StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Monitoring
  4. Fault Tolerance Tools
  5. Hystrix vs Kong

Hystrix vs Kong

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Hystrix
Hystrix
Stacks309
Followers163
Votes2
GitHub Stars24.4K
Forks4.7K
Kong
Kong
Stacks671
Followers1.5K
Votes139
GitHub Stars42.1K
Forks5.0K

Hystrix vs Kong: What are the differences?

Introduction

Here is a comparison between Hystrix and Kong, focusing on the key differences between the two technologies.

  1. Hystrix: Hystrix is a latency and fault tolerance library designed to aid in creating resilient and responsive applications by isolating dependencies between services. It provides features like circuit breaking, thread pool isolation, and fault tolerance.

  2. Kong: Kong is a cloud-native, scalable, and high-performance API gateway built on top of Nginx. It acts as an intermediary between clients and servers, providing advanced API management capabilities such as request routing, rate limiting, authentication, and more.

  3. Circuit Breaker vs API Gateway: Hystrix focuses on implementing circuit breaker patterns to handle failures within microservices, while Kong serves as an API gateway that acts as a central entry point for all API requests.

  4. Resiliency Infrastructure vs API Management: Hystrix primarily focuses on providing a resilient infrastructure for microservices, allowing developers to isolate and handle faults, whereas Kong primarily focuses on API management, providing features like authentication, traffic control, and analytics.

  5. Application-level vs System-level: Hystrix operates at the application level, managing dependencies between microservices within the application, while Kong operates at the system level, managing the overall API ecosystem and interactions with external clients.

  6. Developer-centric vs API Consumer-centric: Hystrix is more developer-centric, providing tools and libraries to build resilient applications, while Kong is more API consumer-centric, providing features and functionalities to manage and control access to APIs.

In summary, Hystrix primarily focuses on providing resiliency infrastructure for microservices at the application level, while Kong primarily focuses on API management at the system level, catering to API consumer needs.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Hystrix, Kong

Prateek
Prateek

Fullstack Engineer| Ruby | React JS | gRPC at Ex Bookmyshow | Furlenco | Shopmatic

Mar 14, 2020

Decided

Istio based on powerful Envoy whereas Kong based on Nginx. Istio is K8S native as well it's actively developed when k8s was successfully accepted with production-ready apps whereas Kong slowly migrated to start leveraging K8s. Istio has an inbuilt turn-keyIstio based on powerful Envoy whereas Kong based on Nginx. Istio is K8S native as well it's actively developed when k8s was successfully accepted with production-ready apps whereas Kong slowly migrated to start leveraging K8s. Istio has an inbuilt turn key solution with Rancher whereas Kong completely lacks here. Traffic distribution in Istio can be done via canary, a/b, shadowing, HTTP headers, ACL, whitelist whereas in Kong it's limited to canary, ACL, blue-green, proxy caching. Istio has amazing community support which is visible via Github stars or releases when comparing both.

322k views322k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Hystrix
Hystrix
Kong
Kong

Hystrix is a latency and fault tolerance library designed to isolate points of access to remote systems, services and 3rd party libraries, stop cascading failure and enable resilience in complex distributed systems where failure is inevitable.

Kong is a scalable, open source API Layer (also known as an API Gateway, or API Middleware). Kong controls layer 4 and 7 traffic and is extended through Plugins, which provide extra functionality and services beyond the core platform.

Latency and Fault Tolerance;Realtime Operations; Concurrency
Logging: Log requests and responses to your system over TCP, UDP or to disk; OAuth2.0: Add easily an OAuth2.0 authentication to your APIs; Monitoring: Live monitoring provides key load and performance server metrics; IP-restriction: Whitelist or blacklist IPs that can make requests; Authentication: Manage consumer credentials query string and header tokens; Rate-limiting: Block and throttle requests based on IP or authentication; Transformations: Add, remove or manipulate HTTP params and headers on-the-fly; CORS: Enable cross-origin requests to your APIs that would otherwise be blocked; Anything: Need custom functionality? Extend Kong with your own Lua plugins;
Statistics
GitHub Stars
24.4K
GitHub Stars
42.1K
GitHub Forks
4.7K
GitHub Forks
5.0K
Stacks
309
Stacks
671
Followers
163
Followers
1.5K
Votes
2
Votes
139
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 2
    Cirkit breaker
Pros
  • 37
    Easy to maintain
  • 32
    Easy to install
  • 26
    Flexible
  • 21
    Great performance
  • 7
    Api blueprint
Integrations
No integrations available
Cassandra
Cassandra
Docker
Docker
Prometheus
Prometheus
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL
NGINX
NGINX
Vagrant
Vagrant

What are some alternatives to Hystrix, Kong?

Amazon API Gateway

Amazon API Gateway

Amazon API Gateway handles all the tasks involved in accepting and processing up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls, including traffic management, authorization and access control, monitoring, and API version management.

Tyk Cloud

Tyk Cloud

Tyk is a leading Open Source API Gateway and Management Platform, featuring an API gateway, analytics, developer portal and dashboard. We power billions of transactions for thousands of innovative organisations.

Moesif

Moesif

Build a winning API platform with instant, meaningful visibility into API usage and customer adoption

Ambassador

Ambassador

Map services to arbitrary URLs in a single, declarative YAML file. Configure routes with CORS support, circuit breakers, timeouts, and more. Replace your Kubernetes ingress controller. Route gRPC, WebSockets, or HTTP.

Polly

Polly

It is a .NET resilience and transient-fault-handling library that allows developers to express policies such as Retry, Circuit Breaker, Timeout, Bulkhead Isolation, and Fallback in a fluent and thread-safe manner.

Azure API Management

Azure API Management

Today's innovative enterprises are adopting API architectures to accelerate growth. Streamline your work across hybrid and multi-cloud environments with a single place for managing all your APIs.

API Umbrella

API Umbrella

API Umbrella is a proxy that sits in front of your APIs. It can seamlessly add common functionality like api keys, rate limiting, and analytics to any API.

Treblle

Treblle

It makes it super easy to understand what’s going on with your APIs and the apps that use them. You can add it to any API using one of our SDKs for PHP, Laravel, .NET, Node, Ruby and Python. Once you add our SDK out of the box you get: real time API monitoring and logging, error tracking, automatically generated documentation, quality scoring and analytics. Essentially you get all the tools you need to build and ship APIs with ease. Treblle isn’t built just for back-end and API developers. You can invite team members to you project and they all get the same features.

Google Cloud API Gateway

Google Cloud API Gateway

It enables you to provide secure access to your backend services through a well-defined REST API that is consistent across all of your services, regardless of the service implementation. Clients consume your REST APIS to implement standalone apps for a mobile device or tablet, through apps running in a browser, or through any other type of app that can make a request to an HTTP endpoint.

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

GitHub
Bitbucket

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Kubernetes
Rancher

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

Postman
Swagger UI

Postman vs Swagger UI

gulp
Grunt

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp