Calico Enterprise vs Tetrate Service Bridge

Calico Enterprise is a self-managed platform for network security and observability in Kubernetes clusters. It provides pod-to-pod networking within single clusters and across multiple clusters, with data-plane options including eBPF, nftables, iptables, Windows, and VPP. Cluster mesh connects clusters for pod communication and service discovery, while supporting policy enforcement and traffic visibility. Security controls include network- and application-layer policies, DNS policies, egress controls, and workload microsegmentation. It also provides workload-level IDS/IPS, a workload-focused WAF, and DDoS detection and prevention. For observability, Calico combines flow logs with Kubernetes context and offers network topology views, dashboards, alerts, and workload packet capture. Tigera lists support for PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2, NIST, CCPA, and custom compliance frameworks, along with continuous monitoring and audit-ready reports. Policy deployment can integrate with CI/CD tools such as ArgoCD and Jenkins. The product supports hybrid deployment and centralized control, with BGP, IP-in-IP, VXLAN, WireGuard, TCP, UDP, SCTP, ICMP, ICMPv6, and HTTP listed as supported protocols.

Tetrate Service Bridge is a paid, hybrid service mesh and control plane for connecting, monitoring, and securing microservices. Built on Istio, it centralizes Istio and Envoy configuration and visibility across Kubernetes and traditional compute clusters, including application edges, cluster ingress, and links between workloads. A global management plane spans multi-cluster hybrid environments. Security controls include end-to-end mTLS, certificate management, identity-aware authorization, role-based access control, tenant isolation, and zero-trust policies with auditability. Traffic features cover global routing, circuit breaking, locality-aware failover, canary releases, traffic shifting, and blue-green deployments. Unified metrics, distributed tracing, topology views, service inventory, dashboards, and alerts provide observability. Tetrate lists support for Kubernetes, AWS EKS, Azure AKS, and Google GCP, plus integrations and partners across major cloud and infrastructure providers. The management plane may be hosted by Tetrate or deployed in customer Kubernetes infrastructure. Self-managed installation requires Kubernetes and several supporting services. Pricing is on request; no free plan is listed.