Amazon API Gateway vs Apache APISIX

Amazon API Gateway is a cloud service for creating, publishing, maintaining, monitoring, and securing APIs that connect applications to backend services. It supports REST, HTTP, and WebSocket APIs, including real-time two-way communication. Integrations include AWS Lambda, Step Functions, Elastic Beanstalk, EC2, and public HTTP endpoints; HTTP APIs can also route requests to certain private services. API Gateway Portals provide managed spaces to discover, document, and govern REST APIs. Traffic controls include request throttling and configurable caching for REST APIs. The console integrates with Amazon CloudWatch for call, latency, and error metrics, alarms, and execution logs. Authorization options include IAM, Lambda authorizers, OIDC, OAuth 2.0, and other listed methods; REST API keys are optional. A free tier is available to new AWS customers for up to 12 months within monthly allowances, with excess usage charged at standard rates. Pay-as-you-go has no minimum fees or upfront commitments; the listed pricing note is From $1. WebSocket messages can be up to 128 KB and are metered in 32 KB increments.

Apache APISIX is a free, Apache 2.0-licensed, self-hosted gateway for routing, securing and managing API, microservice and LLM traffic. It runs on bare metal or Kubernetes and supports HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, UDP, WebSocket, gRPC, MQTT, HTTP/3 and Dubbo, with HTTP-to-gRPC transcoding. More than 100 open-source plugins cover traffic management, security, observability and protocol handling. The project provides authentication options including API keys, JWT, Basic Authentication, OAuth 2.0/OpenID Connect, HMAC, LDAP, CAS, Keycloak, Casdoor, forward authentication and multi-auth, along with rate limiting and request transformation. Its NGINX-and-etcd architecture uses hot-reloadable plugins and distributes cluster configuration without restarts. AI gateway functions include multi-provider proxying, load balancing, retries, fallback, token limits, prompt security and transformation. Listed integrations include Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, Kubernetes, Redis, OpenAI, Anthropic and AWS Bedrock. Official source releases include detached signatures and SHA-512 checksums.