KrakenD allowed us to focus on our backend and deploy a secure and performant system in a few days. After more than 2 years of use in production and 0 crash or malfunction, it also has proven its robustness
Jonathan Muller
CTO / Openroom Inc.
Migrate From Google Apigee to KrakenD:
You chose Google Apigee because it solved the gateway problem. It still does. But the bill grows with every request, and the lock-in grows with every year.
Start the Migration ConversationThe Hidden Google Apigee Bill
The first part is the per-call pricing. The second is the platform dependency. The third is the identity trap. Most teams discover the second when they try to optimize costs. They discover the third when they try to leave.
Google Apigee's pricing is tied to API call volume. Every successful feature, every new integration, every traffic spike is a line item. There is no instance count that caps your exposure. You are not buying a gateway, you are renting access to your own API traffic.
KrakenD is priced by flat-tiered plans. The team processing ten times the traffic in three years pays the same rate per plan as today.
Your Google Apigee policies, environments, and configurations live inside Google's control plane. When you decide to move, you are not exporting a config file, you are rebuilding a layer of your architecture from scratch, on a timeline set by your dependency, not your roadmap.
KrakenD configuration is a declarative JSON file that lives in your Git repository. The config travels with you.
Many teams that adopted Google Apigee also adopted its identity management, including OAuth flows and API key issuance, without registering they were delegating a critical function to Google. That separation project is not in anyone's migration estimate.
KrakenD validates identity, it does not manage it. JWT, OIDC, mTLS, API Keys, OAuth2, all pointing at whatever IdP your team controls.
The Migration Payoff
Config, not a control plane. Stateless by design. Try before you commit. One price, no call-volume surprises. Your Google Apigee policies are not wasted. And you will not need a consultant.
KrakenD has no cloud control plane, no admin console to log into, no vendor environment to configure. Your gateway is a declarative JSON file in Git. Changes go through your existing CI/CD pipeline. Every change is versioned, auditable, and reversible. Rollback is a Docker tag.
No database in the critical path. No coordination between nodes. Each instance runs independently. Horizontal scaling is linear: add an instance, add capacity. No control plane synchronization, no shared state.
KrakenD's Community Edition is the same runtime as Enterprise. Teams deploy it against real infrastructure, validate the approach, and start a license conversation only after the technical case is closed. No sales-gated trial. No Google account required.
"We began by creating a model with the community version to assess its capabilities. Once we confirmed that this tool met our needs, we opted for an enterprise license." — Nicolas Gabetty, Senior Engineer, Coop Atlantique
KrakenD Enterprise is priced by flat-tiered plans. Every feature, including RBAC, OIDC, rate limiting, SOAP, gRPC, WebSockets, observability, and AI Gateway, is included at every tier. What never changes is the model: flat per plan, no per-request uplift.
The routing logic, auth policies, rate limiting rules, and transformation flows you have built in Google Apigee map to KrakenD declarative config. The translation is policy-by-policy, not a rewrite. Start with your highest-traffic, lowest-complexity routes and expand incrementally.
G2 Fall 2026 API Management, Mid-Market: 100% of KrakenD implementations are done in-house with no vendor services and no external consultants. Average time to go-live: 2 months. Zero implementations in KrakenD's G2 history required a professional services engagement.
Drop-In Compatibility
You are not migrating your infrastructure. You are replacing one control plane with a config file. Everything around it stays.
KrakenD runs as a standard Docker image via Kubernetes manifests on GCP, AWS, Azure, or on-premise. No operator, no CRDs. Dev and staging instances are unlimited across all plans, so you can run Google Apigee and KrakenD in parallel at no additional licensing cost during the migration.
Native OpenTelemetry. Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, your SIEM. JWT, OIDC, mTLS, API Keys, OAuth2, all native. If your team uses Google Cloud's identity infrastructure today, KrakenD integrates with your IdP of choice during and after migration.
REST, gRPC, GraphQL, WebSockets, SOAP, Kafka, AMQP. Each instance handles 40,000 to 80,000 RPS with stateless horizontal scaling, no coordinator, no shared state between nodes.
