Airlock Microgateway vs NGINX Ingress Controller

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.

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.