KrakenD is an open-source, high-performance API gateway written in Go. Compare its Community and Enterprise editions, AI Gateway features and pricing.
KrakenD is an open-source API gateway written in Go, created in 2016 by engineers Albert Lombarte, Daniel Lopez and Daniel Ortiz and formally incorporated as a company in 2021, headquartered in Barcelona, Spain. It was built around a stateless, declarative configuration model designed to deliver high throughput and low latency for API traffic without requiring custom plugin code for routine gateway behaviors.
The open-source core, KrakenD Community Edition, was contributed to the Linux Foundation in 2021 and renamed the Lura Project, while the KrakenD company continues to develop and sell a commercial Enterprise Edition that adds security, governance and, more recently, AI Gateway functionality on top of the free core.
KrakenD Community Edition covers the core functions of an API gateway: declarative, JSON-configured routing, rate limiting, request/response transformation and the ability to aggregate multiple backend API calls into a single response, all without requiring developers to write plugin code. The gateway is stateless by design, which contributes to its reputation for high performance in benchmarks against other gateways.
KrakenD Enterprise Edition adds SSO/SAML, role-based access control, audit logging, gRPC and WebSocket support, API key management, OpenAPI integration, and immediate security patches with SLA-backed support. Its AI Gateway module, bundled at no extra license cost, secures and governs traffic to LLM providers like OpenAI, Claude, Gemini and Mistral with token quotas, prompt validation, data masking and multi-LLM routing.
KrakenD Community Edition is free and open source under the Apache 2.0 license, covering the full core gateway functionality with no cost or usage limits. KrakenD Enterprise Edition is custom-priced and not published publicly, but the company markets its Enterprise pricing model as stable and predictable, explicitly not tied to the number of APIs managed or the volume of traffic processed.
Prospective Enterprise customers can trial the full feature set, including the AI Gateway, security policies and SSO, free for two months before committing to a paid contract, after which pricing is negotiated directly with KrakenD's sales team based on deployment scale and support needs.
Yes, KrakenD Community Edition is free and open source under the Apache 2.0 license, covering core routing, rate limiting and transformation features.
KrakenD Enterprise adds SSO/SAML, RBAC, audit logging, gRPC/WebSocket support, an AI Gateway for LLM traffic, and SLA-backed support with immediate security patches.
Yes, KrakenD Enterprise includes an AI Gateway module that routes and secures traffic to providers like OpenAI, Claude, Gemini and Mistral with token quotas and prompt governance.
KrakenD Enterprise pricing is custom and not tied to the number of APIs or traffic throughput; a free two-month trial is available before committing to a quote.
KrakenD was created in 2016 by Albert Lombarte, Daniel Lopez and Daniel Ortiz, with the company formally incorporated in Barcelona, Spain in 2021.
The Lura Project is the name given to KrakenD's open-source core after it was contributed to the Linux Foundation in 2021.