Best alternative to Kong

Kong is an API gateway focused on routing, rate limiting, and identity propagation. For security validation, teams often need a complementary tool. This scanner is a self-service API security scanner that functions as a best alternative to Kong when the priority is continuous risk assessment rather than traffic management. It submits a URL and receives a letter grade risk score with prioritized findings. It is a black-box scanner that requires no agents, SDKs, or code access, and works with any language, framework, or cloud. Scan time is under a minute using read-only methods plus text-only POST for LLM probes.

The scanner evaluates APIs against the OWASP API Top 10 (2023) and maps findings to PCI-DSS 4.0 and SOC 2 Type II controls. Detection covers 12 categories: Authentication, BOLA and IDOR, BFLA and Privilege Escalation, Property Authorization, Input Validation, Rate Limiting and Resource Consumption, Data Exposure, Encryption, SSRF, Inventory Management, Unsafe Consumption, and LLM / AI Security. It identifies JWT misconfigurations such as alg=none, HS256, expired tokens, missing claims, and sensitive data in claims. It finds CORS wildcard issues, dangerous HTTP methods, debug endpoints, PII patterns, API key formats, error leakage, missing versioning, and webhook surfaces.

Authenticated scans (Starter tier and above) support Bearer, API key, Basic auth, and Cookie credentials. Domain verification is enforced through DNS TXT records or an HTTP well-known file, ensuring only the domain owner can scan with credentials. The scanner only forwards a limited allowlist of headers, including Authorization, X-API-Key, Cookie, and X-Custom-*. Read-only methods are used exclusively, and destructive payloads are never sent. Private IPs, localhost, and cloud metadata endpoints are blocked at multiple layers. Customer data is deletable on demand and purged within 30 days of cancellation.

The Web Dashboard provides scan management, report viewing, score trend tracking, and downloadable branded compliance PDFs. The CLI enables commands such as middlebrick scan <url> with JSON or text output. A GitHub Action acts as a CI/CD gate, failing the build when the score drops below a threshold. An MCP Server allows scans from AI coding assistants. The API client supports custom integrations. Continuous monitoring in Pro tier includes scheduled rescans every 6 hours, daily, weekly, or monthly, diff detection across scans, email alerts, HMAC-SHA256 signed webhooks, and Slack or Teams notifications.

The scanner performs 18 adversarial probes across three tiers—Quick, Standard, and Deep—to assess LLM and AI Security. These include system prompt extraction, instruction override, DAN and roleplay jailbreaks, data exfiltration, cost exploitation, encoding bypasses, prompt injection variants, token smuggling, tool abuse, nested instruction injection, and PII extraction. OpenAPI 3.0, 3.1, and Swagger 2.0 files are parsed with recursive $ref resolution, and spec definitions are cross-referenced against runtime findings to surface undefined security schemes, sensitive fields, deprecated operations, and missing pagination.