Envoy Gateway vs ngrok

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.

ngrok is a cloud networking platform that secures, transforms, and routes traffic to services wherever they run. Its agent sends traffic through secure tunnels without requiring firewall changes. Traffic Policy uses CEL-based rules to route requests, authenticate them, apply rate limits or web application firewall controls, and reject them. Supported traffic includes HTTP, TLS, and TCP, including WebSockets, gRPC, SSH, Postgres, MQTT, and Minecraft. The Integrations Hub offers integrations and guides for areas such as SSO, databases, Kubernetes, OAuth, webhooks, and web servers. ngrok also verifies webhook signatures for more than 70 providers, including Stripe, GitHub, Twilio, Slack, and Shopify. The free plan includes $5 one-time usage, up to 3 online endpoints, up to 1GB data transfer, up to 20k HTTP/S requests, and one team member. Paid access starts at $10/mo. On Hobbyist, endpoints stop working when usage credit runs out, until the billing cycle ends and credit resets. ngrok lists region pinning across the United States, Europe, Asia Pacific, Australia, India, Japan, and South America.