Runbeam vs Kong: API Gateway or Healthcare Integration Platform?

When evaluating integration platforms for healthcare or enterprise environments, organisations often encounter Kong—a powerful API gateway and management platform—and wonder how it compares to Runbeam, a secure data integration platform built on the open-source Harmony proxy. While both platforms deal with API connectivity and data flow, they approach the problem from fundamentally different angles.

This guide explores both platforms through practical use cases to help you understand when each solution fits your organisation's needs.

Understanding the Platforms

Before examining specific scenarios, it's essential to understand what each platform is designed to accomplish:

Kong is a comprehensive API platform that serves as a gateway, service mesh, and management layer for APIs, microservices, and increasingly, AI/LLM integrations. Built on NGINX, Kong provides rate limiting, authentication, logging, and routing for modern API infrastructure. It's a general-purpose platform that can work with any API or protocol.

Runbeam is a secure data integration platform built on the open-source Harmony proxy—a general-purpose data proxy that provides orchestration for distributed data mesh architectures. Harmony handles modern REST APIs, protocol transformation, and secure connectivity across any environment. It also includes native support for healthcare protocols (FHIR, HL7, DICOM), making it particularly strong in healthcare, but it's a capable integration platform for any domain.

The choice between these platforms comes down to your integration philosophy: Kong provides comprehensive API management with extensive plugins and observability, while Runbeam/Harmony focuses on secure, distributed data connectivity with built-in protocol transformation.

Use Case 1: Healthcare Protocol Integration (FHIR, HL7, DICOM)

The Scenario

Your healthcare organisation needs to integrate EMR systems, PACS infrastructure, and modern digital health applications. You require native support for FHIR resources, HL7 v2 message processing, and DICOM medical imaging workflows, all while maintaining HIPAA compliance and audit trails.

When Runbeam Excels

This scenario showcases Runbeam's core design purpose. The platform provides native healthcare protocol support out of the box—FHIR, HL7, and DICOM are first-class citizens, not afterthoughts requiring custom plugins or extensive configuration.

The Harmony proxy foundation understands healthcare data structures and can perform intelligent transformations between protocols. Need to convert HL7 v2 messages to FHIR resources? Runbeam's declarative JSON transforms handle this elegantly with version-controlled, auditable transformation rules.

For EMR-PACS integration, Runbeam orchestrates the entire workflow, ensuring patient data and imaging studies flow seamlessly between systems while maintaining compliance requirements. The platform's audit-ready architecture automatically captures healthcare-specific metadata needed for regulatory compliance.

When Kong Fits

Kong can certainly route healthcare API traffic, and with sufficient custom development, you can build healthcare protocol handling on top of Kong's plugin architecture. If your organisation has strong Kong expertise and wants to maintain a single API platform across all domains, building healthcare capabilities into Kong may make sense.

However, you'll need to implement healthcare protocol translation, compliance logging, and domain-specific governance yourself—capabilities that Runbeam provides natively.

Use Case 2: General-Purpose API Management and Developer Experience

The Scenario

Your organisation is building a platform with multiple APIs that need rate limiting, authentication, usage monitoring, and developer-friendly tooling. You want to expose internal services to external developers through a managed API gateway with comprehensive observability and documentation.

When Kong Excels

This is Kong's sweet spot. The platform provides mature, battle-tested features for API management including:

• Rate limiting and throttling with multiple strategies
• Authentication and authorisation across OAuth2, JWT, API keys, and more
• Comprehensive logging and analytics for API usage monitoring
• Plugin ecosystem with extensive functionality for API scenarios
• Service discovery and governance across API producers and consumers

Kong's extensive plugin architecture offers broad functionality for API management scenarios. If your primary need is managing REST APIs with standard authentication patterns, traffic management, and observability, Kong provides a comprehensive solution.

When Runbeam Fits

Runbeam provides straightforward API routing and authentication focused on secure connectivity. It doesn't have Kong's extensive plugin ecosystem or the same breadth of API management tooling. If you need comprehensive API governance with extensive third-party integrations, Kong's mature ecosystem provides more options.

However, if you're focused on secure connectivity, protocol transformation, and distributed data flows rather than centralized API gateway patterns, Runbeam offers a more focused approach. The declarative configuration and built-in protocol transformation capabilities make it particularly efficient for data integration scenarios.

