Emissary-ingress vs Kong Gateway

Emissary-ingress is a free, open-source Kubernetes API gateway, Layer 7 load balancer, and Ingress built on Envoy Proxy. It handles HTTP, HTTPS, HTTP proxy, HTTPS proxy, TCP, TLS, gRPC, and HTTP/3 traffic. Developers can add, remove, merge, or separate services through Kubernetes resources or annotations, and use annotations to control traffic shares for canary deployments. Emissary stores state in Kubernetes rather than requiring a separate database, with Envoy handling routing and proxying. It can check requests through an external authentication service and a third-party rate limit service, and supports request transformation and client certificate validation, including mutual TLS. A diagnostics service helps investigate configuration issues. Emissary can act as an Istio edge proxy and supports Consul service discovery. It is self-hosted on Linux; Helm is the recommended installation method, with Kubernetes YAML also documented. The project is intended for cloud-native organizations where developers operate their services, as well as developers and operators.

Kong Gateway has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.