Open-source alternatives to Kong

ToolJet is a low-code development platform designed for building and deploying internal business applications. It provides a visual interface where users can drag and drop components to design layouts, connect to various data sources, and execute custom logic. The platform is built on a containerized architecture, ensuring that applications remain portable and consistent across different cloud and server environments. The platform distinguishes itself through integrated artificial intelligence capabilities that assist in the generation of user interfaces, database schemas, and data queries fr

Meshery is a service mesh management plane and cloud native infrastructure orchestrator. It provides a visual design-as-code environment for modeling microservices and infrastructure components through declarative blueprints, functioning as a centralized platform for designing, deploying, and managing service mesh infrastructure. The platform is distinguished by its ability to translate visual designs into active deployments and its use of gRPC-based adapters to integrate with diverse infrastructure providers. It features a multi-tenant architecture that manages shared workspaces and role-bas

InsForge is a backend-as-a-service platform that provides an integrated suite of tools for managing relational databases, identity provision, object storage, and serverless compute. It functions as an open-source identity provider and a PostgreSQL database manager featuring integrated vector storage and row-level security. The platform serves as an LLM orchestration gateway, offering a unified endpoint to route requests across various AI providers through an OpenAI-compatible interface. It enables AI-driven application generation and connects AI agents to backend resources using a standardize

This project is an API gateway and ingress controller designed to manage traffic, security, and service connectivity within Kubernetes environments. It operates as a controller that monitors cluster state to reconcile gateway configurations with desired infrastructure definitions, ensuring that network policies and routing rules remain consistent across distributed deployments. The system distinguishes itself through a modular request pipeline that allows for the injection of custom logic to handle transformations, security checks, and logging. It supports declarative infrastructure managemen

Dokploy is a self-hosted platform-as-a-service designed to simplify the deployment and management of containerized applications and databases. It provides a centralized control plane that decouples administrative management from application workloads, allowing users to oversee infrastructure across multiple server nodes through a unified web interface or a command-line tool. The platform distinguishes itself through an extensive library of pre-configured application templates, enabling the rapid deployment of databases, identity providers, and various productivity or development tools. It sup

Shenyu is a microservices API gateway designed to route external traffic to backend services using dynamic rules and protocol conversion. It functions as a central entry point that manages traffic flow through a combination of an API traffic governor, a distributed configuration manager, and a security layer for protecting endpoints. The project features a dynamic plugin architecture that allows for the injection of custom request processing logic without restarting the server. It utilizes a distributed coordination service to synchronize routing and policy updates across a gateway cluster in

The Cloud-Native API Gateway and AI Gateway

Traefik is a cloud-native edge router and API gateway designed to manage service communication and traffic flow across distributed infrastructure. It functions as a dynamic service proxy that automatically discovers backend services and configures routing rules in real time, eliminating the need for manual restarts or complex configuration updates. By integrating directly with container orchestrators and service registries, it maintains a consistent state for network traffic, load balancing, and security policy enforcement. The project distinguishes itself through its deep integration with di

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

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

Envoy Gateway is an open source project for managing Envoy Proxy as a standalone or Kubernetes-based application gateway. Gateway API resources are used to dynamically provision and configure the managed Envoy Proxies.

Mosn is a multi-protocol network proxy designed for cloud-native service meshes, API gateway management, and distributed load balancing. It forwards layer four and layer seven traffic across diverse network protocols to ensure interoperability between distributed cloud components. The project is distinguished by its ability to perform zero-downtime proxy updates, replacing the running binary while maintaining existing network connections. It further supports dynamic proxy extension, allowing custom request processing logic to be added via external plugins or compiled Go modules without restar

dubbo-admin is a web-based administration console and management interface for the Apache Dubbo ecosystem. It serves as a centralized tool for configuring and monitoring services, providers, and consumers across distributed microservices architectures. The project functions as a traffic control plane and service governance tool, enabling the implementation of request routing rules, canary deployments, and traffic regulation. It provides a dedicated interface for orchestrating service mesh data planes and proxy configurations to connect services within a unified network management layer. The

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

mcp-context-forge is a Model Context Protocol federation gateway that unifies diverse AI tool servers and APIs into a single consistent interface for discovery and execution. It acts as a centralized proxy that aggregates multiple servers and APIs, allowing AI agents to access and invoke a unified set of tools, prompts, and resources. The project distinguishes itself through a multi-protocol translation bridge that converts communication between standard I/O, SSE, gRPC, and REST to enable interoperability between disparate tool servers. It includes a comprehensive LLM evaluation framework for

