A vendor-neutral take on the leading API gateways out there for developers in 2025.
If you're building an API, you'll need an API gateway. It's just considered best practice nowadays. API gateways ensure your APIs aren't abused, helping with rate limiting, traffic routing, authentication, authorization, and more. They're also helpful for observability and compliance, too. Whether you're exposing public APIs or managing internal microservices, an API gateway helps protect, scale, and productize your services.
Below, we'll quickly review some of the lightweight, developer-friendly API gateways on the market, including both open-source and commercial options. These are all either inherently lightweight or flexible enough without heavy enterprise overhead. We'll highlight some of the pros, cons, and standout features of each to help you decide which is best for your particular scenario.
Zuplo
Zuplo is a fully-managed API gateway designed for simplicity. It's lightweight and edge-native, utilizing Cloudflare Workers under the hood to achieve global distribution and ultra-low-latency response times — ideal for multi-cloud and geographically distributed use cases.
Zuplo provides out-of-the-box policies for rate limiting, JWT authentication, and role-based access control (RBAC). It can also generate a Stripe-like developer portal with built-in monetization capabilities. It's OpenAPI-native and standards-based, reducing some lock-in concerns.
One possible drawback is that Zuplo doesn't support GraphQL or asynchronous protocols (as of now). It also doesn't have some tools that larger API management platforms have out of the box, related to design and governance.
If you're looking for ultra-low latency, developer-friendly configuration, and modern SaaS usability, without the heavy DevOps overhead, Zuplo is an awesome choice.
Ambassador Labs (Edge Stack)
The Edge Stack API Gateway from Ambassador Labs is a Kubernetes-native gateway built on Envoy Proxy, designed specifically for cloud-native developers. It integrates smoothly with containerized microservices and supports declarative configuration through Kubernetes controllers.
While it doesn't offer built-in monetization or developer portal generation, Edge Stack delivers all the core features you'd expect — authentication, authorization, rate limiting, and fine-grained access control — with high performance and availability.
If you're looking for a cost-effective, developer-first gateway that fits naturally into your cloud-native stack, Ambassador is well worth considering.
Kong Gateway OSS
Kong Gateway OSS is the open-source version of Kong’s popular API gateway, offering routing, proxying, load balancing, health checks, authentication, and more. Built for scalability, it runs well in self-hosted and Kubernetes-based environments.
Kong OSS is often paired with tools like Insomnia for API design and supports service mesh integration if your needs grow beyond simple gateway functionality.
That said, Kong's setup can require significant DevOps effort, especially in multi-cloud scenarios, making it less ideal for smaller projects looking for plug-and-play simplicity.
If you're building on Kubernetes and want an open-source gateway with proven scalability, Kong remains one of the most popular options out there.
Traefik API Gateway
The Traefik API Gateway from Traefik Labs builds on the popular open-source Traefik Proxy, offering a developer-friendly, cloud-native gateway with quick onboarding and strong GitOps support.
Key features include authentication, authorization, traffic routing, load balancing, distributed rate limiting, and automatic service discovery. Some standout capabilities include Wasm-based plugins, distributed Let’s Encrypt certificate management, and HashiCorp Vault integration.
If you’re already using Traefik Proxy, adopting the gateway is a natural next step. Even if you're not, Traefik stands out as an infrastructure-agnostic, developer-first option.
Tyk
Tyk is an API management platform that offers rate limiting, authentication, API analytics, and traffic control features like quotas and burst handling. One standout feature is its broad protocol support — Tyk handles REST, GraphQL, gRPC, and asynchronous APIs, with strong versioning capabilities.
Similar to Kong, Tyk provides more than just a gateway. It includes observability, governance tools, API design features, and a developer portal, with an intuitive GUI for managing your policies and API portfolio.
Tyk is OpenAPI compatible, supports configuration-as-code, and can fit into GitOps workflows, though its default experience leans more toward dashboard-driven management. It does not offer built-in monetization capabilities.
If you're looking for a powerful API gateway with broader management features, especially for internal or partner-facing APIs, Tyk is a solid option.
