AWS App Mesh vs Kuma
AWS App Mesh
aws.amazon.comKuma
kuma.ioSide by side
| Figure | AWS App Mesh | Kuma |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 2 |
| Spec score · Service Mesh Platforms | 9.1 (#1) | 8.7 (#2) |
| Integrations | The feature page lists Amazon CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray, along with partner and open source tools including Datadog, HashiCorp, and Sysdig. | Kuma's observability documentation describes integrations with Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, and Datadog. |
| Observability | App Mesh collects service metrics, logs and traces and integrates with Amazon CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray. | Listed observability features include service maps, traces, access logs, metrics, and OpenTelemetry. |
| Purpose | AWS App Mesh provides visibility and network traffic controls for service-to-service communication. | Kuma is an open-source control plane for service mesh and microservices management. |
| Rating on G2 | 4.3 out of 5 from 14 reviews | G2's service-mesh category reports 4.49 out of 5 across submitted product ratings; the page does not show a Kuma product rating. |
| Rating on TrustRadius | 6.4 out of 10 from 39 reviews | TrustRadius's service-mesh category page does not show a Kuma rating; its listed products include OpenShift at 9.1 out of 10 from 625 reviews. |
| Security | AWS App Mesh API clients must support TLS 1.2, and AWS recommends TLS 1.3. | Listed security features include multi-mesh, mutual TLS, and mesh traffic permissions. |
| What it does | AWS App Mesh is a managed service mesh that standardizes microservice communication and provides visibility and traffic controls through lightweight proxies. | Kuma is an Envoy-based control plane for securing, observing, routing and connecting services across Kubernetes, virtual machines and bare-metal systems. |
Plans
In their own words
AWS App Mesh
AWS App Mesh is a managed service for visibility and traffic control between services. It uses the open source Envoy proxy to handle traffic into and out of service containers, and can change routes between services without application-code changes. Proxies balance client traffic and adjust endpoints using health checks and service registration. App Mesh provides metrics and logs for service hops, and can collect traces to help visualize service API calls. It works with AWS Fargate, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, Amazon EC2 and Kubernetes on EC2. Mutual TLS verifies service identities using certificates from AWS Certificate Manager Private Certificate Authority or a customer-managed certificate authority. Listed integrations include Amazon CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray, plus tools such as Datadog, HashiCorp and Sysdig. There is no additional charge for App Mesh itself, but proxy-consumed AWS resources are billed separately. AWS states support ends on September 30, 2026; after that, the console and App Mesh resources will no longer be accessible. API clients must support TLS 1.2; AWS recommends TLS 1.3.
Kuma
Kuma is an open-source control plane for managing service meshes and microservices across Kubernetes, virtual machines, and bare-metal environments. It supports single-zone or multi-zone deployments across clouds, regions, and Kubernetes clusters, and one control plane can serve multiple meshes. Its traffic policies cover HTTP and TCP routing, health checks, circuit breaking, retries, timeouts, fault injection, and rate limiting. Security features include mutual TLS and mesh traffic permissions. Observability includes service maps, traces, access logs, metrics, and OpenTelemetry, with documented integrations for Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, and Datadog. Interfaces include Kubernetes CRDs, a GUI, a REST API, and a CLI; Envoy is bundled as the data-plane proxy. Kuma is self-hosted and available under a free open-source plan. Its installation guide provides Linux and macOS downloads, and documents macOS CLI installation through Homebrew. The Kubernetes quickstart describes the GUI as read-only. Production guidance covers secrets management, API access and authentication, proxy membership, certificates, and Kubernetes RBAC.