head to head · open source
one-api vs Krakend
one-api has 36,932 GitHub stars, 6,867 forks, 1,036 open issues and last shipped 8 months ago. Krakend has 2,682 stars, 501 forks, 37 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. one-api leads on adoption by 1,277% (36,932 vs 2,682 stars). one-api is written in JavaScript under MIT; Krakend is written in Go under Apache-2.0. one-api has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, Krakend 19%. Krakend was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (api-gateway), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| one-api | Krakend | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 37K | ★ 2.7K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | JavaScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-01-09 | 2026-09-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.9K | ⑂ 501 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick one-api if
- You weight community size — 37K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Krakend if
- You want the Krakend feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and Krakend fits your workflow better
About one-api
One API is a self hosted LLM API management and key redistribution system that exposes many model providers through the standard OpenAI API format, aimed at developers, teams and operators who want a single endpoint, a single key model and a single quota surface across providers.
read the full one-api overview →
About Krakend
KrakenD Community Edition is the open source distribution of the KrakenD API Gateway, a high performance, stateless, declarative gateway written in Go and released under the Apache 2.0 license. It lives in the cloud native developer tooling ecosystem, alongside Kubernetes, Docker, and Go based backend services, and it is catalogued here under Developer Tools / API Development & Testing. The project is extensible and platform agnostic, and it runs both in cloud native environments and on self hosted on premises infrastructure.
read the full Krakend overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is one-api or Krakend more popular?
one-api has 36,932 GitHub stars and Krakend has 2,682. one-api has the larger community by that measure.
Are one-api and Krakend free?
Both are open source. one-api is licensed under MIT and Krakend under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between one-api and Krakend?
one-api is written in JavaScript and Krakend in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, one-api or Krakend?
Choose one-api if you want the larger community (36,932 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Krakend if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.