KrakenD AI & API Gateway Reviews & Product Details

KrakenD provides a flexible and extensible API gateway solution that supports contract-first setups using OpenAPI specifications. It allows for seamless integration of custom Go plugins to extend functionality beyond the stock configuration. The collaborative support ensures that users receive real answers and assistance in solving complex problems, particularly with MCP specifications. However, the documentation could be improved to better differentiate between Enterprise and Community versions and to provide comprehensive coverage of all features and behaviors. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Things have not changed in that way, their structure in go inspires us in our own stack to maintain an ultra performant very well made internal architecture Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I wish they would support client idempotency Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We chose KrakenD over other gateway platforms because:

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

- You can manage 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 API Gateway Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.