Open-source Azure API Management alternatives

Kong, also called Kong Gateway, is a cloud-native and platform-agnostic API gateway that has expanded to cover LLM and MCP traffic. It is written in Lua, released under the Apache-2.0 license, and extended through plugins. It proxies, routes, load balances and health checks traffic and handles authentication, sitting as a central layer in front of microservices or conventional APIs.

For AI workloads it adds multi-LLM support, semantic security, and security and analytics for MCP traffic. Kong runs natively on Kubernetes through its official Ingress Controller. The quickstart uses docker-compose, adds authentication to an API in a few minutes, and a Docker procedure covers a DB-less mode, with other distributions listed on the official installation page.

You can run Kong on your own infrastructure, in the cloud, on bare metal or in containers, or sign up for a free trial of the cloud-hosted Kong Konnect. It suits platform and API teams managing many services who need a gateway with a plugin ecosystem and an upgrade path to AI traffic management.

Apache APISIX is a dynamic, real-time API gateway that handles traffic management for microservice architectures. It provides load balancing, dynamic upstreams, canary releases, circuit breaking, authentication and observability, and it can manage both north-south traffic and east-west traffic between services. It can also run as a Kubernetes ingress controller.

APISIX is built on NGINX and etcd. Compared with traditional gateways, it supports dynamic routing and hot-loading of plugins, which suits API management in microservices. Through its plugin system it can act as an AI gateway, proxying traffic to different LLM providers through a single interface, with load balancing, retries and fallbacks across models, and token-based rate limiting to control cost. An mcp-bridge plugin converts stdio-based MCP servers into HTTP SSE services.

The project is developed under the Apache Software Foundation, written mainly in Lua, and released under the Apache 2.0 license. A quickstart script requires Docker and starts APISIX together with its etcd configuration store, after which routes can be created through the Admin API. It is deployed on infrastructure you control.

Tyk Gateway is a cloud-native, open-source API and AI gateway that handles REST, GraphQL, TCP, gRPC and Model Context Protocol traffic. The project describes it as batteries-included with no feature lockout, so organizations can apply rate limits, authentication, analytics and microservice patterns in one place.

The open-source gateway can be run with Docker and Docker Compose alongside Redis, using a tyk.conf configuration file and an apps folder for API definitions. Beyond the gateway there are two commercial routes: Tyk Self Managed, an enterprise API management platform with a management control plane, GUI and developer portal, and Tyk Cloud, a hosted version of that platform with a free trial.

Tyk is written in Go and has been developed since 2014. Its license is stated in the repository, and documentation covers the quick start, the Gateway API, and the MCP and AI gateway features. A community forum and blog complement the docs. It targets teams that want to publish and secure internal or public APIs.

Higress is a cloud-native API gateway based on Istio and Envoy. It can be extended with Wasm plugins written in Go, Rust or JavaScript, and comes with dozens of ready-to-use general-purpose plugins plus an out-of-the-box management console.

Its AI gateway capabilities support mainstream model providers, and it can host Model Context Protocol servers through its plugin mechanism so that AI agents can call tools and services. An openapi-to-mcp tool converts OpenAPI specifications into remote MCP servers, and both LLM APIs and MCP APIs are managed together. A Docker quick start exposes the console on port 8001 and the gateway on ports 8080 and 8443.

Higress originated at Alibaba to deal with connection disruption during gateway reloads and to improve gRPC and Dubbo load balancing, and it is now developed as a vendor-neutral CNCF project. The code is written in Go and licensed under Apache-2.0. Documentation includes a blog, roadmap, developer guide and a Wasm plugin hub.

KrakenD Community Edition is the open-source distribution of the KrakenD API gateway, written in Go and licensed under Apache-2.0. The gateway sits in front of backend services to help teams adopt microservices and backend-for-frontend patterns while securing communications. It is stateless, so each node works independently in a cluster with no central coordination.

Configuration is declarative, which fits a GitOps approach to managing the API lifecycle. The gateway can aggregate, compose and filter content from several APIs into one response, transform formats such as XML to JSON and back, and make concurrent calls to speed up responses. Security features include zero-trust policies, CORS, OAuth, JWT, HSTS and protections against clickjacking and XSS.

It is platform-agnostic, running in cloud-native environments such as Kubernetes or on-premises, and it avoids lock-in by leaving telemetry and identity to existing tools. Project topics also mention GraphQL, NATS, async handling and AI gateway use. It decouples clients from existing services, so new APIs can be created without changing current API contracts.

Orange is an API gateway built on OpenResty, the Nginx and Lua platform, aimed at teams that want API monitoring and management capabilities built directly into their reverse proxy layer. It is designed for environments running on OpenResty rather than a general-purpose gateway independent of Nginx.

It is built using the Lor web framework for Lua and stores its configuration and plugin data in a MySQL database. After installation, Orange exposes both a dashboard, for monitoring and managing API policies, and a separate API server for programmatic configuration, each running on its own port.

Installation uses LuaRocks to reduce dependency issues across operating systems, requires OpenResty, resty-cli and the Lor framework as prerequisites, and currently does not support macOS for either production or development setups. Orange is written in Lua and released under the MIT license, with documentation available in both English and Chinese.