Enterprise gateway comparison
Kong is an established API gateway with a large plugin ecosystem, and Kong AI Gateway now ships as its own product. Tygress takes a different path: one self-hosted Rust gateway, on its own async transport, with API identity, AI governance, MCP, A2A, and post-quantum TLS in the same binary and the same policy chain.
Tygress is pre-release. Updated · Competitor details checked
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Clients
Upstreams
Your services
LLM providers
Agents and tools
L4 passthrough: TCP, UDP and TLS traffic is forwarded outside the HTTP plugin chain.
Why Tygress
Tygress is not trying to recreate Kong's history or ecosystem. It is built around one problem: API, model, tool, and agent traffic need one identity and governance layer, without adding runtime and licensing boundaries for the AI parts.
Planned pricing puts every gateway capability in the $0 tier, including OIDC, LDAP, mTLS, JWE, OPA, the AI controls, and agent approvals; paid plans are managed cloud, support, and services. At Kong, OIDC, mTLS, and JWE are Enterprise features, and most AI plugins need an AI license.
Virtual keys bound to operator-held provider keys, teams with a shared USD budget alongside each member's own, per-user limits keyed on verified JWT claims, an 80-model pricing catalog, and webhook alerts as spend crosses thresholds.
DLP and the prompt guard can inspect every chunk of a streamed reply, not just one buffered body. Provider translation and request signing run inside each retry and failover attempt, after redaction. Both follow from Tygress owning its transport.
MCP tool calls and A2A methods can wait at the gateway for a human decision, with a 45-second default timeout and default deny. Per-consumer MCP tool allowlists, REST and OpenAPI upstreams served as MCP tools, and A2A routing sit beside them.
Clients reach all nine provider types through OpenAI Chat Completions, OpenAI Responses, or Anthropic Messages: natively where the provider offers the API, bridged through chat completions otherwise. Bridges refuse features they can't carry instead of dropping them.
Both gateways offer hybrid ML-KEM key exchange, and Kong also ships ML-DSA certificates, which Tygress does not have. Tygress adds enforcement, which Kong does not document: a pqc_policy per listener or upstream and the pqc-guard plugin per route or consumer, plus a posture report mapped to PQC-migration deadlines.
For the general question, read AI gateway vs API gateway: do you need both?
Side by side
Kong is the mature choice today. Tygress is the consolidated alternative for teams planning API and AI governance as one self-hosted platform.
| Capability | Tygress | Kong |
|---|---|---|
| Availability | Pre-release: built and in active pre-1.0 development, not publicly available yet | Generally available; mature and widely deployed, with enterprise support |
| AI gateway model | Built into the same binary and policy chain as API traffic | AI Gateway 2.x: Konnect-managed AI entities and policies; self-hosted runs the same AI plugins on Kong Gateway |
| Self-hosted control plane | Control plane and data planes both run in your infrastructure: one binary, or split roles that sync over NATS | Gateway: traditional, DB-less, and hybrid modes. AI Gateway 2.x entities need a Konnect control plane; fully self-hosted AI runs as Gateway Enterprise plugins |
| Enterprise identity | OIDC, LDAP/Active Directory, mTLS, OAuth2 introspection, JWT with remote JWKS, JWE, HMAC, basic and API keys, plus ACL and OPA; all in the planned $0 tier | OSS (3.9.x; no new minor since December 2024): key auth, basic, HMAC, JWT, limited OAuth2 and LDAP. OIDC, mTLS, JWE, SAML, and full LDAP are Enterprise |
| Human approvals for agents | MCP tool calls and A2A methods held at the gateway for a decision; 45 s default timeout, default deny | No gateway-held approval step documented |
| MCP and A2A | MCP proxy with per-consumer tool allowlists, MCP server aggregation, REST and OpenAPI upstreams as MCP tools, MCP authorization (RFC 9728), and A2A routing with Agent Card discovery | AI MCP Proxy, MCP OAuth2, and A2A Proxy (AI license) with per-consumer tool ACLs; first-class entities in AI Gateway 2.x |
| AI guardrails | Prompt guard plus regex DLP with Luhn and entropy checks: redact, block, or audit prompts, and redact streamed replies chunk by chunk | AI Prompt Guard, semantic prompt and response guards, PII Sanitizer (external PII service), and cloud guardrail plugins; most need an AI license |
| AI cost controls | Virtual keys, token limits, USD budgets per consumer and team with threshold alerts, an 80-model pricing catalog, semantic cache, and quota-aware key pools with failover | Token and cost limits, semantic cache, load balancing, and LLM metrics via AI plugins; most need an AI license |
| Post-quantum TLS | Hybrid X25519MLKEM768 key exchange offered by default; enforceable per listener, upstream, route, or consumer; posture report. Key exchange only, no PQ certificates | Hybrid ML-KEM key exchange and ML-DSA certificates announced September 2026 (non-FIPS builds); no PQ configuration or per-route enforcement documented |
| Engine | Rust, on Tygress's own async transport and request engine (hyper and rustls) | NGINX-based gateway with Lua plugins |
| API traffic | HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, gRPC, gRPC-Web, gRPC-JSON transcoding, WebSocket, and TCP/UDP/TLS passthrough | Mature REST and API gateway with broad protocol and deployment support |
| Extensibility | 60+ built-in plugins, sandboxed proxy-wasm plugins, and inline Rhai or JavaScript | Large established plugin ecosystem; plugin development kits for Lua, Go, Python, and JavaScript |
The Tygress column reflects the current pre-release build; the changelog lists what has been built since June 2026. Kong cells were checked against Kong's own documentation and release posts on .
