Open-source alternatives to Janus

Cilium is a networking, security, and observability platform for containerized environments that leverages kernel-level data paths to process traffic. By executing programs directly within the Linux kernel, it provides high-performance packet filtering, routing, and load balancing without the need for traditional user-space proxies or context switching. The platform distinguishes itself through identity-based security enforcement, which filters traffic based on service labels rather than volatile IP addresses. It integrates containerized workloads with external physical or virtual infrastruct

Pingora is a Rust-based framework for building high-performance network services, including HTTP reverse proxies, layer seven load balancers, and TLS termination proxies. It serves as an asynchronous network library designed to intercept and route HTTP, gRPC, and WebSocket traffic between clients and upstream backend servers. The project enables zero-downtime service updates by handing over listening sockets between processes during binary or configuration upgrades. It utilizes a programmable multi-phase pipeline to modify request and response bodies and headers, and it provides a pluggable T

Traefik is a cloud-native load balancer and dynamic reverse proxy designed for microservices traffic routing. It automatically discovers services and generates network routes by listening to infrastructure changes in orchestrators and service registries. The project distinguishes itself through auto-configuring service routing, which eliminates manual configuration by updating routing rules in real time as infrastructure scales. It also provides automated SSL certificate management, utilizing ACME-based automation to request and renew certificates from remote authorities. Additional capabili

Neutrino is a software load balancer(SLB)

Express Gateway is a centralized API gateway built on the Express.js framework, designed to serve as a single entry point for microservices architectures. It manages incoming network traffic by routing requests to backend services based on defined path-based rules while enforcing security policies and authentication protocols at the edge. The system distinguishes itself through a configuration-driven approach that utilizes a centralized definition file to dictate routing logic and policy application. It features a hot-reloading engine that allows for real-time updates to routing rules and sec

Fabio is a network gateway that provides reverse proxying, layer 7 traffic management, and automated service discovery mapping. It functions as an HTTP reverse proxy, a gRPC and TCP proxy, and a service discovery gateway to route incoming traffic to healthy backend instances. The project distinguishes itself through deep integration with service registries, specifically acting as a Consul load balancer to automatically synchronize routing tables and update destination targets. It manages diverse traffic types using SNI-based routing for raw TCP streams and maintains full protocol compatibilit

HAProxy is a high-performance TCP and HTTP proxy that distributes traffic across multiple backend servers to ensure availability and fault tolerance for critical services. It operates in either TCP or HTTP mode, with an event-driven, single-threaded reactor that handles tens of thousands of connections without context switching, and supports kernel-level data transfer to minimize memory usage and latency. What distinguishes HAProxy is its configuration-file-first design, where all load-balancing rules and runtime behavior are defined in a declarative text file parsed at startup. It embeds a L

Kong is a high-performance API gateway and service connectivity platform designed to manage, secure, and monitor traffic across distributed microservices and hybrid cloud environments. It functions as a centralized control plane for service governance, providing essential traffic routing, load balancing, and request transformation capabilities to ensure consistent policy enforcement across all service endpoints. The platform distinguishes itself through a modular plugin architecture and a declarative configuration engine that allows infrastructure behavior to be defined via version-controlled

An HTTP router and reverse proxy for service composition, including use cases like Kubernetes Ingress

3scale API Gateway

Lura is an API gateway and traffic router that directs network requests to backend services using a configurable pipeline of processing steps. It functions as a backend load balancer and a request middleware engine designed to validate, modify, and transform incoming requests and responses. The system specializes in API response aggregation, allowing it to execute concurrent requests to multiple backend services and merge the results into a single unified output. This includes the ability to perform dynamic response mapping by renaming fields and filtering data to optimize the final client pa

Envoy is a cloud-native service proxy and distributed system traffic manager designed to route and control network traffic between services and clients. It operates as an L4 and L7 network proxy, managing communication at the edge and middle levels of a distributed cloud environment. The project provides capabilities for API gateway implementation and edge proxy routing to direct external requests to internal services. It serves as a foundation for service mesh traffic management and cloud-native load balancing to ensure high availability across backend instances. The system also includes to

Zuul is an API gateway service that manages incoming network traffic to backend services. It serves as a routing layer and edge security proxy that provides centralized control over security and monitoring for microservices. The project implements a dynamic request router that maps incoming paths to backend locations using configurable rules that can be updated at runtime. It also includes a circuit breaker implementation to monitor backend failure rates and stop traffic to failing services to prevent cascading outages. The gateway provides a filter-based request pipeline for processing traf

Open source API management platform

A cloud native Identity & Access Proxy / API (IAP) and Access Control Decision API that authenticates, authorizes, and mutates incoming HTTP(s) requests. Inspired by the BeyondCorp / Zero Trust white paper. Written in Go.

The Cloud-Native API Gateway and AI Gateway

IBM API Connect Microgateway framework, built on Node.js & Nginx

Tyk is an open-source API gateway written in Go that routes, secures, and monitors network traffic across REST, GraphQL, TCP, and gRPC protocols. It functions as a multi-protocol proxy designed to deliver requests to backend services while managing the end-to-end API lifecycle. The system distinguishes itself through a plugin-based architecture that allows for the injection of custom logic into the request and response middleware chain. It also features native Kubernetes integration, operating as an ingress controller that uses operators and custom resource definitions to deploy security poli

Programmatic load balancer backed by Etcd

WSO2 API Manager is a complete platform for building, integrating, and exposing your digital services as managed APIs in the cloud, on-premise, and hybrid architectures to drive your digital transformation strategy.

Langroid is a multi-agent orchestration framework and tool integration suite designed for building complex AI applications. It serves as a multi-modal integration layer that connects diverse local and remote language models with an agentic retrieval-augmented generation system. The project distinguishes itself through a collaborative message-exchange paradigm, allowing specialized agents to delegate tasks hierarchically and coordinate via structured communication. It features an advanced state management system for conversational AI, including the ability to rewind and prune conversation hist