Use Case 3: Distributed Healthcare Networks and Data Sovereignty

The Scenario

Your healthcare network spans multiple hospitals, clinics, and research facilities across geographic regions. Each site must maintain data sovereignty and regulatory compliance within its jurisdiction while enabling secure data exchange for patient care coordination. You need governance across this distributed architecture without creating centralised data bottlenecks.

When Runbeam Excels

This scenario exemplifies Runbeam's architectural philosophy. The platform's secure data mesh architecture enables each site to deploy local Harmony proxy instances that handle connectivity within their environment while connecting to the broader network through secure WireGuard VPN tunnels.

Each healthcare facility maintains full control over its data, with processing happening behind their firewall. The centralised Runbeam dashboard provides orchestration and monitoring across all distributed instances without data passing through a central gateway—critical for regulatory compliance in jurisdictions with strict data residency requirements.

The platform understands healthcare-specific governance needs: consent management, patient privacy controls, and audit trails are built into the architecture rather than bolted on afterward.

When Kong Fits

Kong can be deployed in distributed architectures, and Kong Konnect provides central management for multiple Kong instances. However, Kong's approach assumes a traditional API gateway model where traffic flows through the gateway.

For organisations comfortable with this architecture and willing to build healthcare-specific governance capabilities themselves, Kong's distributed deployment can work. However, you'll need to design and implement data sovereignty controls, healthcare consent management, and compliance frameworks on top of Kong's base functionality.

Use Case 4: Modern Cloud-Native Microservices (Non-Healthcare)

The Scenario

Your organisation is building a cloud-native application using microservices architecture, containerised deployments, and service mesh patterns. You need service-to-service authentication, traffic management, and observability across your microservices ecosystem. Healthcare protocols are not a requirement.

When Kong Excels

Kong provides comprehensive capabilities for this scenario through both its API Gateway and Service Mesh products. The platform offers:

• Service mesh functionality for microservices communication
• Container-native deployment optimised for Kubernetes
• Comprehensive observability integration with monitoring tools
• Traffic control including canary deployments and blue-green strategies

Kong's maturity in generic microservices environments means extensive community support and integration with the broader cloud-native ecosystem.

When Runbeam Fits

Runbeam's container-based architecture works well in cloud-native environments, particularly when you need distributed connectivity without centralised bottlenecks. The Harmony proxy can handle microservices communication with protocol transformation and secure tunneling.

However, if you need advanced traffic management features like sophisticated rate limiting strategies, canary deployments, or service mesh observability integrations, Kong's mature feature set provides more comprehensive capabilities. Runbeam excels at secure, distributed connectivity and data transformation—Kong excels at traffic management and observability.

Use Case 5: AI and LLM Integration

The Scenario

Your organisation is building AI-powered healthcare applications that need to access both healthcare data sources (EMRs, imaging systems) and LLM APIs. You require secure, cost-effective routing to AI services while maintaining compliance when AI models process healthcare data.

When Kong Excels

Kong has recently emphasised AI and LLM integration, positioning itself as an "AI Gateway." The platform provides:

• LLM routing and load balancing across multiple AI providers
• Cost management through caching and token usage monitoring
• Rate limiting to control AI API costs
• MCP (Model Context Protocol) server integration

If your primary focus is managing connections to external AI services and controlling costs across multiple LLM providers, Kong's AI-specific features offer significant value.

When Runbeam Fits

Runbeam approaches AI integration from a different angle. Rather than focusing on LLM routing, Runbeam ensures that AI applications can securely access healthcare data in the formats they need (FHIR, HL7, DICOM transformed to JSON/REST).

For healthcare AI applications that need to process EMR data, medical imaging, or patient records, Runbeam provides the healthcare-specific data pipeline. You could actually use Runbeam alongside Kong—Runbeam handling healthcare data integration while Kong manages LLM API routing.

The critical difference: Kong excels at AI service management, while Runbeam excels at making healthcare data accessible to AI applications in compliant, auditable ways.

Use Case 6: Developer Experience and Time to Value

The Scenario

Your development teams need to create integrations quickly without becoming experts in complex healthcare protocols or infrastructure. You want to empower developers while maintaining security, compliance, and governance guardrails.

When Runbeam Excels

Runbeam's open source foundation provides developers with transparent, well-documented interfaces. Healthcare-specific complexity is abstracted behind modern REST APIs—developers can request FHIR resources without understanding the underlying HL7 v2 messages that might be involved in the data retrieval.

