KrakenD API Gateway (Community Edition)

What do you like best about the product?

Single point for APIs. Licencing model. Flexibility, simplicity and specially 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 didnt 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

What do you like best about the product?

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.

What do you dislike about the product?

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.

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

For my organization KrakenD solved the problem of multiple authentication providers. To consume our private cloud APIs, users can choose between two types of authentication tokens being okta and authblue. We did not have a solution to enable the two authentication tokens in the same API gateway endpoint. However, after acquiring KrakenD Enterprise Version, we were able to integrate multiple authentication providers which solved a tremendous need for our customers to consume private cloud APIs.

What do you like best about the product?

It is generally intuitive to configure and reliable. We've never had issues with it crashing or anything like that.

What do you dislike about the product?

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.

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

KrakenD handles our token validation, routing to different backends, rate limiting and even region routing via a custom plugin.