KrakenD API Gateway Reviews & Product Details

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.

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.

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.

KrakenD has proven to have both a product that delivered the outcome we were looking for and be an organisation that is pleasant to work with.

The Gateway is a critical part of our architecture for our customer-facing console and was easier to implement than other systems we have worked with in the past. When we did have questions, KrakenD responded promptly. KrakenD have also listened to suggestions for product enhancements with an open mind and provided reasoned feedback . Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is our preference to manage systems using an API, e.g REST, gRPC, GraphQL or similar. At the time of our evaluation and subsequent purchase, KrakenD does not offer such a facility. After discussing with KrakenD and our SRE team, we looked using CI/CD with configuration under source control.q Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

In short, it's stability, the performance and the extendability via plugins. Also, the file-based configuration, including templating, is something we value a lot.

It took us only 3-4 weeks to develop a robust solution that suits our needs, including Golang plugins.

We run KrakenD in production for a couple of months now and haven't had any issues since we deployed it. The uptime is flawless.

The team at KrakenD is super quick in responding to questions and issues. They have been great to work with.

Thanks to the Docker image and the file-based configuration, it integrated very neatly into our stack. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

One part for which we use KrakenD is to proxy requests. One minor point regarding this is that the configuration file gets somewhat lengthy with duplication. There is a technical reason for this, and it's not hindering us from using KrakenD. Further, a lot of the duplication can be decreased by using the templating that is offered by KrakenD, which we do. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I have migrated an older api manager to KrakenD and it is faster, secure and powerfull. It is easy to develop, deploy and use for customers. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sometimes it is difficult search a valid example Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Limited API monetization alternatives. I was able to find only one plugin. Maybe I didnt search enough 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 documentation 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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is generally intuitive to configure and reliable. We've never had issues with it crashing or anything like that. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Some of the documentation is not clear or needs more examples. For example, the rate limiter docs are quite confusing to me. I would also find it useful to have some repository with sample implementations with comments around what each configuration item does.

I'd also really like to see the possibility to customise access logs in a better way so that it is more filterable in tools such as datadog. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.