# Kong Gateway vs KrakenD

| Attribute | Kong Gateway | KrakenD |
|---|---|---|
| **vioscaleAI score** | 53.8 (74% (medium)) | 49.9 (67% (medium)) |
| activity.commits_last_30d | 10 | 23 |
| adoption.dependent_repos | 1 | 0 |
| adoption.github_stars | 44,260 | 2,691 |
| content.faq | `[{"answer":"Kong provides a unified platform for building, testing, and governing APIs and AI agents. It handles both traditional API gateway functions—routing, rate limiting, authentication—and modern AI-specific concerns like token budgeting, context management, and LLM traffic control. It is indexed under API Gateways.","source":"https://konghq.com","question":"What is Kong Gateway?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Kong Gateway offers a free tier, so you can start without paying. Pricing changes often, so verify at source before relying on it.","source":"https://konghq.com","question":"Is Kong Gateway free?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Kong Gateway supports the web and a command-line interface. Platforms we have not confirmed are simply not listed here rather than ruled out.","source":"https://konghq.com","question":"What platforms does Kong Gateway support?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Yes. Kong Gateway can be deployed cloud / SaaS, hybrid and self-hosted, so it does not have to run on the vendor's infrastructure.","source":"https://konghq.com","question":"Can Kong Gateway be self-hosted?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have confirmed 11 integrations for Kong Gateway, including AWS Bedrock, Azure Content Safety, Google Cloud Model Armor, OpenAI, Anthropic, Llama 3, Kubernetes and Helm, plus 3 more. This is what we could verify from public sources, so the vendor may support others we have not indexed.","source":"https://konghq.com","question":"What does Kong Gateway integrate with?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have independently confirmed SOC 2 and GDPR for Kong Gateway. Certifications we do not list are ones we have not been able to verify from public sources, which is not the same as Kong Gateway not holding them. Always confirm compliance directly before you rely on it.","source":"https://konghq.com/compliance","question":"What security certifications does Kong Gateway have?","confidence":0.7},{"answer":"Yes. Kong Gateway is published under the Apache-2.0 licence, a permissive licence that generally allows commercial use and modification. Licence terms can change between releases, so verify against the repository for the version you intend to use.","source":"https://github.com/Kong/kong","question":"Is Kong Gateway open source?","confidence":0.95},{"answer":"Kong Gateway is available worldwide. Its primary market is the United States.","source":"https://konghq.com","question":"Where is Kong Gateway available?","confidence":0.5}]` | `[{"answer":"KrakenD is an open-source API gateway offering both a free community edition and a commercial enterprise version. It provides API aggregation, request/response transformation, traffic management, and security features for microservices and AI workload routing. It is indexed under API Gateways.","source":"https://www.krakend.io","question":"What is KrakenD?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"KrakenD is open source, so it can be self-hosted and used at no licence cost. It is released under the Apache-2.0 licence. Paid editions are also offered: Enterprise Edition, priced on request. Pricing changes often, so verify at source before relying on it.","source":"https://www.krakend.io","question":"Is KrakenD free to use?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"KrakenD supports a command-line interface. Platforms we have not confirmed are simply not listed here rather than ruled out.","source":"https://www.krakend.io","question":"What platforms does KrakenD support?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Yes. KrakenD can be deployed cloud / SaaS, hybrid and self-hosted, so it does not have to run on the vendor's infrastructure.","source":"https://www.krakend.io","question":"Can KrakenD be self-hosted?