Ambassador Edge Stack vs Higress
Ambassador Edge Stack
landing.gravitee.io
Higress
higress.ioSide by side
| Figure | Ambassador Edge Stack | Higress |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 0 | 5 |
| Spec score · API Gateway Software | 7.9 (#9) | 8.7 (#2) |
| Deployment | The product can be installed manually or with Helm. | A Docker all-in-one deployment exposes the console on port 8001, HTTP gateway on 8080 and HTTPS gateway on 8443. |
| Support | Gravitee says Ambassador customers can keep using the same support channels and teams, with ongoing improvements planned. | The community edition includes community support and documentation; the dedicated commercial edition lists ticket, DingTalk group, and offline support. |
| Traffic management | It supports canary deployments in which developers control the share of production traffic routed to a service version. | Its AI gateway supports Token-based quotas and rate limiting, API key pool rotation, and consumer authentication. |
Plans
Higress
- Alibaba Cloud AI Gateway Serverless StandardPriced on request
- Higress CommunityFree
- Higress Community EditionFree
- Alibaba Cloud AI Gateway Serverless EnterprisePriced on request
- Feitian Exclusive EditionPriced on request
In their own words
Ambassador Edge Stack
Ambassador Edge Stack has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
Higress
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.