existing API into a multi-tenant product for developers and AI agents.

Kong

General purpose

API and AI gateway plus a full API-management platform (Konnect).

API gateway

APIblaze

Built in

Managed, serverless proxy in front of your unchanged backend.

Kong

Built in

High-performance gateway — the core of the platform.

Authentication

APIblaze

Built in

API keys, OAuth sign-in (GitHub, Google, Microsoft…), or your own JWT/OIDC issuer — a setting, not code.

Kong

Extensive, via plugins

Key Auth, JWT, Basic, HMAC, LDAP, mTLS, OpenID Connect, SAML and more; availability varies by edition.

API keys

APIblaze

First-class workflow

Keys per tenant, minted by your customers from a drop-in widget or the hosted portal.

Kong

Supported

Key Auth credentials on Consumers; self-service app credentials through the Konnect Dev Portal.

Fine-grained authorization

APIblaze

Built in

Per-route rules written as a sentence, run watch-only on real traffic, then enforced. Fail-closed.

Kong

Via plugin/configuration

ACLs by consumer group, OIDC claim and scope checks, or an OPA policy.

Relationship-based authorization

APIblaze

Built in

OpenFGA-style model: owners, groups, and roles inherited through parent objects.

Kong

External policy engine

Achievable with OPA and your own policy data. No ReBAC/OpenFGA plugin in Kong’s Plugin Hub at time of writing.

Multi-tenancy

APIblaze

First-class workflow

Each customer is a tenant with its own keys, users, groups, identity-provider trust and MCP catalogue.

Kong

Supported

Platform-level isolation with Workspaces or Konnect control planes; customer tenancy modelled with Consumers, Consumer Groups and config.

Rate limiting

APIblaze

Built in

On by default for every new proxy, per consumer. One command to change.

Kong

Extensive

Rate Limiting, Rate Limiting Advanced (sliding windows), Service Protection, token-based AI limits.

Quotas

APIblaze

Built in

Daily, weekly or monthly ceilings, on by default.

Kong

Via configuration

Long rate-limit windows (day, month, year), or Entitlement Enforcement with Konnect Metering & Billing.

Developer self-service

APIblaze

First-class workflow

Widgets on your own site: users mint and rotate keys, manage groups, request access.

Kong

Supported

Konnect Dev Portal application registration — key-auth, OIDC or DCR — with approvals and developer teams.

Developer portal

APIblaze

Built in

A zero-config hosted portal per proxy, with sign-in, keys and a live try-it console.

Kong

Extensive

Konnect Dev Portal: customizable, API packages, developer RBAC, SSO.

MCP

APIblaze

Built in

Every proxy also gets an MCP address. Agents go through the same keys, sign-in, rules and limits.

Kong

Supported

Kong AI Gateway: AI MCP Proxy converts REST APIs into MCP tools or proxies MCP servers; per-tool ACLs; MCP OAuth2 plugin.

Deployment model

APIblaze

Managed only

Serverless and fully managed. No self-hosted option.

Kong

Extensive

Self-managed (traditional, hybrid, DB-less), Konnect hybrid, Dedicated Cloud Gateways, Serverless Gateways, Kubernetes.

Plugin ecosystem

APIblaze

Not a plugin platform

Built-in transforms and mappings; no third-party plugin marketplace.

Kong

Extensive

140+ plugins in the Plugin Hub; custom plugins in Lua, Go, Python or JavaScript.

Enterprise API management

APIblaze

Focused

Not built for organization-wide API governance across many teams.

Kong

Extensive

Catalog, analytics, APIOps with decK, admin RBAC, workspaces and control planes.

Setup complexity

APIblaze

One command

npx apiblaze create — no account needed to start.

Kong

Scales with scope

From a single gateway to a multi-plane platform; you choose and compose the plugins.

Kong capabilities checked against Kong’s official documentation in October 2026. Some Kong features depend on the edition or on Konnect; see the sources.

The core difference

A platform you compose, or a workflow that comes assembled

Both put a gateway in front of your backend. The difference is how much of the product around that gateway you build yourself. Kong gives you a powerful set of building blocks and lets you decide how they fit together. APIblaze makes those decisions for you, around one use case.

