Higress
Higress is an open-source AI-native API gateway built on Istio and Envoy for governing LLM APIs, AI agents, MCP servers, and cloud-native traffic.
What Higress is
Higress is an open-source AI-native API gateway built on Istio and Envoy for governing LLM APIs, AI agents, MCP servers, and cloud-native traffic. Its AI Gateway centralizes access to model APIs and MCP services, with unified routing, protocol conversion, load balancing, and fallback. Higress says it supports governance for more than 100 mainstream language models. It can convert HTTP traffic to MCP and proxy native MCP services. Traffic controls include token-based quotas, rate limiting, API key pool rotation, and consumer authentication. Caching can reuse inference results precisely or semantically for similar or repeated questions. Security features include prompt-attack detection, sensitive-content identification, privacy protection, and output filtering. The wider API gateway covers traffic, microservice, and security functions, including service exposure and API lifecycle management. Higress supports HTTP, HTTP2, HTTPS, GRPC, GRPCS, TCP, and Dubbo. It offers local Docker deployment without signup and deployment outside Kubernetes. The community edition is free and self-hosted, with community support and documentation; users handle stability and performance.
Good
- Supports unified governance for over 100 language models
- Provides quotas, rate limits, and key pool rotation
- Includes prompt-attack and sensitive-content protections
- Local Docker deployment is available without signup
Watch out
- Community users handle stability and performance
- Community support is limited to documentation and community channels
Who it suits
Higress suits teams that need a self-hosted gateway for AI services and cloud-native traffic. It may also fit those needing MCP, Kubernetes gateway, or API lifecycle capabilities.
Verdict
Higress combines AI traffic governance with broader API gateway functions and offers a free self-hosted community edition. Teams should account for operating and maintaining that deployment themselves.
Plans and prices
From Higress's own pricing page, checked 15 Oct 2026.
| Plan | Price | What it gives you |
|---|---|---|
| Alibaba Cloud AI Gateway Serverless Standard | Priced on request | Fully managed · automatic request-based scaling · LLM, Agent and MCP support · Starts at ¥0; usage-based billing |
| Higress Community | Free | Self-hosted · self-managed stability and performance · community support · Free & Open Source, Community Support |
| Higress Community Edition | Free | self-hosted · community support and documentation · user handles stability and performance |
| Alibaba Cloud AI Gateway Serverless Enterprise | Priced on request | 99.95% SLA · dedicated endpoints · custom domains · transport encryption · Usage-based commercial service; price not shown |
| Feitian Exclusive Edition | Priced on request | Elastic resources · negotiated SLA · commercial support · enterprise integrations · Negotiated on demand |
The facts
Each one read from Higress's own pages, with the date it was checked.
What it does
- AI gateway
- It unifies access to domestic and international large-language-model providers and supports model load balancing, fallback, token controls, caching and AI observability.checked 15 Oct 2026
- AI model integrations
- The integration directory uses a unified OpenAI-compatible protocol to manage, route and protect multiple mainstream model services.checked 15 Oct 2026
- API and SDK
- The public repository includes API definitions, Kubernetes and Gateway API resources, and links to a Wasm Plugin Golang SDK.checked 15 Oct 2026
- API gateway features
- The API Gateway combines traffic, microservice, and security gateway functions and provides service exposure, traffic control, and API lifecycle management.checked 8 Oct 2026
- Caching
- It supports precise and semantic caching of inference results to reduce token use and latency for similar or repeated questions.checked 8 Oct 2026
- Capterra pricing status
- Capterra lists pricing as contact vendor, with no free trial and no free version included in its directory record.checked 15 Oct 2026
- CNCF status
- CNCF announced that Higress passed its TOC vote and joined the CNCF Sandbox on March 25, 2026.checked 15 Oct 2026
- Deployment
- A Docker all-in-one deployment exposes the console on port 8001, HTTP gateway on 8080 and HTTPS gateway on 8443.checked 15 Oct 2026
- Documentation depth
- Documentation covers quickstarts, Helm configuration, plugin usage, CRDs, service discovery, protocol conversion, operations and contributor workflows.checked 15 Oct 2026
- Dubbo conversion
- An Http2Rpc custom resource maps HTTP paths and methods to Dubbo service methods and can use query parameters or the entire request body as method input.checked 15 Oct 2026
- Extensions
- Custom Wasm plugins can be developed in Go, Rust, or JavaScript, and the product page describes sandbox isolation for memory safety and hot updates.checked 8 Oct 2026
- Governance
- Higress is identified as a CNCF Sandbox project hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.checked 8 Oct 2026
- Independent analysis
- Podo Stack characterizes Higress as an Envoy and Istio-based ingress controller that expanded into an AI gateway and MCP host.checked 15 Oct 2026
- Kubernetes ingress
- It supports Kubernetes Ingress and Gateway API resources and is compatible with many NGINX Ingress annotations.checked 15 Oct 2026
- Kubernetes installation
- The documented Kubernetes installation uses Helm and supports local Kind clusters as well as standard clusters.checked 15 Oct 2026
- Kubernetes integrations
- The documentation describes Kubernetes Ingress and Gateway API support and integrations with Nacos, ZooKeeper, Consul, Eureka, Dubbo, and Sentinel.checked 8 Oct 2026
- Latest release
- GitHub lists v2.2.5 as the latest release, with 133 updates including 21 new features and 72 bug fixes.checked 15 Oct 2026
- Licence
- The main Higress project is licensed under Apache License 2.0, while bundled components can carry separate licences.checked 15 Oct 2026
- Limit: open-source operations
- GatewayScore says the open-source edition has no SLA and leaves multi-AZ deployment, monitoring, alerting and other enterprise operations to the adopter.checked 15 Oct 2026
- Limit: operational complexity
- The same evaluation judged Higress better suited to Kubernetes platform teams than developers expecting a conventional plain go mod installation.checked 15 Oct 2026
- Limit: reliability defaults
- GatewayScore reports that failover is disabled by default, retry behavior is shallow and retries apply only to non-streaming requests.checked 15 Oct 2026
- Limit: source build
- An independent 2026 evaluation reported that a clean source installation failed because the expected external/go-control-plane submodule path was missing.checked 15 Oct 2026
- MCP management
- The gateway can proxy native MCP servers and convert HTTP services to MCP for centralized tool access.checked 15 Oct 2026
The company
- Company facts
- The opened project and CNCF pages do not state a separate Higress legal entity, headquarters, employee count, founding year or external funding total.checked 15 Oct 2026
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