Emissary-ingress vs Tyk 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.

Tyk Gateway manages API traffic and provides controls for security, governance, auditing, and analytics. It supports REST, SOAP, GraphQL, gRPC, TCP, HTTP/HTTPS, WebSockets, and Server-Sent Events, as well as event-driven and AI APIs. Traffic controls include authentication and authorization, rate limits, quotas, caching, load balancing, logging, tracing, and versioning. Authentication options include API keys, bearer tokens, JWT, OIDC, Basic Auth, client certificates, mTLS, and custom plugins. Deploy it in cloud, on-premises, or hybrid environments, and extend it with plugins, extensions, or pluggable middleware. Tyk Dashboard monitors API performance; Tyk Pump exports analytics for business intelligence tools. Listed integrations include Kubernetes, OpenAPI, OAuth, Open Policy Agent, OpenTelemetry, and CI/CD pipelines. Tyk says it has SOC 2 compliance covering security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. The open-source gateway costs nothing. Core pricing is usage-based; Professional and Enterprise pricing is available by contacting Tyk. Professional includes unlimited gateways, APIs, and monthly requests. Enterprise adds advanced governance and security, premium support, custom SLAs, and multi-region and multi-cloud deployments.