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have confirmed 13 integrations for KrakenD, including REST APIs, RabbitMQ, SNS, SQS, Kafka, GraphQL, gRPC and SOAP, plus 5 more. This is what we could verify from public sources, so the vendor may support others we have not indexed.","source":"https://www.krakend.io","question":"What does KrakenD integrate with?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have independently confirmed SOC 2 and GDPR for KrakenD. Certifications we do not list are ones we have not been able to verify from public sources, which is not the same as KrakenD not holding them. Always confirm compliance directly before you rely on it.","source":"https://www.krakend.io","question":"What security certifications does KrakenD have?","confidence":0.48},{"answer":"Yes. KrakenD is published under the Apache-2.0 licence, a permissive licence that generally allows commercial use and modification. Licence terms can change between releases, so verify against the repository for the version you intend to use.","source":"https://github.com/krakend/krakend-ce","question":"Is KrakenD open source?","confidence":0.95},{"answer":"KrakenD is available worldwide. The vendor is headquartered in Spain.","source":"https://www.krakend.io","question":"Where is KrakenD available?","confidence":0.75}]` |
| deployment.options | `{"cloud":true,"hybrid":true,"self_hosted":true}` | `{"cloud":true,"hybrid":true,"on_prem":true,"self_hosted":true}` |
| description.long | Kong Gateway is a scalable API and LLM gateway platform designed for cloud-native deployments. It provides traffic management, authentication, rate limiting, request transformation, and advanced AI capabilities. | An open-source gateway positioned between client applications and backend services that aggregates, transforms, and secures API traffic across distributed microservice architectures with minimal resource consumption. |
| features.capabilities | `{"mtls":true,"hosting":"both","k8s_native":true,"oauth_oidc":true,"monetization":true,"observability":true,"rate_limiting":true,"developer_portal":true,"plugin_ecosystem":"extensive","request_transformation":true}` | `{"mtls":true,"hosting":"both","k8s_native":true,"oauth_oidc":true,"grpc_support":true,"monetization":true,"observability":true,"rate_limiting":true,"graphql_gateway":true,"developer_portal":true,"plugin_ecosystem":"limited","request_transformation":true}` |
| integrations.count | 12 | 12 |
| integrations.list | `[{"name":"AWS Bedrock"},{"name":"Azure Content Safety"},{"name":"Google Cloud Model Armor"},{"name":"OpenAI"},{"name":"Anthropic"},{"name":"Llama 3"},{"name":"Kubernetes"},{"name":"Helm"},{"name":"Git"},{"name":"Stripe"},{"name":"Twilio"},{"name":"Llama","native":true,"category":"llm","direction":"outbound"},{"name":"DocuSign","native":true,"category":"business_process","direction":"outbound"},{"name":"Insomnia","native":true,"category":"api_development","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"Apache Kafka","native":true,"category":"event_streaming","direction":"bidirectional"},{"name":"Redis","native":true,"category":"cache","direction":"outbound"},{"name":"Prometheus","native":true,"category":"monitoring","direction":"outbound"},{"name":"cert-manager","native":true,"category":"pki","direction":"outbound"},{"name":"AWS Lambda","native":true}]` | `[{"name":"REST APIs"},{"name":"RabbitMQ"},{"name":"SNS"},{"name":"SQS"},{"name":"Kafka"},{"name":"GraphQL"},{"name":"gRPC"},{"name":"SOAP"},{"name":"Lambda"},{"name":"NATS"},{"name":"OpenAI"},{"name":"Moesif"},{"name":"Google Analytics"},{"name":"Amazon SNS","category":"messaging"},{"name":"Amazon SQS","category":"messaging"},{"name":"Apache Kafka","category":"messaging"},{"name":"AWS Lambda"},{"name":"Elasticsearch","native":true,"category":"observability","direction":"outbound"},{"name":"Kibana","native":true,"category":"observability","direction":"outbound"},{"name":"Datadog","native":true,"category":"observability","direction":"outbound"},{"name":"Prometheus","native":true,"category":"observability","direction":"outbound"},{"name":"Grafana","native":true,"category":"observability","direction":"outbound"},{"name":"Zipkin","native":true,"category":"observability","direction":"outbound"},{"name":"Jaeger","native":true,"category":"observability","direction":"outbound"}]` |
| language.primary | Lua | Go |