A typical Kong setup for a multi-tenant API

Each piece is well supported. You choose, configure and operate the combination:

  1. 1Pick a deployment: self-managed, Konnect hybrid, or Kong-managed data planes
  2. 2Model customers as Consumers and Consumer Groups
  3. 3Add authentication plugins: Key Auth, JWT or OpenID Connect
  4. 4Add authorization: ACLs, OIDC claim checks, or OPA with your own policies
  5. 5Configure rate limits and long-window limits for quotas
  6. 6Set up Dev Portal applications for self-service credentials
  7. 7Add AI Gateway’s MCP Proxy plugin to expose tools to agents
APIblaze — one command

$ npx apiblaze create --target https://ninopizzas.com/openapi.yaml

✓ Your app is behind a secured API and MCP:

API acme.abz.run/1.0.0/dev tenants, API keys

MCP acme-nino.mcp.apiblaze.com agents, OAuth

Portal acme.portal.apiblaze.com

Limits 10 req/s per consumer · 3,000 / day

Rules records locked to their creator

# your backend keeps no auth code — it reads x-abz-tenant-id and x-abz-user-id

Composition is a strength when your requirements are unusual or span a whole organization. An opinionated workflow is a strength when your requirements look like most SaaS APIs, and you would rather ship this week.

Authentication vs authorization

Two different questions, often confused

Comparisons of API gateways often mix these up. They are separate problems, solved by separate parts of a gateway.

Authentication — who is making this request?

APIblaze: API keys per tenant, OAuth sign-in with social or your own provider, or JWTs from any JWKS-backed OIDC issuer you trust, scoped per tenant. The gateway resolves an end-user and tenant and forwards them to your backend.

Kong: a very broad set of authentication plugins (Key Auth, JWT, Basic, HMAC, LDAP, mTLS, OpenID Connect, SAML and more) that map callers to Consumers. This is one of Kong’s strongest areas.

Authorization — what is this identity allowed to do?

APIblaze: per-route rules on the records themselves (“users see only their own reservations; managers see all of their restaurant’s”), backed by a relationship-based model and enforced on every request.

Kong: ACLs by consumer group, claim and scope checks in the OpenID Connect plugin, and the Open Policy Agent plugin for anything those don’t cover, using policies and data you maintain.

A note on RBAC. Kong’s role-based access control for Kong Manager, the Admin API and Konnect teams governs who can configure the gateway. That is administrative access. It is a separate thing from authorizing your application’s end users against your data, which is what this page compares.
Fine-grained authorization

Roles answer “what kind of user?” Relationships answer “which records?”

APIblaze’s authorization model is relationship-based, in the style of OpenFGA (Google Zanzibar). Instead of attaching permissions only to roles, it derives them from how users and records are connected.

A role

user:alice has role editor

Editor of what? Every reservation in the system? Only some? The role alone can’t say.

A relationship

alice can edit reservation:123 because alice is a manager of restaurant:456, and reservation:123 belongs to restaurant:456.

Add a restaurant, hire a manager, or move a reservation, and permissions follow the data. Nobody edits a role list.

authorization model — OpenFGA DSL

type user

type restaurant

relations

define manager: [user, group#member]

type reservation

relations

define restaurant: [restaurant]

define owner: [user]

define editor: owner or manager from restaurant

# PATCH /reservations/123 alice → 200 (manager of 456)

# PATCH /reservations/123 bob → 403 (no relationship)

Why it fits SaaS

SaaS permissions are rarely global. Access usually depends on which organization, project or resource a user is connected to, which is exactly what relationships describe.

Isolated per tenant

Each tenant’s relationships are evaluated in their own namespace, so a “manager” at one customer gains nothing at another, even when user ids collide.

Safe to roll out

Rules start watch-only: they report what they would block on real traffic, then you enforce. If the policy engine is unreachable, requests are denied, not leaked.

Kong can implement sophisticated authorization too. A common pattern is the OPA plugin with Rego policies and the relationship data they need, or claims issued by your identity provider. The difference is architectural: in APIblaze, application-level authorization is a first-class part of the gateway, so there is no separate policy engine to compose, feed with data, and operate.

Multi-tenant API gateway

Your backend stays a backend. The gateway makes it a multi-tenant product.

Kong is a general-purpose platform: Workspaces and Konnect control planes isolate teams and environments, and you can model customer tenancy with Consumers, Consumer Groups and configuration. APIblaze is opinionated around one shape, an existing backend exposed to many customer organizations, and treats the tenant as a core concept.

