Apigee vs KrakenD: What are the differences?

1. Key difference 1: Architecture: Apigee is a full-featured API platform that provides a complete environment for designing, developing, and managing APIs. It offers a centralized architecture where all the components are hosted in the cloud. On the other hand, KrakenD is a lightweight API gateway that focuses on providing a highly efficient and scalable gateway layer to distribute the traffic across multiple microservices. KrakenD follows a decentralized architecture where each instance of the gateway runs independently and autonomously.
2. Key difference 2: Authentication and Authorization: Apigee provides robust capabilities for authentication and authorization, with support for numerous security protocols and token-based authentication mechanisms. It offers advanced features like OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect integration, enabling secure access control to APIs. In contrast, KrakenD mainly focuses on traffic routing and does not provide built-in support for authentication and authorization. It expects these functionalities to be handled by the microservices themselves or by an external identity provider.
3. Key difference 3: Scalability and Performance: Apigee is designed to handle large-scale API programs, offering high scalability and performance. With its cloud-based architecture, it can elastically handle varying workloads, ensuring reliable and consistent performance for API traffic. On the other hand, KrakenD excels in horizontal scalability, allowing multiple instances of the gateway to be deployed and load-balanced. Its lightweight design and use of fast networking libraries enable high throughput and low latency, making it suitable for high-performance scenarios.
4. Key difference 4: API Management Capabilities: Apigee provides a comprehensive set of API management features, including analytics, rate limiting, caching, developer portal, and API documentation. It offers an extensive set of tools and capabilities to manage the entire lifecycle of APIs. In comparison, KrakenD focuses primarily on providing a lightweight gateway layer and does not offer built-in capabilities for API management. While it can proxy requests and route traffic efficiently, other management aspects need to be handled separately.
5. Key difference 5: Extensibility and Customization: Apigee offers a highly customizable platform, allowing developers to extend its functionalities and create custom policies to enforce specific logic and security requirements. It provides a rich API for customization and integration with external systems. On the contrary, KrakenD has a limited set of extension points and customization options compared to Apigee. While it allows some customizations using plugins, the level of extensibility and flexibility is lesser.
6. Key difference 6: Pricing Model: Apigee follows a commercial licensing model, where the pricing is based on factors like the number of API calls, features utilized, and support requirements. It offers different pricing tiers based on the scale and requirements of the organization. In contrast, KrakenD is an open-source project and available under the Apache 2.0 license, making it free to use and modify. However, organizations using KrakenD need to consider the cost of infrastructure and resources required to run and maintain the gateway instances.

In summary, Apigee is a centralized API platform with a comprehensive set of features and capabilities, offering scalability, API management, and extensive customization options, while KrakenD is a lightweight, decentralized API gateway focusing on high-performance traffic routing, without built-in API management features and limited extensibility.