Higress vs Lura

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.

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.