Where Kong AI Gateway fits
Kong AI Gateway is the natural choice for organisations that already run Kong for API management and want to bring LLM traffic under the same governance. Its strengths are semantic caching, prompt guards, rate limiting and analytics delivered as plugins, self-hosted control for compliance, and one policy plane across every API — not just AI. If your platform team already owns Kong, adding AI routing there keeps auth, quotas and observability consistent with the rest of your estate.
Where Kunavo wins
Kunavo removes the provider accounts and the operations. There is nothing to deploy: top up one wallet and call Claude, Gemini, GPT, plus image, video and audio, at 30–70% under each provider's list price depending on the model — no Anthropic Console, no Google Cloud project, no gateway to host, patch and monitor, one invoice. Generation endpoints are first-class, the native Anthropic Messages API is on the same key, and checkout is Stripe-native with local methods. Kong gives a platform team a gateway to run and govern; Kunavo gives a product team a gateway to call.
How to pick (or use both)
Pick Kong AI Gateway if you run enterprise API management, need self-hosted governance over provider keys you already hold, and want AI under the same policy plane as the rest of your APIs. Pick Kunavo if you want zero-ops hosted inference on one prepaid wallet at 30–70% under list, first-class multimodal, and one invoice. They compose: point Kong AI Gateway at Kunavo (base URL https://api.kunavo.com/v1) to keep Kong's governance and semantic caching while inference runs through Kunavo's discounted catalog.