Envoy Gateway vs Lura

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.

Lura is a free, open-source Go library for building stateless API gateways and proxies in cloud-native or on-premises deployments. It combines multiple backend sources behind endpoints, allowing a client to request data through one endpoint and receive only the needed fields. Its proxy can group, wrap, transform, and reduce responses, with an EntityFormatter for response manipulation. The framework is organized around configuration, router, and proxy packages, with helpers for encoding, logging, and service discovery. Documented middleware covers balancing, concurrent requests, request and response logging, response merging, and HTTP URL patterns. Lura supports HTTP(S), while adapters for Thrift, gRPC, AMQP, and NATS can be added. The router layer can use other routers, frameworks, or middleware, and generic libraries support plugins such as OAuth layers. It is compiled from source and requires Go. Pricing is free.