KrakenD API Gateway (Community Edition)

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

What do you like best about the product?

KrakenD is our technical BFF – Backend-for-Frontend (also best friend forever) simply by declaring the backend sources and allowing frontend teams to define the exact information they want to retrieve. It is an outstanding secured, ultra-performant, stateless API gateway which scales effortlessly whether you are running microservices or more complex architectures. Highly recommended!

What do you dislike about the product?

A user interface would be a nice to have, but anyone with technical skills could easily manage it.

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

It helps us transform different formats on the fly and not to mention that it is secured.

What do you like best about the product?

KrakenD is a high-performance, easy-to-implement, and developer-friendly API gateway that excels in stateless, microservices-based environments. With strong community engagement and responsive customer support, it’s a solid choice for teams aiming to build secure and scalable API infrastructures.

What do you dislike about the product?

KrakenD may require some efforts for advanced use cases.

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

KrakenD enables rapid API integration with strong security controls, while allowing seamless aggregation of multiple backend APIs into a single, unified interface—significantly reducing development time and complexity

What do you like best about the product?

Ease of integration through plug-and-play connectors which requires minimal declarative JSON/YAML configuration. KrakenD delivers flexible protocol support, it natively understands HTTP/HTTPS, gRPC, WebSockets. KrakenD API Gateway supports numerous official plugins (rate limiting, circuit breakers, throttling, etc), and they are easy to integrate and configure. Customer Support is top class, we've received best support from both technical and management teams of KrakenD. Also, documentation quality excels.

What do you dislike about the product?

As of now, we haven't noticed things we dislike about KrakenD API Gateway

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

Standardizing Security and Access Control Reducing client complexity by allowing to define a single endpoint that fans out to multiple backend services, merge their responses and return a unified payload. Improving performance and scalability by reducing the redundant calls to downstream services.

What do you like best about the product?

Single point for APIs. Licensing model. Flexibility, simplicity and especially the Krakend's support team.

What do you dislike about the product?

Direct integration with RabbitMQ was a bit disappointing although it may suffice for simple scenarios, it was not robust enough for our use cases. This is something that they could improve.

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

Single point of contact. API security hardening. API normalization.

What do you like best about the product?

I’ve had a great experience using this API Gateway! One of the standout features is the excellent documentation. It’s well-structured, easy to follow, and provides clear explanations for a wide range of use cases.

What truly sets it apart, though, is the inclusion of live working examples. These aren’t just basic snippets—you get fully functional Docker images that are ready to use right out of the box. This makes it incredibly easy to test and deploy different configurations without wasting time on setup.

What do you dislike about the product?

Limited API monetization alternatives. I was able to find only one plugin. Maybe I didn't search enough

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

Moving from SaaS to our OnPremise API Gateway

What do you like best about the product?

- The documentation is great, compared to other competitors
- The focus on being a good API Gateway, no focus on side projects that lower the quality of the gateway
- The people behind it are very helpful - they really want to help and search for a solution
- The flexible configuration feature
- It was easy to deploy in our Kubernetes cluster
- Go plugin support, with a handy builder image supplied
- Uses security-first principles like zero-trust security policy

What do you dislike about the product?

- Because of the stateless nature of everything, some business requirements are challenging to implement. But I can see the reasoning - speed matters.
- We were advertised the upcoming proxy plugins feature, but when it was dropped, we did not receive a formal update. It would be nice to keep track of which customers are interested in which features.
- Lack of an authentication system on a global level, but only endpoint level. Unmapped endpoints are thus not authenticated and we needed to rethink our plugins for things to work as they used to.
- Low customization options for authentication responses (returning different reasons in case of missing token, expired token, incorrect signature, ...).
- Not easy to do a transparent migration from another gateway system, but this will most likely be the case for every other gateway on the market. We need to integrate KrakenD to work exactly as our old gateway did.
- Its native plugin system is using Go, which I dislike. We cannot bump dependency versions when KrakenD's binary is using them already. This slows down patches and forces us to group them together and update them when KrakenD does. It feels archaic to have to deal with this in a modern programming language.

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

Replacing our current API Gateway, ultimately lowering maintenance.
Supporting future API Monetization & usage logging