BFE Ingress Controller vs kgateway
BFE Ingress Controller
bfe-networks.net
kgateway
kgateway.devSide by side
| Figure | BFE Ingress Controller | kgateway |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Kubernetes Ingress Controllers | 9.0 (#2) | 7.0 (#22) |
| Installation | The documentation describes installing from source and provides binary, Go, Snap, and Docker installation paths. | The kgateway control plane installs into a Kubernetes cluster using Helm or Argo CD. |
| Integrations | Official documentation names Kubernetes, Prometheus, Jaeger, Fluentd and mainstream layer-4 load balancers as integrations. | Documented integrations include Istio, AWS load balancers, Argo Rollouts, ExternalDNS, cert-manager, and OpenTelemetry. |
| Security | The vendor says BFE is written in Go, a memory-safe language, and describes it as immune to buffer overflow vulnerabilities. | Documented security features include TLS and mTLS, external authentication, API keys, JWT, OAuth2/OIDC, IP access control, and rate limiting. |
| Support | The project directs questions and issues to GitHub and lists CNCF Slack and WeChat community channels. | Solo offers free community support through its Gloo Community and public GitHub repository. |
Plans
In their own words
BFE Ingress Controller
BFE Ingress Controller is an open-source Layer 7 load balancer derived from Baidu’s proprietary Baidu Front End. It is self-hosted and supports Linux, macOS, Windows, and API use. BFE handles HTTP, HTTPS, SPDY, HTTP/2, WebSocket, TLS, gRPC, and FastCGI traffic; HTTP/3 is planned. Operators define content-based routing rules with a domain-specific language. Traffic features include global and distributed load balancing, zone-aware balancing, resilience to zone-level failures, and overload protection. Each tenant has an isolated configuration that is not visible to other tenants. A built-in plugin framework supports extensions for traffic management, security, and observability. For operations, BFE provides subsystem metrics, troubleshooting and analysis logs, and distributed tracing. The project lists integrations with mainstream Layer 4 load balancers and ecosystem projects such as Kubernetes, Prometheus, Jaeger, and Fluentd. It is licensed under Apache 2.0 and is a CNCF sandbox project. Documentation covers installation from source and through binary, Go, Snap, and Docker paths. The open-source plan is free.