Edge Stack vs. Emissary-Ingress

Widely Adopted Open Source API Gateway and K8s Ingress

The open source Emissary-ingress and commercially supported Ambassador Edge Stack are Kubernetes-native API Gateways that deliver scalability, security, and simplicity for some of the world's largest Kubernetes installations

Ambassador Edge Stack

A widely-adopted and production-ready enterprise API gateway and K8s Ingress solution. Built on the CNCF Emissary-Ingress project, with extended security and rate limiting features. Includes mission-critical support with an SLA for your team.

Emissary-Ingress

An open source Kubernetes-native API gateway based on Envoy Proxy. Built to enable both global configuration for ops and a decentralized workflow for developers. Created by Ambassador Labs, and now a CNCF Incubation project.

Edge Stack compared to the open source Emissary-Ingress

FeatureAmbassador Edge StackEmissary-Ingress OSS
Support
Ambassador Edge Stack
available
Emissary-Ingress OSS
unavailable
Developer Portal with Swagger / OpenAPI support
Ambassador Edge Stack
available
Emissary-Ingress OSS
unavailable
API Keys
Ambassador Edge Stack
available
Emissary-Ingress OSS
unavailable
Automated Config Analysis
Ambassador Edge Stack
available
Emissary-Ingress OSS
unavailable
Service Catalog
Ambassador Edge Stack
available
Emissary-Ingress OSS
unavailable
Filters and filter management (plug-ins)
Ambassador Edge Stack
available
Emissary-Ingress OSS
unavailable
Authentication: OAuth, JWT, OpenID Connect integration*
Ambassador Edge Stack
available
Emissary-Ingress OSS
partial
Web Application Firewalls
Ambassador Edge Stack
available
Emissary-Ingress OSS
unavailable
Rate Limiting*
Ambassador Edge Stack
available
Emissary-Ingress OSS
partial
Service mesh integration
Ambassador Edge Stack
available
Emissary-Ingress OSS
available
Observability: distributed tracing, real-time L7 metrics
Ambassador Edge Stack
available
Emissary-Ingress OSS
available
Circuit breakers, automatic retries, timeouts
Ambassador Edge Stack
available
Emissary-Ingress OSS
available
L4/L7 load balancing and routing for HTTP/1, HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, WebSockets, TCP, gRPC
Ambassador Edge Stack
available
Emissary-Ingress OSS
available

Rate Limiting*. Emissary-Ingress can rate limit via API calls to an external rate limit service you provide. Edge Stack has built-in, advanced rate limit capabilities.

OAuth, JWT, OpenID Connect integration*. Emissary-Ingress can do basic authentication via an external auth service you provide. Edge Stack offers comprehensive, built-in authentication features.

Get Ambassador Edge Stack

Emissary-Ingress

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