Amazon CloudFront vs Kong AI Gateway (2026): Pricing, Features & Verdict
Amazon CloudFront is our pick, scoring 7.9/10 against 7.1/10 for Kong AI Gateway on our Hosting & Infrastructure criteria. Its biggest advantage: higher Cost score (6/10 vs 4/10). For 10 users, Amazon CloudFront is free, against $25/mo for Kong AI Gateway; only Amazon CloudFront has a free plan.
Last updated: November 2026
Amazon CloudFront
7.9/10
Amazon CloudFront is the AWS content delivery network. It caches and serves websites, APIs and media from more than 750 edge locations, and includes DDoS protection, WAF and edge compute.
Kong AI Gateway
7.1/10
Kong AI Gateway governs LLM, MCP and agent-to-agent traffic for engineering teams, adding routing, guardrails, token quotas, caching and observability through Kong's API gateway platform.
Feature-by-Feature Comparison
| Feature | A Amazon CloudFront | |
|---|---|---|
| Scores | ||
| Overall Rating | 7.9/10 | 7.1/10 |
| Integration | 9/10 | 8/10 |
| Support | 6/10 | 6/10 |
| Cost | 6/10 | 4/10 |
| Customization | 9/10 | 9/10 |
| Security | 9/10 | 8/10 |
| Reliability | 9/10 | 8/10 |
| Ease of Use | 5/10 | 5/10 |
| Analytics | 7/10 | 7/10 |
| Scalability | 10/10 | 9/10 |
| Pricing | ||
| Free plan | Yes | No |
| Cheapest paid plan | $15/mo Pro (flat-rate) | $25/mo Plus (AI Management) |
| Estimated cost for 10 users | Free Free (flat-rate) | $25/mo Plus (AI Management) |
| Features | ||
| Multiple Regions | ||
| Uptime SLA | ||
| API and CLI | Not listed | |
| Content Delivery Network | Not listed | |
| DDoS Protection | Not listed | |
| Dedicated Servers | Not listed | |
| Free SSL Certificates | Not listed | |
| Managed WordPress | ||
| Serverless Functions | Not listed | |
| Shared Hosting | ||
Amazon CloudFront vs Kong AI Gateway cost by team size
Amazon CloudFront costs less at every team size we checked.
| Team size | Amazon CloudFront | Kong AI Gateway |
|---|---|---|
| 1 user | FreeFree (flat-rate) | $25/moPlus (AI Management) |
| 5 users | FreeFree (flat-rate) | $25/moPlus (AI Management) |
| 10 users | FreeFree (flat-rate) | $25/moPlus (AI Management) |
| 25 users | FreeFree (flat-rate) | $25/moPlus (AI Management) |
| 50 users | FreeFree (flat-rate) | $25/moPlus (AI Management) |
The plan that fits each team size, billed monthly, before add-ons and usage charges. Each cost opens that tool's pricing calculator for the team size.
Who Amazon CloudFront and Kong AI Gateway suit
Amazon CloudFront fits developers better than Kong AI Gateway.
| Audience | Amazon CloudFront | Kong AI Gateway |
|---|---|---|
| Developers | 9/10It offers a full API, works with CloudFormation and the SDKs, and runs code at the edge, which suits engineers who want deep control. | 7/10Offers a quickstart script, Docker and Kubernetes installs, and a unified API across LLM providers, though configuration has a learning curve. |
| Enterprise | 8/10It holds PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SOC and FedRAMP Moderate compliance, offers custom pricing, and runs on a very large edge network. | 9/10Enterprise pricing unlocks unlimited models and regions, SSO, RBAC, audit logs and 24x7 support tiers with SLAs. |
| SaaS Companies | 8/10It integrates natively with AWS origins and supports blue/green continuous deployment, a good fit for SaaS products hosted on AWS. | 7/10Token quotas, metering and billing features suit SaaS products that embed LLM calls. |
| Startups | 7/10The always-free tier and the $15 Pro flat-rate plan keep early costs low. | 6/10Kong for Startups provides credits and 50% off AI Gateway, but the pricing stacks up across many components. |
| IT Teams | Not rated | 8/10Platform teams get centralized governance, quotas, chargeback and guardrails across AI traffic. |
| Small Business | 5/10Reviewers cite configuration complexity and costs as hurdles for smaller teams that are not technical. | Not rated |
Which One Should You Choose?
AWhy choose Amazon CloudFront
- Has a free plan (Kong AI Gateway does not)
- Lower estimated cost for 10 users: Free vs $25/mo
- Higher Cost score (6/10 vs 4/10)
- Higher Integration score (9/10 vs 8/10)
- Better fit for developers (9/10 vs 7/10)
Why choose Kong AI Gateway
Our data shows no clear advantage over Amazon CloudFront.
Pros & Cons
AAmazon CloudFront
Pros
- The network is very large, with more than 750 PoPs plus over 1,140 PoPs embedded inside ISP networks.
- Data transfer from AWS origins such as S3 and EC2 to CloudFront costs nothing, which lowers costs for workloads hosted on AWS.
- Flat-rate plans start at $15 a month with no overage charges, which makes bills predictable.
- It has strong compliance coverage, including PCI-DSS Level 1, HIPAA, SOC, ISO and FedRAMP Moderate.
- Two tiers of edge compute are available: CloudFront Functions at $0.10 per million invocations and Lambda@Edge for heavier code.
Cons
- G2 and Capterra reviewers report complex configuration and a steep learning curve for people new to AWS.
- Capterra-network reviewers rate customer support poorly, around 3.4 out of 5.
- Flat-rate plans lack some features, such as real-time logs, dedicated IP SSL and continuous deployment, and going over the allowance reduces performance.
- Dedicated IP SSL at $600 a month and Anycast Static IPs at $3,000 a month are expensive extras.
- Users on AWS re:Post and GitHub report cache invalidations that occasionally hang for hours or time out during deploys.
Kong AI Gateway
Pros
- Governs LLM, MCP and agent-to-agent traffic in one gateway instead of separate tools.
- Ships many AI policies, including semantic caching, prompt compression, PII sanitization and AWS, Azure and GCP guardrail integrations.
- Flexible deployment: serverless, hybrid, dedicated cloud with a 99.99% SLA, or fully self-hosted.
- Teams that already run Kong for APIs can reuse the same plugin and control-plane model.
- Token quotas, showback and chargeback help split AI spend across teams.
Cons
- Pricing has many parts, with charges per control plane, per model, per request and per GB, so costs are hard to predict.
- Key AI plugins such as Semantic Cache and AI Proxy Advanced are paid add-ons on Plus.
- SSO, RBAC and audit logs require Enterprise.
- Reviewers report a steep learning curve and configuration overhead for plugin ordering and custom plugins.
- Plus support is email only with a 2-business-day response target.
Not sold on either?
Frequently Asked Questions
Amazon CloudFront scores higher on our Hosting & Infrastructure criteria: 7.9/10 against 7.1/10 for Kong AI Gateway. The largest gap is in Cost: 6/10 for Amazon CloudFront and 4/10 for Kong AI Gateway.
Amazon CloudFront costs less for 10 users: free on its Free (flat-rate) plan, against about $25/mo on its Plus (AI Management) plan for Kong AI Gateway, billed monthly.
Amazon CloudFront has a free plan; Kong AI Gateway does not list one.
Amazon CloudFront is the better fit for developers: we rate it 9/10 for them, against 7/10 for Kong AI Gateway.
