KrakenD API Gateway (Community Edition)

What do you like best about the product?

Ease of integration, extensibility, and high performance. Supported by a top-notch support team. Krakend adds agility to value delivery in our organization at a competitive cost.

What do you dislike about the product?

Does not include a UI to accelerate adoption, file management, validation, and general administration.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Before Krakend, we needed to publish different versions of exposure of the same existing capability on our integration platform. Krakend greatly simplifies the integration of capabilities through transformation and access from a single point, all through quick and secure configurations.

What do you like best about the product?

I mostly use the API gateway, and I really like how easy it is to configure. The plugin system has been a real lifesaver, since it’s allowed us to add functionality and extend what we can do without much hassle.

What do you dislike about the product?

So far none, maybe having hot reload to apply changes without having to restart would have been nice to have

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

The gateway is easy to scale with our Kubernetes setup, it sets as a gateway for our microservices, and has particularly made migrating from a legacy system to the new services much easier! we were able to apply techniques such as canary rollout between both APIs through custom plugins with ease.

What do you like best about the product?

KrakenD is highly customizable, fairly easy to use, and quick to get hands-on with. Adding plugins is straightforward, and made even easier thanks to the provided skill. The available plugins, regular updates, and responsiveness of the KrakenD team make it a product you can truly rely on.

What do you dislike about the product?

The AI features could stand to be released faster and offer the same level of customizability. Some plugins can occasionally be quite opinionated about things that aren't necessarily the textbook standards.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I like how simple it is to set up a single source of truth and then manage everything through it, from authentication to validation.

What do you like best about the product?

The declarative, configuration driven model. We define our endpoints, routing and policies as templates rather than writing gateway code, which keeps the setup easy to reason about, review and version. It also made updating our configuration for a newer release straightforward, and the documentation is clear enough that an AI coding assistant can handle most of that work.

What do you dislike about the product?

Nothing material. It does what we need it to do, the configuration model is clear, and it has been easy to adopt and maintain. Our wish list is small and mostly about further depth in the documentation as our usage grows.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

The benefits are faster delivery, less custom code to maintain, and a lower operational burden for a small engineering team. The gateway has been fast and stable for our workloads, and the return for us sits in avoiding the cost and risk of building and owning that layer ourselves. In Enterprise, OpenAPI spec support and the built in mock server also let front end teams build against endpoints before the backend exists.

What do you like best about the product?

I really appreciate KrakenD's ease of deployment and setup—getting it running in our Kubernetes environment was straightforward, and it doesn't require constant babysitting. The plugin architecture is a standout, allowing us to customize functionality and empowering teams to self-serve without always needing help from my team. This has significantly reduced the operational burden and sped up our workflows.

What do you dislike about the product?

The main pain points have been around plugin development: KrakenD only supports Lua and Go for plugins, which isn't ideal since our teams primarily use TypeScript. This creates a learning curve and slows us down. Additionally, KrakenD's OpenAPI schema support is limited; we encountered issues integrating valid OpenAPI schemas, especially with URL and parameter handling, making it less seamless than we hoped.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Config-based gateway for ease of use across multiple teams, and rate-limiting.

What do you like best about the product?

The Community Edition with its broad feature set is truly compelling. If you're a startup or a medium-sized business, it feels like it solves 90% of typical API gateway problems. Additionally, it comes with excellent documentation and a straightforward setup, allowing you to get started quickly.

What do you dislike about the product?

For small to medium-sized businesses, upgrading to the paid version is hardly worthwhile unless you absolutely need specific features of these plans. However, this is mainly due to the high price, not the features and services, which are unmatched compared to other gateways and are very good.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We use KrakenD as our API gateway for all our environments, fully leveraging the Community Edition's capabilities.

What do you like best about the product?

The flexibility. We run a contract-first setup: our OpenAPI specs are the single source of truth, and a build step compiles them into KrakenD configuration. Not a single line of our gateway config is written by hand, and KrakenD never fought us on that.

When we hit something the stock configuration could not express, the plugin system let us write our own Go plugins and drop them in. We have several running in production today. Being able to extend the gateway instead of working around it is the main reason we are still on it.

