agentgateway vs NGINX Ingress Controller
agentgateway
agentgateway.dev
NGINX Ingress Controller
docs.nginx.comSide by side
| Figure | agentgateway | NGINX Ingress Controller |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 2 |
| Spec score · Kubernetes Ingress Controllers | 9.1 (#1) | 7.1 (#21) |
| Integrations | Official integration categories cover identity providers, AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, LLM providers, MCP, networking tools, agent frameworks and NetBird. | Documented integrations include F5 WAF for NGINX, F5 DoS for NGINX, F5 BIG-IP, cert-manager, ExternalDNS, Prometheus, Istio, Linkerd, and Open Service Mesh. |
| 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 Ingress Controller is a Kubernetes Ingress Controller that load balances WebSocket, gRPC, TCP, and UDP applications. |
| Support | The enterprise page lists partner-provided commercial support, including a Solo.io offer with 24×7 coverage, upstream collaboration, and best-practice guidance. | Technical support applies to provider-supported Kubernetes platforms that pass Kubernetes conformance tests; F5 customer support covers the latest controller version and versions released within two years of the current release. |
Plans
NGINX Ingress Controller
- NGINX Ingress Controller with NGINX Open SourceFree
- NGINX Plus Ingress ControllerPriced on request
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 Ingress Controller
NGINX Ingress Controller is a self-hosted Kubernetes Ingress Controller for load balancing WebSocket, gRPC, TCP, and UDP applications. It provides content-based routing and TLS/SSL termination, with further NGINX settings exposed through annotations and ConfigMaps. Manifest installation can use Deployment, DaemonSet, or StatefulSet modes. Policy resources cover access control, rate limiting, API keys, authentication, mutual TLS, WAF, CORS, and HSTS, although some require NGINX Plus. The controller can expose NGINX and controller metrics in Prometheus format, including a ServiceMonitor with Prometheus Operator. Documented integrations include cert-manager, ExternalDNS, Prometheus, Istio, Linkerd, Open Service Mesh, and F5 products. The free NGINX Open Source plan costs nothing and requires a Kubernetes cluster. NGINX Plus requires a subscription and registry credentials, and adds metrics, balancing methods, persistence, health checks, and JWT validation.