Choose Tygress when
Choose Kong when
FAQ
Yes, for both Kong Gateway and Kong AI Gateway. Tygress covers the API gateway role: REST, gRPC, and WebSocket traffic with authentication, rate limiting, health checks, retries, failover, and 60+ built-in plugins. LLM routing, AI cost controls, guardrails, MCP, A2A, and post-quantum TLS run in the same binary and policy chain rather than as a separate product. Tygress is pre-release: the gateway is built and in active pre-1.0 development, but it is not publicly available yet.
Architecture and packaging. Kong Gateway uses an NGINX and Lua architecture. Kong AI Gateway 2.x adds a Konnect-managed control plane whose AI entities compile to AI plugins on Kong data planes, which benefits from Kong's mature ecosystem. Tygress is a Rust gateway on its own async transport, with API and AI controls in one self-hosted binary and one policy chain. Its planned pricing puts every gateway capability, including SSO and AI governance, in the $0 tier.
Yes. Kong AI Gateway governs LLM, MCP, and A2A traffic. AI Gateway 2.x (GA September 2026) runs on its own release train with a Konnect-managed control plane and first-class AI Models, Providers, MCP Servers, and Agents; self-hosted deployments configure the same capabilities as AI plugins on Kong Gateway. It covers provider abstraction, load balancing, semantic caching, guardrails, PII sanitization, token and cost limits, observability, MCP, and A2A. Most advanced AI plugins are labeled "AI License Required", so compare the Kong licenses and deployment model you need with Tygress's built-in feature set.
Yes. Tygress is designed to run in a private VPC or on-premises, as one binary or as separate control-plane and data-plane roles that sync configuration over NATS. PostgreSQL and Redis are optional, depending on the features and topology you use. A distroless, non-root container image builds from source, and a Docker Compose reference stack runs NATS, a control plane, and two data planes; no image is published yet. Kong Gateway also supports self-managed traditional, DB-less, and hybrid modes; Kong AI Gateway 2.x entities need a Konnect control plane, and fully self-hosted AI runs as Gateway Enterprise plugins.
Both offer hybrid post-quantum key exchange. Kong announced hybrid ML-KEM key exchange and ML-DSA certificates in September 2026, in non-FIPS builds; we found no Kong documentation for PQ configuration or per-route enforcement. Tygress offers X25519MLKEM768 (ML-KEM-768, NIST FIPS 203, combined with X25519) first by default on listeners and upstream connections, so PQ-capable peers negotiate it without configuration. A pqc_policy can require it per listener or upstream, the pqc-guard plugin enforces it per route or consumer, and a posture report maps certificates, key-exchange policy, and token algorithms to PQC-migration deadlines. Tygress has no post-quantum certificates.
Kong is the stronger choice when production maturity, an established plugin ecosystem, existing Konnect investment, enterprise support history, or immediate availability matters most, and when you need SAML, FIPS builds, or post-quantum certificates. Tygress is the alternative for teams that want API and AI governance in one self-hosted binary, with no enterprise-only gateway features in its planned pricing, but it is not generally available yet.
Related
Sources
Competitor capabilities and editions change. This page uses Kong's own product pages, developer documentation, and release blog posts, checked .
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