BFE Ingress Controller
7.2#6 in kubernetes ingress controllersFree planFree planAPILinuxmacOSSelf-hosted
VisitBFE Ingress Controller vs ngrok
What both publish
| Fact | BFE Ingress Controller | ngrok |
|---|---|---|
| Installation | The documentation describes installing from source and provides binary, Go, Snap, and Docker installation paths. | Linux installation supports Apt, Snap and standalone binaries with no runtime dependencies. |
| Integrations | Official documentation names Kubernetes, Prometheus, Jaeger, Fluentd and mainstream layer-4 load balancers as integrations. | Official documentation lists SDKs for Python, Go, Node and Rust and integrations including Okta SSO, Microsoft Entra ID and Datadog. |
| Load balancing | The platform provides global and distributed balancing with zone awareness, zone-failure resilience and overload protection. | Endpoint pooling load-balances traffic across multiple agents and can fail over to healthy backends. |
| Observability | Built-in metrics, logs and distributed tracing are provided for operations and troubleshooting. | The platform logs configuration changes, authentication events and API calls and can stream events to SIEM systems. |
| Platforms | The vendor says BFE runs on Linux, Windows, Mac OS, and almost any platform to which Go compiles; its download page lists Darwin, Linux, and Windows binaries. | The download page provides agents for macOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Docker, Docker Desktop, and Raspberry Pi, plus SDKs and Kubernetes tooling. |
| Product | BFE is an open-source Layer 7 load balancer derived from Baidu’s proprietary Baidu Front End. | ngrok is an all-in-one cloud networking platform that secures, transforms, and routes traffic to services wherever they run. |
| Protocols | BFE supports HTTP, HTTPS, SPDY, HTTP/2, WebSocket, TLS, gRPC and FastCGI, while HTTP/3 is planned. | ngrok supports HTTP, TLS, and TCP, including WebSockets, gRPC, SSH, Postgres, MQTT, and Minecraft traffic. |
| Public API | The management API exposes monitoring, reload and profiling endpoints on port 8421 by default. | The API reference covers endpoints, domains, certificates, Traffic Policy, tunnels, observability, IAM, secrets and Kubernetes operators. |
BFE Ingress Controller plans
- Open sourceFree
ngrok plans
- FreeFree
- Hobbyist$10 a month
- Pay-as-you-go$20 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
Pick BFE Ingress Controller if…
BFE suits operators seeking a self-hosted Layer 7 load balancer with content-based routing and tenant isolation. Its listed integrations and installation paths may also suit teams using the named ecosystem tools.
Pick ngrok if…
The Free and Hobbyist plans are described for developers, solo developers, home labs, and game servers. Pay-as-you-go is presented for teams shipping production traffic.