KrakenD vs. SmartClient Comparison Chart

Pros

• Simplicity, ease of use, statelessness, and immutability are crucial factors when selecting an API Gateway. Additionally, features such as circuit breaker, rate limiting, and authentication prove invaluable in preventing the need to reimplement these functionalities across all microservices within my network.
• Minimal Resources used (hardware). Super fast and efficient (throughput is incredible). Affordable. Secure/Agile. Easy Upgrades.
• KrakenD stands out for its ease of use configuration files making setup a breeze. Its efficient handling of numerous APIs and private services has streamlined our operations. The ability to easily route, aggregate, and transform data, coupled with high performance under heavy loads, has significantly improved our backend processes.
• KrakenD stands out for its operational simplicity and GitOps approach, aligning seamlessly with modern infrastructure-as-code practices. This aspect, coupled with its streamlined declarative configuration, allows developers to manage API gateways as they would any other codebase, ensuring efficiency and ease of use. The gateway's adaptability is further enhanced by a robust plugin ecosystem, making it a highly customizable solution for diverse API management needs.
• - Easy to get started - Good documentation - Plenty of features in the community edition - Built by engineers for engineers
• My main advantage is around its performance and capacity. Even in small instances it's extremely powerful. Besides, its documentation and overall ease of use are always helpful for those new to tools out of the native solutions of the large cloud providers. I liked a lot its extensibility too.
• KrakenD stands out for its extensibility, offering an extensive plugin ecosystem and flexible configuration options to adapt to various API needs. Its well-written codebase simplifies creating custom plugins, enhancing its functionality as an API gateway.
• - Free community edition - Open Source - No Single Point of Failure - Config in standard JSON schema - Visual config designer - Better performance than alternatives - Golang binary ready to plug and play - Easy to configure for Backend for Frontend architectures - Linux foundation project guaranteeing its governance
• It offers a lightweight, highly scalable API gateway solution that discards old-fashioned Full Lifecycle API Management (FLAM) systems, which have become cumbersome and inefficient in handling large-scale API operations. In our benchmarking phase, Kraken processed close to a million requests per second in a 20-machine cluster. Perfect for multi-region setups. Its configuration simplification is pivotal where rapid scaling and agility are crucial. KrakenD's focus on core gateway functionalities, rather than the broad but shallow approach of FLAM systems, and allows for more specialized, high-performance API management.
• KrakenD offers high performance and high availability, handling a lot of traffic on each instance. It features linear scalability, meaning more hardware leads to increased output without complex coordination, although we have rarely seen the autoscale trigger because the CPU is super stable even with different loads. KrakenD supports various protocols and API specifications, providing access controls, data transformations, integrations, and caching. It's customizable with a plugin system and implements the Backend For Frontend pattern for aggregating multiple API responses which we use for 3rd parties. KrakenD aligns with OWASP practices for security and is data storage-free for compliance. Its configuration is straightforward, with extensive documentation and platform-agnostic deployment. The open-source community version is free, and the Enterprise Edition has additional features with expert support.