BFE Ingress Controller vs LiteSpeed 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.

LiteSpeed Ingress Controller is the Kubernetes ingress component in LiteSpeed Web ADC, a software HTTP load balancer and application delivery controller. The solution can run on private dedicated hardware, hosted environments, or cloud infrastructure. The controller supports the Kubernetes Gateway API and installs through Helm, using native ingress without sidecars or Kubernetes modifications. It supports HTTP versions including HTTP/2 and HTTP/3. Built-in LiteSpeed Cache is intended to accelerate web applications, and its Web Application Firewall can use ModSecurity rules and templates. ZeroConf lets Kubernetes configuration changes take effect without restarting the load balancer. Realtime statistics and controller commands are available in the Web ADC WebAdmin Console. Web ADC works with all web servers, though LiteSpeed Web Server is preferred for the backend. The default LoadBalancer installation exposes the service to the internet and load-balances all Ingress definitions; the documentation recommends Kubernetes cert-manager to manage TLS secrets for HTTPS. Helm installation includes full 24-7 support. Listed Web ADC plans are billed monthly: Small is $65 a month for one worker, Medium $130 a month for two workers, Large $260 a month for four workers, and Ultimate $520 a month with configurable workers.