Airlock Microgateway vs Higress

Airlock Microgateway is a Kubernetes-native Web Application and API Protection solution that also serves as an identity-aware proxy. It runs as a container in Kubernetes clusters and is configured through GitOps. The gateway supports Kubernetes Gateway API and is positioned as an upgrade from Ingress NGINX. It validates identities through OIDC, JWT, token exchange or mutual TLS, then applies role- and path-based access control. Protection features include deny rules, CSRF protection, OpenAPI specification enforcement and GraphQL validation against OWASP Top 10 threats. Its Envoy-based reverse proxy supports routing, TLS termination, client certificate authentication and caller IP forwarding. Integrations include Cilium and Istio, and the product is certified for Red Hat OpenShift. Prometheus and Grafana provide monitoring, while logs use ECS format. Deployment can be multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud, but remains self-hosted. Community Edition is free for small environments or local development, with enforced throughput and six-month license validity. The free evaluation license specifies 5 requests per second, at most two replicas per gateway and six-month validity. Premium Edition has no listed price and is intended for enterprise setups.

Higress is an open-source API gateway for governing AI services and cloud-native traffic, built on Istio and Envoy. Its AI Gateway provides centralized access to model APIs and MCP servers, with unified routing, protocol conversion, load balancing, and fallback. Higress says it supports more than 100 mainstream large language models. It can convert HTTP to MCP and proxy native MCP services. Traffic controls include token-based quotas and rate limits, API key pool rotation, and consumer authentication. Caching can reuse inference results precisely or semantically to reduce token use and latency for similar or repeated questions. Listed security measures cover prompt attacks, sensitive content, data privacy, and output filtering. The wider API gateway combines traffic, microservice, and security gateway functions with service exposure and API lifecycle management. It supports HTTP, HTTP2, HTTPS, GRPC, GRPCS, TCP, and Dubbo, along with Kubernetes Ingress and Gateway API. Custom Wasm plugins can be written in Go, Rust, or JavaScript, with sandbox isolation and hot updates. The self-hosted Community Edition is free; the site also lists a managed Alibaba Cloud plan billed by actual usage, starting at ¥0.