This project is a serverless full-stack framework and infrastructure-as-code tool designed for deploying and managing full-stack applications. It functions as a cloud-native deployment orchestrator that synchronizes application code and environment variables across frontend content delivery networks and backend API endpoints. The platform enables the deployment of complete application architectures on either private or cloud infrastructure. It allows for the orchestration of self-hosted applications without the need to manage traditional virtual servers. The system covers serverless infrastr

go-coffeeshop is an event-driven microservices architecture designed to manage the end-to-end lifecycle of customer orders. It coordinates independent services using asynchronous messaging patterns to handle business workflows, background processing, and order fulfillment tracking. The project utilizes a HashiCorp stack for infrastructure, employing Nomad, Consul, and Vault for service orchestration and secret storage. Infrastructure is managed through declarative automation using Terraform to ensure consistent and repeatable deployment of compute resources and networking. The system include

This project is a service mesh platform designed to manage, secure, and observe service-to-service communication within Kubernetes clusters. It functions as a control plane that orchestrates transparent sidecar proxies, which intercept and manage network traffic to provide reliable connectivity for microservices. By automating the injection of these proxies, the platform ensures that infrastructure-level policies are applied consistently across all workloads without requiring manual configuration changes. The platform distinguishes itself through its focus on zero-trust security and cross-clu

Chalice is a framework for building and deploying serverless applications and REST APIs on AWS Lambda using Python. It functions as an infrastructure-as-code generator, mapping application logic and routing definitions directly to cloud compute resources while automating the provisioning and management of the underlying environment. The framework distinguishes itself by analyzing source code to automatically construct the minimum necessary security permissions, ensuring least-privilege access for all deployed functions. It supports modular development through blueprint-based organization and

Agno is an agent operating system designed to manage the lifecycle, tool execution, and persistent state of autonomous agents across distributed infrastructure. It provides a unified runtime environment that wraps diverse agent frameworks into a consistent, interoperable protocol, allowing developers to build and deploy complex multi-agent systems that coordinate tasks and delegate sub-processes. The platform distinguishes itself through a robust governance and orchestration layer that includes human-in-the-loop approval gates, role-based access control, and a centralized API gateway. It feat

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

Infisical is a centralized secrets management platform designed to store, synchronize, and control access to sensitive credentials and configuration data across distributed development, staging, and production environments. It employs client-side encryption to ensure that secrets remain unreadable to the underlying storage infrastructure, while providing a hierarchical permission model to govern both user and machine access. The platform distinguishes itself through dynamic credential provisioning, which generates short-lived access tokens that are automatically revoked after use. It supports

Nomad is a distributed workload orchestrator and infrastructure automation platform designed to manage the lifecycle of applications across large-scale, heterogeneous environments. It functions as a multi-cloud orchestration engine, providing a unified control plane to deploy, scale, and govern containers, virtual machines, and legacy applications. By utilizing declarative job specifications, the system ensures infrastructure convergence and maintains the desired state across distributed data centers and geographic regions. The platform distinguishes itself through a flexible, plugin-based ar

Terraform is a declarative infrastructure-as-code tool designed to manage the lifecycle of cloud and on-premises resources. It functions as a workflow engine that reconciles a defined desired state against real-world infrastructure, using a persistent state-tracking layer to maintain consistency and visibility across distributed environments. By mapping infrastructure components into a directed acyclic graph, the system calculates the optimal order for provisioning, updating, or destroying resources. The platform is distinguished by its extensible plugin-based architecture, which decouples co

Twenty is a headless customer relationship management framework that enables developers to build, version, and deploy custom business applications using code. By utilizing a declarative approach to data modeling, the platform allows for the definition of custom objects, fields, and complex relationships directly within the source code. This schema-driven architecture automatically generates corresponding REST and GraphQL APIs, ensuring that data structures and interface components remain synchronized across development and production environments. The platform distinguishes itself through a m

Incus is a unified orchestration platform for managing system containers, OCI application containers, and virtual machines through a single control plane. It brings together cluster infrastructure management, secure multi-tenancy, software-defined networking, and pluggable storage backend orchestration into one cohesive system exposed via a full REST API and command-line interface. What distinguishes Incus is its ability to run multiple instance types side by side—full Linux system containers, OCI application containers, and QEMU virtual machines—all managed with consistent tooling. Networkin

pyinfra is an agentless infrastructure automation framework that turns declarative Python code into idempotent shell commands to manage servers, containers, and local machines over SSH without requiring any pre-installed software on target hosts. It operates by comparing the desired state of a system against its current state, using a dry-run simulation mode to preview changes and a fact-based conditional execution engine to gather host attributes at runtime and control which operations run. The tool compiles Python operations into optimized shell commands and executes them in parallel across