The support deserves its own paragraph, and I did not expect to be writing that. It has been genuinely collaborative: we ask a question, we get a real answer, and on the harder problems we worked through them together rather than being handed the tool and left to figure it out. On MCP in particular they acted on what we asked for and updated KrakenD to the recent MCP specs.

What do you dislike about the product?

The documentation is not the most pleasant I have worked with. You do end up finding what you need, but a search often lands you on the Community page when you are running Enterprise, and the variations between the two are small enough that you lose your bearings. It also does not say everything: some behaviours we depend on only show up by testing, which is why we run a small integration lab against a real KrakenD before implementing against it. Their AI assistant tooling helps here, edition checks included.

Plugin development takes some setup: plugins have to be compiled against the exact Go and musl versions of the target build, using their builder image, so you cannot simply build locally. In fairness that is Go's plugin model rather than anything KrakenD chose, and once the pipeline is in place it does not move. A first-day cost, not an ongoing one.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Our API started as a single monolith, with JWT validation, request and response validation and rate limiting implemented endpoint by endpoint, inside the application. That holds up while there is only one application. The moment we wanted to pull services out of it, each one would have re-implemented the same logic its own way.

KrakenD is what made that extraction practical. Our API definitions are centralised in OpenAPI contracts and the gateway enforces those cross-cutting concerns at the edge, so a service we extract inherits them instead of carrying them. We are not chasing microservices, the services we pull out are large, but they come out uniform by construction rather than by discipline.

The bigger payoff came later. Because the gateway config is generated from those same contracts, we exposed the same operations as MCP tools for LLM agents - more than 200 of them - with a single annotation per operation, plus per-audience API documentation served from the gateway itself. One contract, three delivery surfaces, and the governance we had already built for REST applied to the agent surface for free.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

To improve the documentation, consider creating separate sections for Enterprise and Community users to avoid confusion. Additionally, ensure that all behaviors and features are well-documented to reduce reliance on testing for discovery. Streamlining the plugin development process by providing more detailed guides and examples could also be beneficial.

What do you like best about the product?

I love how KrakenD's Flexible Configuration and template system enabled us to move to a true self-service model for our API gateway. With over 500+ live routes and 15 engineering teams, managing everything from a single repo would have been impossible without this. The plugin system is also fantastic—we built production-ready Go plugins for compliance and API key management in weeks, not months. The performance is outstanding: we serve 500 million API calls daily with minimal infrastructure and sub-millisecond gateway overhead. The built-in features like JWT/OIDC validation, CEL policies, rate limiting, OpenTelemetry, and automatic OpenAPI spec generation save us massive amounts of engineering time.

What do you dislike about the product?

The main pain point has been automating plugin compatibility checks when KrakenD base images update. We had to invest in our own GitHub Actions workflow to ensure our in-house plugins remain compatible with new releases. Some official tooling or boilerplate for plugin compatibility validation would make life easier for teams maintaining custom plugins across versions.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

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What do you like best about the product?

I really appreciate the flexibility KrakenD offers, especially the open source model that let us test and deploy in our own environment before committing. The plugin system is absolutely critical for our use case—we've built custom plugins for BFF aggregation and JWT rewriting, which are now at the core of our mobile API architecture. The ability to aggregate multiple backend calls into a single API call has drastically reduced latency and improved our mobile experience. Telemetry has also been unexpectedly valuable, surfacing anomalies we wouldn't have found otherwise. The direct, responsive communication with the KrakenD team, even up to the CEO, is a major plus.

What do you dislike about the product?

The biggest pain points have been the lack of a fully managed, hosted version (you have to run your own infrastructure, which can be a barrier for some teams) and the training resources. What's available is really just API gateway 101-level content, but we needed much deeper, 301-level training for our engineers and that wasn't available, even for a fee. Improving these would make it a perfect solution.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Customer engagement by improving the latency and data consumption.

What do you like best about the product?

- Performance
- Integrated tools to validate/check configuration
- Bonus "watch" tool to be able to easily live test in docker-compose by simply editing config files
- Speed / quality of support when raising issues
- Easy to deploy
- Extensive and complete documentation

What do you dislike about the product?

- Go templating
- Lack of kubernetes controller/integration
- Complexity to create a custom plugin

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

The need for a secure apigateway with integrated jwt validation