The platform's declarative JSON transforms mean data transformations are configuration rather than code, making them easier to test, version control, and audit. Developers can run local instances of the entire integration stack using Docker, enabling proper testing before production deployment.

For healthcare-focused development teams, this approach significantly reduces time to value compared to building healthcare protocol handling from scratch.

When Kong Fits

Kong provides excellent developer experience for general API scenarios. The extensive documentation, large community, and numerous plugins mean developers can implement common API patterns quickly without reinventing solutions.

Kong's admin API and declarative configuration enable infrastructure-as-code approaches. For teams already familiar with Kong or working primarily with standard REST APIs, this familiarity accelerates development.

Compliance, Governance, and Auditability

Both platforms address security and compliance, but with different emphasis:

Runbeam provides an audit-ready healthcare data pipeline with HIPAA-compliant logging, patient consent tracking, and healthcare-specific access controls built into the platform. The distributed architecture means audit events are captured at the network edge, providing granular visibility into how healthcare data is accessed and transformed. Runbeam understands that in healthcare, knowing who accessed what patient data when isn't optional—it's mandatory.

Kong offers robust security features including authentication, authorisation, and logging. However, healthcare-specific compliance features (patient consent management, HIPAA-required audit trails, healthcare role-based access control) require custom implementation. Kong provides the security foundation, but organisations must build healthcare governance frameworks on top.

Making Your Decision

Choosing between Runbeam and Kong depends on your organisation's specific context and requirements:

Choose Runbeam When:

• Building distributed data mesh architectures with data sovereignty
• Need behind-the-firewall integration without centralised bottlenecks
• Require protocol transformation and declarative data mapping
• Working with healthcare protocols (FHIR, HL7, DICOM) natively
• Prioritising secure, auditable data pipelines
• Want lightweight, container-native proxy deployment
• Focus is on connectivity and transformation rather than traffic management

Choose Kong When:

• Need extensive plugin ecosystem for API management
• Want comprehensive traffic management and rate limiting strategies
• Focusing on LLM/AI service routing and cost management
• Require sophisticated observability and analytics features
• Building API governance for multiple producers and consumers
• Have existing Kong expertise and infrastructure
• Centralized API gateway pattern fits your architecture

Consider Hybrid Approaches:

The platforms address different concerns and can complement each other. Many organisations use Kong for general API management and LLM routing while using Runbeam specifically for healthcare data integration. This combination lets each platform focus on its strengths—Kong handling API infrastructure broadly, Runbeam providing healthcare-specific capabilities where needed.

The Platform Philosophy Difference

The fundamental distinction between Kong and Runbeam isn't about feature comparison—it's about architectural philosophy:

Kong is a comprehensive API management platform focused on traffic control, observability, and API governance. It excels when you need to manage and expose APIs with sophisticated rate limiting, analytics, extensive plugins, and centralized control across API producers and consumers.

Runbeam is a secure data integration platform focused on distributed connectivity and protocol transformation. Built on the general-purpose Harmony proxy, it excels when you need to connect systems across network boundaries, transform data between protocols, and maintain data sovereignty without centralised bottlenecks. Its native healthcare protocol support makes it particularly strong in healthcare, but it's a capable integration platform for any domain.

Neither approach is inherently superior—the right choice depends on whether your architecture prioritises API management features or distributed data connectivity.

The Path Forward

As organisations modernise their integration infrastructure, the question isn't "which platform is better" but rather "what problem are we solving?"

If you need to expose and manage APIs with comprehensive analytics, traffic management, and extensive plugin support, Kong's mature API management features provide significant value. If your challenge is connecting distributed systems across network boundaries with protocol transformation and data sovereignty—especially in healthcare—Runbeam's distributed data mesh approach can dramatically reduce complexity.

Runbeam's foundation on the open-source Harmony proxy means you're not locked into proprietary ecosystems. The platform provides a general-purpose data proxy with particularly strong healthcare capabilities, respecting the architectural patterns and infrastructure choices that modern organisations require.

Explore Runbeam

Ready to see how Runbeam's secure data integration platform can simplify your healthcare interoperability challenges? Explore the open-source Harmony proxy or contact us to discuss your specific integration requirements.

The future of healthcare integration is distributed, secure, and built on open standards. Welcome to purpose-built interoperability.