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.