Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd vs Solo Enterprise for Istio
Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd
buoyant.io
Solo Enterprise for Istio
solo.ioSide by side
| Figure | Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd | Solo Enterprise for Istio |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 1 |
| Spec score · Service Mesh Platforms | 8.2 (#4) | 6.6 (#15) |
| Multicluster | It supports transparent multicluster communication, federated services, and automatic cross-cluster failover. | It supports gateway-routed mTLS peering across VPCs and clouds, and direct pod-to-pod networking within a VPC. |
| Observability | It provides L7 metrics, including success rates and latency distributions, exports metrics to Prometheus-compatible stores, and supports OpenTelemetry distributed tracing. | Node-based Layer 7 observability exposes HTTP methods, paths, response codes, and traces without per-service sidecars or waypoints. |
Plans
Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd
- Open sourceFree
- PremiumPriced on request
- StrategicPriced on request
Solo Enterprise for Istio
- Solo Enterprise for IstioPriced on request
In their own words
Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd
Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd (BEL) is Buoyant’s enterprise distribution of Linkerd, a service mesh for Kubernetes. It encrypts meshed traffic with mutual TLS and offers latency-based load balancing, timeouts, retries, circuit breaking, gRPC load balancing and blue-green or canary deployments. It supports communication across clusters, federated services and automatic cross-cluster failover. Observability includes layer 7 success-rate and latency metrics, Prometheus-compatible metric exports and OpenTelemetry tracing. High Availability Zone-aware Load Balancing keeps requests in-zone under normal load and sends them to other zones when local endpoints are overloaded or return errors. Supported environments include Kubernetes and managed or self-hosted distributions such as Amazon EKS, Google GKE, Microsoft Azure AKS, Oracle OKE, Rancher RKE2 and Red Hat OpenShift. Linux VM workloads are supported in Premium and Strategic; the product also describes management of non-Kubernetes workloads including Windows VMs. It is free to try, and companies with fewer than 50 employees can use it in production at any scale. Premium and Strategic pricing is available by request.
Solo Enterprise for Istio
Solo Enterprise for Istio has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.