agentgateway vs F5 BIG-IP Container Ingress Services
agentgateway
agentgateway.dev
F5 BIG-IP Container Ingress Services
clouddocs.f5.comSide by side
| Figure | agentgateway | F5 BIG-IP Container Ingress Services |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Kubernetes Ingress Controllers | 9.1 (#1) | 7.8 (#10) |
| Intended users | The site invites tool-builders, platform engineers, and AI enthusiasts to join the community and describes the controls as suited to platform teams. | F5 identifies network architects, network operations, AppDev, DevOps, and system infrastructure teams as target customers. |
| Observability | Built-in observability exports OpenTelemetry metrics, logs and distributed traces. | BIG-IP data streams can export application and network statistics to third-party visibility and analytics tools, with Splunk given as an example. |
| Purpose | Agentgateway is an open-source HTTP and gRPC gateway for routing, securing, observing, and governing service, LLM, MCP, and agent-to-agent traffic. | CIS integrates container orchestration environments with F5 BIG-IP to dynamically create L4/L7 services and load balance traffic as container applications change. |
| Security | Listed security features include JWT and OIDC, API keys, authorization policies, TLS and mTLS with certificate rotation, and rate limiting. | F5 documents securing CIS BIG-IP credentials by storing them in HashiCorp Vault and synchronizing them to a Kubernetes Secret with External Secrets Operator. |
Plans
F5 BIG-IP Container Ingress Services
- Open-source softwareFree
In their own words
agentgateway
Agentgateway is a free, open-source HTTP and gRPC gateway for routing, securing, observing, and governing service, LLM, MCP, and agent-to-agent traffic. Its LLM gateway offers an OpenAI-compatible API for providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Bedrock, Gemini, Vertex, and OSS Llama runs. Self-hosted inference routing supports vLLM, TGI, and Triton, with choices guided by latency, cost, and model. For MCP it supports server discovery, scoped tool calls, and audit trails; A2A routing connects runtimes such as LangChain, CrewAI, and ADK. Security features include JWT and OIDC, API keys, authorization policies, TLS and mTLS with certificate rotation, and rate limiting. Guardrails inspect MCP calls and responses for prompt injection and unsafe payloads, while prompt guards support checks and redaction. Observability includes OpenTelemetry, Prometheus token-usage histograms, Jaeger traces, and request logs with latency, token counts, and realized USD cost. It can run as a standalone binary, in Docker, or on Kubernetes. Commercial support is listed through a partner.
F5 BIG-IP Container Ingress Services
F5 BIG-IP Container Ingress Services (CIS) connects Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift environments with F5 BIG-IP. It watches Kubernetes resources and adjusts BIG-IP configuration as applications change, while teams manage BIG-IP through Kubernetes or OpenShift command-line interfaces and APIs. CIS can send traffic from BIG-IP to clusters through NodePort or ClusterIP and supports F5 AS3 declarations. It provides HTTP and URI routing, load balancing, scaling, health monitoring, and Blue/Green or A/B traffic handling. F5 documents Ingress resources, OpenShift Routes, IngressLink coordination with NGINX Ingress Controller, and overlays including OpenShift SDN, Flannel, and Calico. BIG-IP data streams can export application and network statistics to tools such as Splunk. Installation is available through Helm or manual methods, with releases on Docker Hub and Red Hat Container Registry. The open-source plan is free, but requires a licensed BIG-IP system, a Kubernetes or OpenShift cluster, and AS3 installed on BIG-IP.