Envoy Gateway vs Higress

Envoy Gateway is a free, open-source application gateway for managing Envoy Proxy in standalone or Kubernetes-based deployments. It provisions and configures proxies through Kubernetes Gateway API resources, extending the API to expose Envoy features. Traffic management includes rate limiting, retries, circuit breaking, timeouts and failover. Security options include mTLS, JWT-based access control, OIDC integration and API-key authorization; listed authentication methods also include Basic Auth and external authorization. Envoy Gateway supports TLS termination and can attach an OCSP response from a Gateway certificate Secret during a TLS handshake. Metrics, access logging and distributed tracing are among its observability features. Installation options include Helm, Argo CD, Flux CD and Kubernetes YAML, though the quickstart requires a Kubernetes cluster. The project lists HTTP, HTTPS, gRPC, TLS, TCP and UDP support. Integrations and ecosystem projects include Envoy AI Gateway, Kuadrant, Knative, KServe and KEDA. Community help is directed through Envoy Slack, GitHub discussions and issues, and community meetings. Documentation cautions that the latest release includes recent main-branch commits and might not be stable.

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.