Contour vs NGINX Ingress Controller

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.

NGINX Ingress Controller is a self-hosted Kubernetes Ingress Controller for load balancing WebSocket, gRPC, TCP, and UDP applications. It provides content-based routing and TLS/SSL termination, with further NGINX settings exposed through annotations and ConfigMaps. Manifest installation can use Deployment, DaemonSet, or StatefulSet modes. Policy resources cover access control, rate limiting, API keys, authentication, mutual TLS, WAF, CORS, and HSTS, although some require NGINX Plus. The controller can expose NGINX and controller metrics in Prometheus format, including a ServiceMonitor with Prometheus Operator. Documented integrations include cert-manager, ExternalDNS, Prometheus, Istio, Linkerd, Open Service Mesh, and F5 products. The free NGINX Open Source plan costs nothing and requires a Kubernetes cluster. NGINX Plus requires a subscription and registry credentials, and adds metrics, balancing methods, persistence, health checks, and JWT validation.