Higress
7.7#2 in api gateway softwareFree planFree planWebAPILinuxmacOS
VisitHigress vs ngrok
What both publish
| Fact | Higress | ngrok |
|---|---|---|
| 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. | ngrok was founded in 2015, is based in San Francisco and is listed by Crunchbase at 51–100 employees. |
| Documentation depth | Documentation covers quickstarts, Helm configuration, plugin usage, CRDs, service discovery, protocol conversion, operations and contributor workflows. | The documentation includes quickstarts, conceptual guides, examples, Traffic Policy recipes and API reference pages. |
| Licence | The main Higress project is licensed under Apache License 2.0, while bundled components can carry separate licences. | The hosted ngrok service is proprietary under its terms, while several official SDK, Terraform and operator repositories are MIT licensed. |
| Observability | The AI statistics plugin records token counts, first-token latency, total request latency and logs across gateway, route, service and model dimensions. | The platform logs configuration changes, authentication events and API calls and can stream events to SIEM systems. |
Higress plans
- 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
ngrok plans
- FreeFree
- Hobbyist$10 a month
- Pay-as-you-go$20 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
Pick Higress if…
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.
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.