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  4. API Gateway
  5. Kong vs Tars

Kong vs Tars

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Kong
Kong
Stacks671
Followers1.5K
Votes139
GitHub Stars42.1K
Forks5.0K
Tars
Tars
Stacks6
Followers15
Votes0
GitHub Stars10.0K
Forks2.1K

Kong vs Tars: What are the differences?

What is Kong? Open Source Microservice & API Management Layer. 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.

What is Tars? A high-performance RPC framework. It is an open-source microservice platform. It contains a high-performance RPC framework and a service management platform. Based on Tars, you can develop a reliable microservice system efficiently It is designed for high reliability, high performance, and efficient service management. By significantly reducing system operation work, developers can focus on business logic and meet fast changes of user requirements..

Kong can be classified as a tool in the "Microservices Tools" category, while Tars is grouped under "Remote Procedure Call (RPC)".

Some of the features offered by Kong are:

  • 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

On the other hand, Tars provides the following key features:

  • Microservices platform
  • Multiple programming languages supporting
  • High performance

Kong and Tars are both open source tools. It seems that Kong with 25.8K GitHub stars and 3.31K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Tars with 8.35K GitHub stars and 1.98K GitHub forks.

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Advice on Kong, Tars

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.

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

Kong
Kong
Tars
Tars

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.

It is an open-source microservice platform. It contains a high-performance RPC framework and a service management platform. Based on Tars, you can develop a reliable microservice system efficiently. It is designed for high reliability, high performance, and efficient service management. By significantly reducing system operation work, developers can focus on business logic and meet fast changes of user requirements.

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;
Microservices platform; Multiple programming languages supporting; High performance; Agile R&D; High Availability; Efficient Operation; Massive requests
Statistics
GitHub Stars
42.1K
GitHub Stars
10.0K
GitHub Forks
5.0K
GitHub Forks
2.1K
Stacks
671
Stacks
6
Followers
1.5K
Followers
15
Votes
139
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 37
    Easy to maintain
  • 32
    Easy to install
  • 26
    Flexible
  • 21
    Great performance
  • 7
    Api blueprint
No community feedback yet
Integrations
Cassandra
Cassandra
Docker
Docker
Prometheus
Prometheus
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL
NGINX
NGINX
Vagrant
Vagrant
Node.js
Node.js
PHP
PHP
Golang
Golang
Java
Java
Linux
Linux
C++
C++
macOS
macOS

What are some alternatives to Kong, Tars?

gRPC

gRPC

gRPC is a modern open source high performance RPC framework that can run in any environment. It can efficiently connect services in and across data centers with pluggable support for load balancing, tracing, health checking...

Istio

Istio

Istio is an open platform for providing a uniform way to integrate microservices, manage traffic flow across microservices, enforce policies and aggregate telemetry data. Istio's control plane provides an abstraction layer over the underlying cluster management platform, such as Kubernetes, Mesos, etc.

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.

Azure Service Fabric

Azure Service Fabric

Azure Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform that makes it easy to package, deploy, and manage scalable and reliable microservices. Service Fabric addresses the significant challenges in developing and managing cloud apps.

Moleculer

Moleculer

It is a fault tolerant framework. It has built-in load balancer, circuit breaker, retries, timeout and bulkhead features. It is open source and free of charge project.

Express Gateway

Express Gateway

A cloud-native microservices gateway completely configurable and extensible through JavaScript/Node.js built for ALL platforms and languages. Enterprise features are FREE thanks to the power of 3K+ ExpressJS battle hardened modules.

ArangoDB Foxx

ArangoDB Foxx

It is a JavaScript framework for writing data-centric HTTP microservices that run directly inside of ArangoDB.

Dapr

Dapr

It is a portable, event-driven runtime that makes it easy for developers to build resilient, stateless and stateful microservices that run on the cloud and edge and embraces the diversity of languages and developer frameworks.

Zuul

Zuul

It is the front door for all requests from devices and websites to the backend of the Netflix streaming application. As an edge service application, It is built to enable dynamic routing, monitoring, resiliency, and security. Routing is an integral part of a microservice architecture.

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