Kong AI Gateway brings enterprise API management to LLM workloads, but its complexity and pricing are built for traditional API governance, not AI-native workflows. Here are the best alternatives for teams that need purpose-built AI gateway capabilities without the overhead. Why Teams Outgrow Kong for AI Workloads Kong earned its reputation as one of the most battle-tested API gateways in the market. Built on Nginx and OpenResty, it handles request routing, authentication, and traffic management for some of the largest API deployments in the world. When generative AI emerged as an enterprise workload, Kong extended its platform with AI-specific plugins for model routing, token-based rate limiting, semantic caching, and content moderation. The problem is architectural. Kong is a general-purpose API management platform that added AI capabilities as plugins. The core infrastructure, configuration model, and pricing structure all reflect its origins in traditional API governance.…