APIblaze handles, per tenant

  • Tenants and accounts: each customer gets its own space
  • Users and nested groups, with self-service join requests
  • API keys your customers mint and rotate themselves
  • Permissions and relationship-based authorization
  • Rate limits and quotas
  • Its own identity-provider trust and MCP catalogue
what your backend receives

GET /reservations/123

x-abz-tenant-id: nino

x-abz-user-id: alice

abz.groups: ["managers"]

# already authenticated, authorized and rate-limited.

# your code stamps and filters rows by tenant + owner.

MCP gateway

One backend, two kinds of callers: developers and AI agents

Your API now has two audiences: developers who call it with keys, and AI agents that call it as tools over the Model Context Protocol. Both should be subject to the same identity, permissions and limits.

APIblaze: MCP is part of every proxy

Every APIblaze proxy gets an MCP address next to its API address. Routes become typed tools; tool calls go through the same gateway as API calls, so the same tenants, keys, OAuth sign-in, authorization rules and rate limits apply.

Agents sign in like any other user, with the OAuth provider you choose, and each tenant gets its own catalogue. There is no separate MCP server, auth layer or gateway to build and operate.

Kong: MCP through Kong AI Gateway

Kong supports MCP today. The AI MCP Proxy plugin can convert REST API routes into MCP tools, proxy existing MCP servers, and restrict tools by Consumer or Consumer Group. The AI MCP OAuth2 plugin validates tokens from an external authorization server. Newer AI Gateway releases add MCP servers as managed entities in Konnect.

It is a capable, enterprise-oriented approach: you enable the AI Gateway components, pair them with the authentication and authorization plugins of your choice, and run them alongside the rest of your Kong setup.

The question isn’t whether each product can serve MCP. Both can. It’s whether you want MCP to be a default property of every API you put behind the gateway, already wired to your tenants and rules, or a set of components you add and configure on a broader platform.

Which one fits your team?

Where Kong shines

  • Mature, organization-wide API management across many teams and services
  • An extensive plugin ecosystem, plus custom plugins in Lua, Go, Python or JavaScript
  • Deployment flexibility: self-managed, hybrid, DB-less, Kubernetes, or Kong-managed data planes in your cloud region
  • Protocols and traffic beyond request/response HTTP APIs, and LLM traffic governance through AI Gateway
  • Teams that already run Kong and have the expertise and infrastructure in place
  • Organizations that need Kong-specific enterprise capabilities, governance and support

Where APIblaze shines

  • You already have an API and want it in front of customers this week, not next quarter
  • Your product is multi-tenant, and every customer needs its own keys, users and limits
  • Access depends on records and relationships, not only on roles
  • Your customers should get keys and manage their teams on your site, without support tickets
  • You want the same API usable by developers and AI agents, with one set of rules
  • You’d rather configure an opinionated workflow than assemble and operate a gateway stack

Start with APIblaze, move to Kong if you outgrow it

One export turns your configuration, end users, API keys and authorization rules into a ready-to-run Kong setup. Your consumers keep their keys, and a report lists exactly what doesn’t carry over.

How the export works

Common questions

Is APIblaze a Kong alternative?

For one specific job, yes: putting an existing API in front of customers and AI agents with tenants, keys, authorization, quotas and MCP built in. As a general-purpose, self-hosted API-management platform with a plugin ecosystem, Kong covers far more ground, and APIblaze does not try to replace it there.

Can Kong do fine-grained authorization?

Yes. Kong can authorize with ACLs on consumer groups, with claims and scopes through its OpenID Connect plugin, and with arbitrary policies through its Open Policy Agent integration. The difference is that APIblaze ships a relationship-based authorization model as part of the gateway, while with Kong you compose it from those pieces and run the policy and data side yourself.

Does Kong support MCP?

Yes. Kong AI Gateway includes the AI MCP Proxy plugin, which can convert REST APIs into MCP tools or proxy existing MCP servers, with per-tool access control, plus an MCP OAuth2 plugin. APIblaze gives every proxy an MCP address by default, behind the same keys, sign-in, rules and limits as the API.

Can I move from APIblaze to Kong later?

Yes. APIblaze can export your configuration, end users, API keys (as hashes, so consumers keep their keys) and authorization rules as a ready-to-run Kong bundle, with a report of what does not translate.

Put your API in front of customers and agents

One command, no signup required. Claim it to your account whenever you’re ready.

Start free npx apiblaze create
Explore more:Fine-grained authz MCP servers API-key widget Rate limits & quotas

Sources

Statements about Kong were checked against Kong’s official documentation in October 2026. Kong evolves quickly, and availability of some features depends on the Kong edition or on Konnect. If something here is out of date, tell us and we’ll fix it.

Kong and Kong Konnect are trademarks of Kong Inc. APIblaze is not affiliated with Kong Inc.