LiteSpeed Ingress Controller vs NGINX Gateway Fabric

LiteSpeed Ingress Controller is the Kubernetes ingress component in LiteSpeed Web ADC, a software HTTP load balancer and application delivery controller. The solution can run on private dedicated hardware, hosted environments, or cloud infrastructure. The controller supports the Kubernetes Gateway API and installs through Helm, using native ingress without sidecars or Kubernetes modifications. It supports HTTP versions including HTTP/2 and HTTP/3. Built-in LiteSpeed Cache is intended to accelerate web applications, and its Web Application Firewall can use ModSecurity rules and templates. ZeroConf lets Kubernetes configuration changes take effect without restarting the load balancer. Realtime statistics and controller commands are available in the Web ADC WebAdmin Console. Web ADC works with all web servers, though LiteSpeed Web Server is preferred for the backend. The default LoadBalancer installation exposes the service to the internet and load-balances all Ingress definitions; the documentation recommends Kubernetes cert-manager to manage TLS secrets for HTTPS. Helm installation includes full 24-7 support. Listed Web ADC plans are billed monthly: Small is $65 a month for one worker, Medium $130 a month for two workers, Large $260 a month for four workers, and Ultimate $520 a month with configurable workers.

NGINX Gateway Fabric is a self-hosted Kubernetes implementation of the Gateway API, using NGINX as its data plane for load balancing, reverse proxying, and API gateway use cases. Its control plane translates Gateway API resources into NGINX configuration. Supported resource coverage includes GatewayClass, Gateway, HTTPRoute, GRPCRoute, ReferenceGrant, TLSRoute, TCPRoute, UDPRoute, and BackendTLSPolicy, though the support level varies by resource. Traffic features include HTTP and TLS routing, redirects, rewrites, request mirroring, session persistence, and rate limiting. Security documentation covers HTTPS with cert-manager, mutual TLS, basic authentication, OpenID Connect, external authentication, and JWT authentication. Monitoring examples use Prometheus and Grafana; tracing uses OpenTelemetry collectors, including Jaeger examples. The free NGINX Open Source data-plane plan costs nothing. Installation is available through Helm from an OCI registry or from source, with Gateway API resources installed beforehand. Version 2.7.2 requires Kubernetes 1.32 or later; documented images are available for amd64 and arm64. Support is directed to GitHub issues and the NGINX Community Forum.