The Cost Curve
Google Apigee's per-call pricing has a structural trap: the tiers are not linear. Cross a volume threshold and the overage rate kicks in, often higher than your committed rate. The total bill does not scale smoothly. It jumps. A holiday campaign, a viral moment, a partner integration going live: each one is a cost event you did not budget for. You find out at end of month, after the traffic has already happened.
KrakenD is priced by flat-tiered plans. A traffic spike that doubles your call volume does not change your invoice. A record-breaking sales day costs the same as a quiet Tuesday. Your gateway cost is a line in the annual budget, not a variable you track weekly. Scale your traffic as fast as your business demands. The gateway bill stays the same.
Metric | KrakenD | Google Apigee |
|---|---|---|
G2 quadrant | High Performer | Contender |
Meets Requirements | 93% | 90% |
Ease of Admin | 93% | 90% |
Ease of Setup | 92% | 90% |
ROI payback, Mid-Market | 3 months | 11 months |
Source: G2 Fall 2026 API Management reports. Data collected through July 28, 2026, published August 25, 2026. Third-party verified peer reviews, not vendor claims.
With Kong and Apigee, you can't start small. The pricing doesn't allow it. As an R&D department, we were like: cool, these guys are open source. We can try it out and deploy it even before licenses are involved.
KrakenD played a vital role in our API transformation journey by protecting our business platforms boundary and exposing the business capabilities in a standard way to both internal and external audience.
What About AI?
Google Apigee's AI capabilities, Model Armor, LLM Token Policies, Semantic Caching, exist as separate policies layered onto its control plane. Teams still configure, deploy, and manage each one as its own piece of the stack.
KrakenD's AI Gateway is native config: LLM routing, prompt guarding, semantic caching, token budgets, and an MCP server, all in the same binary you already run, no additional service to deploy. AI is not new infrastructure. It is a new pattern on the infrastructure you have.
Google Apigee Migration FAQ
Incremental. Start with your highest-traffic, lowest-complexity routes. Run KrakenD alongside Google Apigee in parallel (dev and staging instances are unlimited across all plans, no licensing cost for the parallel period). Validate behavior route by route. No production traffic moves until your team is confident.
This is the most common hidden complexity in a Google Apigee migration. KrakenD validates identity but does not manage it. Before migrating the gateway, your team will need identity management in a dedicated IdP: Keycloak, Auth0, Entra ID, Cognito, or equivalent. KrakenD then points at that IdP for JWT validation, OIDC, and OAuth2. The migration assessment call maps this dependency explicitly so it is in your plan from day one, not a surprise at week six.
Yes. KrakenD runs as a standard Docker image on GKE or any Kubernetes cluster on GCP. It has no dependency on Google-specific services and no preference for any cloud provider. Teams that migrate from Google Apigee typically keep their GCP infrastructure and replace only the gateway layer.
Google Apigee policies including quota enforcement, JWT validation, CORS, transformation, and rate limiting have direct equivalents in KrakenD's declarative config. Custom logic beyond native policy support maps to Go plugins. The migration assessment call exists to go through your policy inventory and categorize each one before you commit.
G2 Fall 2026 Mid-Market: KrakenD's average time to go-live is 2 months, with 100% of implementations done in-house. The actual timeline depends on the number of routes, the complexity of your Google Apigee policies, and whether identity management separation is in scope. A phased migration of a subset of routes can go live in days.
No. KrakenD does not include a developer portal, API marketplace, monetization features, or built-in analytics dashboards. For observability, KrakenD emits data to your existing stack via native OpenTelemetry: Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, your SIEM. The data is yours, in the tools you already use, not locked inside a vendor dashboard. For developer portal and monetization, if those functions are in active use, they need a complementary tool as part of your migration plan. KrakenD's scope is the gateway layer: routing, auth, transformation, rate limiting, observability, and AI traffic governance. The migration assessment call will map which functions need a complementary tool and which are handled natively.
Google Apigee Hybrid runs the data plane on your infrastructure but still requires Google's control plane for configuration management. KrakenD has no control plane. Configuration is a file in your Git repository. If the goal is full infrastructure independence from Google, Google Apigee Hybrid does not achieve it. KrakenD does.
Walk through your current Google Apigee setup, the policies involved, and what a phased, low-risk migration path looks like for your architecture.
Start the Migration Conversation See the Full KrakenD vs Google Apigee ComparisonStay up to date with KrakenD releases and important updates
