What is Higress?
Managing API traffic in a cloud-native, microservices-based environment can be complex and costly. You're often juggling separate solutions for traffic routing, security, and microservice management. Higress addresses this directly by unifying traffic gateway, microservice gateway, and security gateway functionalities into a single, powerful, AI-enhanced platform. Built on the robust foundation of Istio and Envoy, Higress significantly simplifies deployment, operation, and maintenance, while providing advanced capabilities for the modern, AI-driven application landscape.
Key Features:
🚀 Consolidated Gateway Architecture: Combines traffic gateway, microservice gateway, and security gateway functions. This reduces infrastructure overhead and streamlines management, eliminating the need for separate deployments and configurations. Based on Istio and Envoy, it provides a proven, high-performance data plane.
🤖 AI-Native Capabilities: Provides a comprehensive suite of AI plugins and enhanced backend model orchestration. This allows you to easily integrate AI functionalities into your API workflows, creating intelligent and adaptive services.
🧩 Extensible Plugin System: Offers a rich library of official plugins for common tasks like AI integration, traffic management, and security. Supports Wasm plugins (written in multiple languages) for custom extensions. Plugin updates use a hot-plug mechanism, ensuring zero traffic loss during updates.
☁️ Cloud-Native Standards Compliance: Fully adheres to Ingress, Gateway API, and Istio API standards. This ensures seamless migration from other gateways that follow these standards, minimizing transition time and effort.
🔒 Comprehensive API Management: Provides an "API introspection" feature, enabling rapid development of API openness capabilities. Includes built-in support for authentication and authorization methods like JWT and OIDC, ensuring robust API security.
🛡️ Integrated Security: Includes built-in WAF (Web Application Firewall) capabilities for security, authorization, and traffic protection at both global and route-specific levels.
🤝 Ecosystem Integration: Seamlessly integrates with popular Alibaba Cloud and open-source tools, including Nacos, Sentinel, ChaosBlade, OpenSergo, and more. This provides a unified control and governance plane for your microservices.
Use Cases:
Simplified Multi-Cloud Gateway Management: A company operating across multiple cloud providers (e.g., Alibaba Cloud and another international provider) needs a unified gateway solution. Higress's open-source availability and enterprise-grade Alibaba Cloud offering allow for consistent management and policy enforcement across all environments, simplifying operations and reducing vendor lock-in.
AI-Powered Customer Support: An online service provider uses AI-powered chatbots for customer support, relying on WebSockets for long-lived connections. Higress's support for WebSocket connections, combined with its ability to handle configuration updates without dropping connections (hot-plugging), ensures a seamless and uninterrupted user experience, even during updates or scaling events.
High-Volume E-commerce Platform: An e-commerce company experiences massive traffic spikes during promotional events. Higress's performance optimizations (demonstrated by the 90% performance increase and 50% HTTPS latency reduction at Fery) enable the platform to handle these surges efficiently, maintaining responsiveness and ensuring a positive customer experience. The ability to quickly roll out configuration changes (40x faster) also allows for rapid adaptation to changing traffic patterns.
Conclusion:
Higress offers a compelling solution for organizations seeking a robust, efficient, and future-proof API gateway for their cloud-native applications. By consolidating multiple gateway functions, embracing open standards, and providing AI-native capabilities, Higress empowers you to build, secure, and manage your APIs with unprecedented ease and performance. It's a powerful tool for simplifying infrastructure and accelerating innovation, especially in the evolving AI landscape.
More information on Higress
Launched
2022-10
Pricing Model
Free
Starting Price
Global Rank
333979
Follow
Month Visit
104.3K
Tech used
Google Analytics,Google Tag Manager,Astro,Tailwind CSS,Gzip,OpenGraph,HSTS
Top 5 Countries
90.16%
4.4%
1.62%
1.41%
1.02%
China
Hong Kong
Taiwan
United States
Singapore
Traffic Sources
0.57%
0.18%
0.03%
12.23%
32.79%
54.19%
social
paidReferrals
mail
referrals
search
direct
Source: Similarweb (Sep 25, 2025)
Higress was manually vetted by our editorial team and was first featured on 2025-03-02.
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