AWS API Gateway Locks You In. KrakenD Sets You Free.

AWS API Gateway charges per million API calls. REST APIs: $3.50 per million for the first 333 million requests per month. HTTP APIs: $1.00 per million for the first 300 million. WebSocket: $1.00 per million messages plus $0.25 per million connection minutes. These rates tier down at volume, but they never reach zero. Every request your product handles is a revenue event for AWS.

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 monitor weekly in the AWS Cost Explorer.

AWS API Gateway integrates natively with IAM for auth, Lambda for compute, CloudFront for edge, and Route 53 for DNS. That tight integration is its strength inside AWS. It is also why it cannot leave. Your API definitions reference Lambda ARNs. Your auth policies reference IAM roles. Your caching integrates with ElastiCache. None of that is portable. Moving to another cloud, to on-premise, or to a hybrid architecture means rebuilding the gateway layer from scratch.

KrakenD runs on any infrastructure: GCP, Azure, AWS, on-premise, air-gapped environments. The same Docker image, the same config file, the same CI/CD pipeline. Your gateway travels with your architecture, not with your cloud provider.

AWS API Gateway has no export format that other gateways can import. Your route definitions, your integrations, your auth policies: all of them are expressed in AWS-specific constructs. Teams that have tried to migrate report that the process is not a migration. It is a rebuild. The configuration does not translate, it gets rewritten.

KrakenD's declarative config is a JSON file in your Git repo. It deploys as a Docker image. Moving KrakenD between cloud providers or to on-premise is a CI/CD variable change. Moving AWS API Gateway off AWS is a project.

KrakenD has no managed service, no cloud console to configure, no Lambda dependency. 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 for standard operation. Each instance runs independently on any infrastructure. Horizontal scaling is linear: add an instance, add capacity. No AWS account required to run it.

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 AWS account required. No managed service to provision.

"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, and observability, is included at every tier. What never changes is the model: flat per plan, no per-request uplift, no renegotiation when your traffic doubles.

Your existing API definitions, auth policies, and routing logic map to KrakenD declarative config. The translation requires rewriting AWS-specific constructs into standard config, but the business logic, the routes, the policies, the transformations, all of it travels. Start with your lowest-dependency routes, those not tied to Lambda or IAM, 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.

KrakenD runs as a standard Docker image on EKS, ECS, EC2, or any Kubernetes cluster. No managed service to provision. No AWS-specific constructs in the config. Dev and staging instances are unlimited across all plans, so you can run AWS API Gateway and KrakenD in parallel at no additional licensing cost during the migration.

Native OpenTelemetry. CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, your SIEM. JWT, OIDC, mTLS, API Keys, OAuth2: all native. If your team uses Cognito or IAM for identity 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 Redis required for standard operation. Each instance runs independently with stateless rate limiting.