Higress vs N42 Gateway
Higress
higress.ioN42 Gateway
github.comSide by side
| Figure | Higress | N42 Gateway |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 5 | 0 |
| Spec score · Kubernetes Ingress Controllers | 8.6 (#4) | 7.1 (#19) |
| Deployment | A Docker all-in-one deployment exposes the console on port 8001, HTTP gateway on 8080 and HTTPS gateway on 8443. | The project documents building a Docker image and deploying it with Helm. |
| Support | The community edition includes community support and documentation; the dedicated commercial edition lists ticket, DingTalk group, and offline support. | Users can ask questions in the #n42-gateway Kubernetes Slack channel and GitHub Discussions. |
Plans
Higress
- Alibaba Cloud AI Gateway Serverless StandardPriced on request
- Higress CommunityFree
- Higress Community EditionFree
- Alibaba Cloud AI Gateway Serverless EnterprisePriced on request
- Feitian Exclusive EditionPriced on request
In their own words
Higress
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.
N42 Gateway
N42 Gateway has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.