| license.spdx | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| market.availability | `{"primaryMarkets":["US"],"availabilityScope":"global","availableCountries":[],"notAvailableCountries":[]}` | `{"hqCountry":"ES","primaryMarkets":[],"availabilityScope":"global","availableCountries":[],"notAvailableCountries":[]}` |
| platform.support | `{"cli":true,"web":true,"linux":true}` | `{"linux":true}` |
| pricing | `{"type":"open_source","summary":"Open source core; Kong Konnect cloud platform offers free trial and commercial subscriptions","sourceUrl":"https://konghq.com","retrievedAt":"2026-10-13T15:14:34.129Z"}` | `{"type":"hybrid","plans":[{"free":true,"name":"Community Edition","description":"High-performance open source API gateway, free to use","contactSales":false},{"free":false,"name":"Enterprise Edition","description":"Production-grade gateway with security, governance, and 24/7 support backed by SLAs","contactSales":true}],"summary":"Free Community Edition; Enterprise Edition available by quote","freeTier":true,"sourceUrl":"https://www.krakend.io","retrievedAt":"2026-08-05T13:08:11.806Z"}` |
| pricing.free_tier | yes | yes |
| pricing.model | open_source | freemium |
| pricing.price_level | free | low |
| pricing.transparent | no | yes |
| release.cadence_days | 42 | 19 |
| release.history | `[{"url":"https://github.com/Kong/kong/releases/tag/3.9.4","date":"2026-10-12T07:27:48Z","type":"stable","version":"3.9.4"},{"url":"https://github.com/Kong/kong/releases/tag/3.9.3","date":"2026-06-17T06:02:19Z","type":"stable","version":"3.9.3"},{"url":"https://github.com/Kong/kong/releases/tag/3.9.2","date":"2026-06-04T07:12:53Z","type":"stable","version":"3.9.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/Kong/kong/releases/tag/3.9.1","date":"2025-06-04T09:20:05Z","type":"stable","version":"3.9.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/Kong/kong/releases/tag/3.9.0","date":"2024-12-13T04:17:54Z","type":"stable","version":"3.9.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/Kong/kong/releases/tag/3.8.1","date":"2024-11-18T20:52:27Z","type":"stable","version":"3.8.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/Kong/kong/releases/tag/3.8.0","date":"2024-09-11T09:19:15Z","type":"stable","version":"3.8.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/Kong/kong/releases/tag/2.8.5","date":"2024-06-24T14:54:52Z","type":"stable","version":"2.8.5"},{"url":"https://github.com/Kong/kong/releases/tag/3.7.1","date":"2024-06-21T09:38:32Z","type":"stable","version":"3.7.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/Kong/kong/releases/tag/3.7.0","date":"2024-05-28T16:00:45Z","type":"stable","version":"3.7.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/Kong/kong/releases/tag/3.6.1","date":"2024-03-04T14:19:57Z","type":"stable","version":"3.6.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/Kong/kong/releases/tag/3.6.0","date":"2024-02-09T22:08:50Z","type":"stable","version":"3.6.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/Kong/kong/releases/tag/3.5.0","date":"2023-11-08T09:50:40Z","type":"stable","version":"3.5.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/Kong/kong/releases/tag/3.4.2","date":"2023-10-12T10:50:05Z","type":"stable","version":"3.4.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/Kong/kong/releases/tag/3.4.1","date":"2023-10-03T10:33:19Z","type":"stable","version":"3.4.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/Kong/kong/releases/tag/2.8.4","date":"2023-09-20T23:03:15Z","type":"stable","version":"2.8.4"},{"url":"https://github.com/Kong/kong/releases/tag/3.4.0","date":"2023-08-09T15:57:37Z","type":"stable","version":"3.4.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/Kong/kong/releases/tag/3.3.1","date":"2023-07-11T08:58:57Z","type":"stable","version":"3.3.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/Kong/kong/releases/tag/3.3.0","date":"2023-05-18T17:19:41Z","type":"stable","version":"3.3.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/Kong/kong/releases/tag/3.2.2","date":"2023-03-16T12:24:30Z","type":"stable","version":"3.2.2"}]` | `[{"url":"https://github.com/krakend/krakend-ce/releases/tag/v3.0.1","date":"2026-10-13T11:29:56Z","type":"stable","version":"v3.0.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/krakend/krakend-ce/releases/tag/v3.0.0","date":"2026-09-30T14:26:39Z","type":"stable","version":"v3.0.