This topic compares AI Gateway and the open source version of Higress in terms of AI capabilities, cost, stability, performance, security and compliance, and microservice and API management.
Capability dimension | Capability | AI Gateway | Open source Higress |
Basic information | Version description | Provides a unified proxy for model APIs, MCP Server, and Agent APIs. Offers rich integration, security, and administration capabilities. | Includes the open source capabilities of AI Gateway. |
Scenarios | Ready to use out of the box. It has advantages over the community version in stability, performance, cloud product integration, and ease of use. It also provides commercial service support through tickets and DingTalk groups. | Requires users to have development and maintenance skills. Users are responsible for ensuring stability, performance, cloud product integration, and ease of use. | |
AI capabilities | Proxy | Support | Supported |
Multi-model grayscale release | Supported | Supported | |
Failover between multiple models | Support | Support | |
Token quota management and throttling | Supported | Supported | |
Routing configuration authentication | Supported. Provides richer authentication algorithms, such as | Supported | |
Consumer authentication | Supported. Provides finer-grained authentication with the MCP tool. | Supported | |
Web search | Supported | Supported | |
Enterprise-grade observability | Supported | Self-built | |
API-to-MCP | Supported | Supported | |
MCP protocol offloading | Supported | Supported | |
MCP marketplace | Supported | Supported | |
MCP tool assembly | Supported | Self-built | |
Cost | Fully managed, O&M-free | Supported | Not supported |
System setup and scaling | Support | Self-built | |
Stability | Multi-zone deployment | Supported | Self-built |
Automatic fault detection and recovery | Supported | Not supported | |
Throttling and degradation | Supports throttling based on tokens, number of requests, and concurrent requests. | Self-built | |
Monitoring and alerts | Supported | Self-built | |
SLA | 99.99% | Not supported | |
Performance | Kernel optimization | 90%+ | Self-tuned |
Integrated software and hardware | 50%+ | Not supported | |
Security and compliance | WAF protection | Deeply integrated with Alibaba Cloud WAF. | Self-built |
OIDC authentication | Deeply integrated with Alibaba Cloud IDaaS. | Self-built | |
Encrypted credentials | Deeply integrated with Alibaba Cloud KMS. | Self-built | |
AIGC protection (security fence) | Deeply integrated with Alibaba Cloud Content Moderation. | Self-built |