Higress vs Tencent Cloud API Gateway

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.

Tencent Cloud API Gateway manages APIs from creation and testing through release, operation, and deactivation. It supports HTTP and HTTPS, with testing, staging, and production environments, versioning, and rollback. Users can set per-second call limits and monitor request counts, outbound public traffic, response times, and frontend and backend errors. HMAC key-pair authentication uses keys issued by the gateway, and SSL certificates secure data transfer at the API frontend. APIs can be published as purchasable products through API Market, and the service integrates with Tencent Cloud SCF and COS. Dedicated instances connect to VPC and Direct Connect, while shared instances cannot connect to VPC. Shared instances support requests up to 16 MB and 500 QPS per service; requests may be discarded at the QPS limit. New users receive a first-year monthly allowance of one million calls and 1 GB of public outbound traffic, with unused monthly allowance not carried forward. The service is cloud-deployed and available through web and API platforms. Its listed pricing note is From $1.90/mo; a separate paid-from value is 0.4 /mo. The shared-instance plan lists free, with excess calls and outbound traffic pay-as-you-go.