Contour vs Higress

Contour is a free, self-hosted, open-source Kubernetes ingress controller that provides the control plane for the Envoy edge and service proxy. It supports Kubernetes Ingress v1, its HTTPProxy custom resource and Gateway API. Contour updates ingress configuration dynamically with minimal dropped connections and supports multiple configuration types in clusters used by multiple teams. It can run as a Kubernetes deployment or daemonset, and administrators can delegate access to wildcard certificates. Documented security features include TLS termination, client authorization, rate limiting, JWT verification and IP filtering. Contour and Envoy expose metrics that Prometheus can scrape, and documentation includes guides for cert-manager, Gatekeeper and AWS Network Load Balancer. The project is tested with Kubernetes 1.21 and later and is intended for both cluster administrators and application developers. Community support is available through the project's GitHub page, where users can report issues or ask questions. Contour is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation incubating project; its documentation includes a threat model, a security reporting process and a security fix checklist.

Higress is an open-source API gateway for governing AI services and cloud-native traffic, built on Istio and Envoy. Its AI Gateway provides centralized access to model APIs and MCP servers, with unified routing, protocol conversion, load balancing, and fallback. Higress says it supports more than 100 mainstream large language models. It can convert HTTP to MCP and proxy native MCP services. Traffic controls include token-based quotas and rate limits, API key pool rotation, and consumer authentication. Caching can reuse inference results precisely or semantically to reduce token use and latency for similar or repeated questions. Listed security measures cover prompt attacks, sensitive content, data privacy, and output filtering. The wider API gateway combines traffic, microservice, and security gateway functions with service exposure and API lifecycle management. It supports HTTP, HTTP2, HTTPS, GRPC, GRPCS, TCP, and Dubbo, along with Kubernetes Ingress and Gateway API. Custom Wasm plugins can be written in Go, Rust, or JavaScript, with sandbox isolation and hot updates. The self-hosted Community Edition is free; the site also lists a managed Alibaba Cloud plan billed by actual usage, starting at ¥0.