agentgateway vs NGINX Gateway Fabric
agentgateway
agentgateway.dev
NGINX Gateway Fabric
docs.nginx.comSide by side
| Figure | agentgateway | NGINX Gateway Fabric |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Kubernetes Ingress Controllers | 9.1 (#1) | 7.4 (#16) |
| Deployment | The project provides standalone binary, Docker and Kubernetes deployment paths. | NGINX Gateway Fabric can be installed with Helm from an OCI registry or from source, and Gateway API resources must be installed before deployment. |
| Integrations | Official integration categories cover identity providers, AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, LLM providers, MCP, networking tools, agent frameworks and NetBird. | The documentation describes monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana and tracing with OpenTelemetry collectors, including Jaeger examples. |
| Purpose | Agentgateway is an open-source HTTP and gRPC gateway for routing, securing, observing, and governing service, LLM, MCP, and agent-to-agent traffic. | NGINX Gateway Fabric implements the Kubernetes Gateway API using NGINX as the data plane for load balancing, reverse proxying, and API gateway use cases. |
| Support | The enterprise page lists partner-provided commercial support, including a Solo.io offer with 24×7 coverage, upstream collaboration, and best-practice guidance. | The support page directs users to GitHub issues and the NGINX Community Forum, and says users can contact F5 Sales for dedicated support or NGINX Plus features. |
Plans
NGINX Gateway Fabric
- NGINX Gateway Fabric (NGINX Open Source data plane)Free
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.
NGINX Gateway Fabric
NGINX Gateway Fabric is a self-hosted Kubernetes implementation of the Gateway API, using NGINX as its data plane for load balancing, reverse proxying, and API gateway use cases. Its control plane translates Gateway API resources into NGINX configuration. Supported resource coverage includes GatewayClass, Gateway, HTTPRoute, GRPCRoute, ReferenceGrant, TLSRoute, TCPRoute, UDPRoute, and BackendTLSPolicy, though the support level varies by resource. Traffic features include HTTP and TLS routing, redirects, rewrites, request mirroring, session persistence, and rate limiting. Security documentation covers HTTPS with cert-manager, mutual TLS, basic authentication, OpenID Connect, external authentication, and JWT authentication. Monitoring examples use Prometheus and Grafana; tracing uses OpenTelemetry collectors, including Jaeger examples. The free NGINX Open Source data-plane plan costs nothing. Installation is available through Helm from an OCI registry or from source, with Gateway API resources installed beforehand. Version 2.7.2 requires Kubernetes 1.32 or later; documented images are available for amd64 and arm64. Support is directed to GitHub issues and the NGINX Community Forum.