Apache APISIX vs Google Cloud API Gateway
Apache APISIX
apisix.apache.org
Google Cloud API Gateway
cloud.google.comSide by side
| Figure | Apache APISIX | Google Cloud API Gateway |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | $1.50/mo |
| Free plan | — | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 0 | 3 |
| Spec score · Rest Apis | 7.6 (#12) | 7.6 (#13) |
| Spec score · API Gateway Software | 7.6 (#18) | 7.7 (#17) |
| Spec score · Apis | 7.6 (#17) | 7.7 (#15) |
| Purpose | Apache APISIX is an open-source API gateway for routing, securing, and managing traffic to APIs, microservices, and LLM workloads. | API Gateway provides secure access to backend services through a consistent REST API regardless of service implementation. |
Plans
Google Cloud API Gateway
- 1B+ API calls$1.50 a month
- 2M-1B API calls$3 a month
- 0-2M API callsPrice not published
In their own words
Apache APISIX
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.
Google Cloud API Gateway
Google Cloud API Gateway has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.