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/krakend/krakend-ce/releases/tag/v2.13.11","date":"2026-09-08T07:59:15Z","type":"stable","version":"v2.13.11"},{"url":"https://github.com/krakend/krakend-ce/releases/tag/v2.13.10","date":"2026-08-20T10:43:44Z","type":"stable","version":"v2.13.10"},{"url":"https://github.com/krakend/krakend-ce/releases/tag/v2.13.9","date":"2026-08-14T11:26:24Z","type":"stable","version":"v2.13.9"},{"url":"https://github.com/krakend/krakend-ce/releases/tag/v2.13.8","date":"2026-07-08T13:47:27Z","type":"stable","version":"v2.13.8"},{"url":"https://github.com/krakend/krakend-ce/releases/tag/v2.13.7","date":"2026-06-03T13:58:16Z","type":"stable","version":"v2.13.7"},{"url":"https://github.com/krakend/krakend-ce/releases/tag/v2.13.6","date":"2026-05-22T10:54:52Z","type":"stable","version":"v2.13.6"},{"url":"https://github.com/krakend/krakend-ce/releases/tag/v2.13.5","date":"2026-05-11T13:11:50Z","type":"stable","version":"v2.13.5"},{"url":"https://github.com/krakend/krakend-ce/releases/tag/v2.13.4","date":"2026-04-08T12:52:49Z","type":"stable","version":"v2.13.4"},{"url":"https://github.com/krakend/krakend-ce/releases/tag/v2.13.3","date":"2026-03-19T12:27:31Z","type":"stable","version":"v2.13.3"},{"url":"https://github.com/krakend/krakend-ce/releases/tag/v2.13.2","date":"2026-03-09T14:36:31Z","type":"stable","version":"v2.13.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/krakend/krakend-ce/releases/tag/v2.13.1","date":"2026-02-18T11:21:11Z","type":"stable","version":"v2.13.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/krakend/krakend-ce/releases/tag/v2.13.0","date":"2026-02-10T14:36:00Z","type":"stable","version":"v2.13.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/krakend/krakend-ce/releases/tag/v2.12.1","date":"2026-01-16T14:57:20Z","type":"stable","version":"v2.12.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/krakend/krakend-ce/releases/tag/v2.12.0","date":"2025-10-27T15:37:13Z","type":"stable","version":"v2.12.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/krakend/krakend-ce/releases/tag/v2.11.2","date":"2025-10-16T13:47:45Z","type":"stable","version":"v2.11.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/krakend/krakend-ce/releases/tag/v2.11.1","date":"2025-10-08T16:03:55Z","type":"stable","version":"v2.11.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/krakend/krakend-ce/releases/tag/v2.11.0","date":"2025-09-09T13:38:44Z","type":"stable","version":"v2.11.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/krakend/krakend-ce/releases/tag/v2.10.2","date":"2025-07-22T16:36:29Z","type":"stable","version":"v2.10.2"}]` |
| reliability.sla_pct | 99.99 | - |
| reliability.status_page | yes | yes |
| security.certifications | - | `[{"name":"SOC 2 Type II","status":"active"}]` |
| security.disclosure_policy | yes | - |
| security.gdpr | yes | yes |
| security.pci | yes | - |
| security.scorecard | 7.5 | - |
| security.soc2 | yes | yes |
| security.trust_center | https://konghq.com/blog/product-releases/trust-what-youre-shipping-with-insomnia-v12 | https://www.krakend.io/docs/security/ |
| security.vulnerabilities | `{"count":0,"source":"https://advisories.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/advisories?ecosystem=go&package_name=github.com%2FKong%2Fkong&per_page=100","last_12m":0,"max_severity":null}` | `{"count":0,"source":"https://advisories.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/advisories?ecosystem=go&package_name=github.com%2Fkrakend%2Fkrakend-ce%2Fv2&per_page=100","last_12m":0,"max_severity":null}` |

## Capabilities (API Gateways)

| Capability | Kong Gateway | KrakenD |
|---|:--:|:--:|
| **Deployment** |  |  |
| Hosting | Cloud + self-hosted | Cloud + self-hosted |
| Kubernetes-native | ✓ | ✓ |
| **Traffic** |  |  |
| Rate limiting | ✓ | ✓ |
| Request/response transformation | ✓ | ✓ |
| **Security** |  |  |
| OAuth2 / OIDC / JWT | ✓ | ✓ |
| Mutual TLS | ✓ | ✓ |
| **Protocols** |  |  |
| GraphQL gateway | - | ✓ |
| gRPC support | - | ✓ |
| **Delivery** |  |  |
| Developer portal | ✓ | ✓ |
| Monetization | ✓ | ✓ |
| **Ecosystem** |  |  |
| Plugin ecosystem | Extensive | Limited |
| **Insight** |  |  |
| Observability | ✓ | ✓ |

*Source: vioscaleAI. Generated 2026-10-16T18:33:34.116Z. "-" = undocumented, not absent.*