KrakenD API Gateway Reviews & Product Details

We chose KrakenD over other gateway platforms because:

- It's easy to operate and configure: JSON or YAML, you choose.

- You can managed the configuration via GitOps practices.

- It supports OpenTelemetry integration for observability.

- It supports multiple backend protocols (HTTP, gRPC, Lambda, among many others).

- It's easy to manipulate data and compose .

- It's easy to extend via custom plugin development at different stages of the request pipeline. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There is only one thing that still bothers me and it's its logging. The available customisations on how a statement is logged are still quite limited.

I'd really like to see a more customisable logging implementation. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The development team is really easy to work with. They listen to feedback from the community and implement changes based on it. Their documentation is also very good, and it is easy to learn how to accomplish whatever you want. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The hardest thing for me has been trying to debug issues with my config file. It lets you know that there is an issue, but it would be nice if it told me a specific line of the file where the issue was. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Simple installation and operations make KrakenD extremely likable. There are up-to-date packages for every major OS, maintained by the KrakenD developers. It's also dead simple to install manually if necessary. Many proxy-based API gateways have multiple services that interact to create the working system (Traefik, Tyk, etc.). KrakenD cuts through all of that. I also love that you can use message brokers (RabbitMQ, SQS, etc.) as API targets. This opens up a whole new world of architectural possibilities. UPDATE Mar 2025: Now using Lambdas as backends for some things, which is extremely slick. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Although the documentation is excellent in most ways—organization, examples, and covering things at an appropriately conceptual level—it is still missing a few items and you'll probably run into one of them at some point. Occasionally something is mentioned but is not quite up to date. Finally, there have been a few bugs. It's a fast development cycle and there is a rough edge here and there. But with the simple operations, it would be very easy to revert to a previous version to wait for a fix. UPDATE Mar 2025: Docs have improved noticeably, bug experiences have disappeared. Leading AI tools don't advise on KrakenD configuration files very well, tending to hallucinate. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As of now, we haven't noticed things we dislike about KrakenD APIG ateway Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- 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 Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- 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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

A user interface would be a nice to have, but anyone with technical skills could easily manage it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- 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 Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- Go templating

- Lack of kubernetes controller/integration

- Complexity to create a custom plugin Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

KrakenD may require some efforts for advanced use cases. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What I like best about KrakenD is how easy it is to integrate it to your systems. It is also easy to implement the endpoint definitions. I like its ability to allow you to implement your own custom plugins to manage authorization and authentication based on your business needs. I also like how responsive its support team is, helping with enterprise level issues on a timely manner. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What I don't like about KrakenD is its inability to run the application locally in debug mode. KrakenD offers metrics and logging mechanisms, but when running the application locally using your IDE of choice, it is not possible to have debug mode enabled and debug your code line by line. When writing custom plugins, it would be useful to run debug mode to make sure that each line of code in the plugin is working as expected. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Really easy to install and configure, super fast Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Small company supporting it, but really skilled devs Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.