Keep the API Gateway, Lose the Overhead.

Every Kong upgrade requires re-validating custom Lua plugins. For teams with SOAP transformations, custom auth logic, or payload manipulation, that means a mini-project on every major version. The team that built those plugins may no longer be there when the next one breaks.

Kong stores its configuration in a database, PostgreSQL in OSS, a control plane in Enterprise. That database is in your critical path. Managing it in Kubernetes, keeping it consistent across environments, and recovering it under failure adds operational surface area a stateless gateway simply does not have.

Kong's Enterprise pricing scales with your traffic, your API count, or your service footprint depending on your contract. Every new team, every new product line, every traffic spike is a renegotiation waiting to happen. That model works when you're small. At scale, there is no ceiling.

KrakenD is priced by flat-tiered plans. The team you are today and the team you are in three years pay the same rate per tier. Predictable infrastructure cost is a competitive advantage. Unpredictable cost is a tax on growth.

SOAP transformation, JWT validation, rate limiting, payload manipulation, response filtering, all declarative JSON config. No plugins to write, no Lua to maintain, no re-validation on upgrade. Releases tend to remove workarounds teams had built, not require new ones.

No database in the critical path. No control plane as an external dependency. Configuration lives in Git, baked into a Docker image, deployed through your existing CI/CD pipeline. Rollback is a Docker tag.

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.

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 traffic-based uplift, no renegotiation when your API call volume doubles.

KrakenD's declarative model maps cleanly from Kong's route and plugin structure. Teams that have migrated report the translation is mechanical, not architectural. Start with a subset of low-complexity routes, validate in parallel, and expand incrementally.

G2 Fall 2026 API Management: 100% of KrakenD Mid-Market implementations are done in-house, with no vendor services and no external consultants. Average time to go-live: 2 months. Kong averages 3.9 months in the same segment and requires partner services in 11% of implementations.

KrakenD runs as a standard Docker image via Kubernetes manifests. No operator, no CRDs, no new abstractions. Dev and staging instances are unlimited across all plans, so you can run Kong and KrakenD in parallel across as many non-production environments as your migration requires, at no additional cost. Validate route by route before a single production request moves.

Native OpenTelemetry means your existing Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, or SIEM setup works without modification. Auth is the same story: JWT, OIDC, mTLS, API Keys, and OAuth2 are all native, no plugin required. If your current Kong setup validates tokens, KrakenD handles the same flows in declarative config.

REST, gRPC, GraphQL, WebSockets, SOAP, Kafka, AMQP. No protocol support is lost in the migration. Each instance handles 40,000 to 80,000 RPS with stateless horizontal scaling, no Redis coordinator, no shared state between nodes.