Gravitee
Gravitee is an API management platform offering a high-performance, event-native API gateway. Gravitee's gateway is feature-rich and stands out by supporting a wide range of protocols and event subscription methods, including REST, WebSockets, Kafka, MQTT, and more.
The platform provides a unified developer portal for managing multiple APIs, along with built-in analytics and monetization. Cloud-native developers will also appreciate its Kubernetes ingress controller.
Gravitee includes its own access management solution but also supports external identity providers through OIDC and OAuth2. Teams with complex IAM setups may want to confirm compatibility before adopting.
If you're managing asynchronous event brokers alongside traditional RESTful APIs, Gravitee is a strong choice for an API gateway. For simple HTTP-only use cases, it might be more than you need.
Axway
Axway is an API management provider offering a gateway with all the core security, analytics, and administrative features you’d expect from an enterprise solution. Standout capabilities include SLA enforcement and bi-directional protocol transformation, such as converting REST to SOAP, XML to JSON, or HTTP to JMS.
One downside of Axway is its opinionated approach to configuration. The platform uses custom file formats and leans on GUI-based policy management, which may require more manual setup than other, lighter-weight gateways.
Axway is a good choice if you need to run legacy service-oriented architecture APIs in parallel with more modern enterprise designs.
WSO2 API Manager
WSO2 API Manager is an open-source API management platform known for its flexible deployment options, strong identity integration, and multi-protocol support. Core gateway features include policy enforcement, rate limiting, security, and deep analytics.
WSO2 supports REST, GraphQL, gRPC, WebSockets, and SOAP, and works well within Kubernetes environments. It also offers robust access control and IAM capabilities. WSO2 recently introduced an AI Gateway feature to help manage APIs powering large language models (LLMs) and AI agents.
All that said, WSO2's architecture may feel heavyweight for smaller projects or one-off gateway deployments.
If you're looking for a unified, enterprise-grade API gateway with strong identity features and new support for managing AI-related APIs, WSO2 remains a solid choice.
Azure API Management
Azure API Management is Microsoft's managed API gateway, offering request routing, policy enforcement, and telemetry collection. It supports both fully managed and self-hosted gateway deployments for hybrid or on-prem environments.
Azure handles OpenAPI-based REST APIs, WSDL (SOAP), and OData, though it doesn’t yet support GraphQL subscriptions. It integrates well with Azure Active Directory, the Curity Identity Server, and other OAuth2 providers for authentication.
With auto-generated developer portals, consumption-based pricing, and multi-region deployment options, Azure APIM is a strong choice for teams already invested in the Microsoft ecosystem.
AWS API Gateway
AWS API Gateway is Amazon’s managed gateway service, designed to work seamlessly within the AWS ecosystem. It supports both REST and WebSocket APIs, with HTTP APIs being the lightweight, lower-cost option for simple proxying and routing use cases.
AWS API Gateway offers core gateway features like request routing, rate limiting, authentication (including AWS IAM, Cognito, and Lambda authorizers), and detailed monitoring via CloudWatch. You can also define usage plans and API keys to control access.
One drawback is that AWS Gateway can feel tightly coupled to the AWS ecosystem, with some complexity around IAM permissions and configuration. Obviously, it's not the best fit if you need a cloud-agnostic tool.
However, for teams already working in AWS, it's a convenient, serverless-friendly option with solid scalability.
Honorable Mentions (And Other Helpful Tools)
Above, we've reviewed some of the best API gateways for developers. Of course, this comparison isn't fully comprehensive — plenty of other API management solutions and proxies offer similar gateway functionality.
Other notable commercial options include Apigee, Solo.io (Gloo Gateway), and Sensedia. Enterprise developers might also consider IBM's API gateway.
With some more work, you could configure proxies that work lower on the infrastructure level, like NGINX, Envoy Proxy, HAProxy, or Traefik Proxy to give you the classic API gateway functionality. There's also KrakenD as another open-source option.
It's also worth noting that traditional, holistic API management is increasingly becoming "unbundled," as developers turn to smaller gateways and a mix of specialized tools to get the job done. This often leads to pairing a gateway with best-of-breed solutions for areas like observability, SDK generation, testing, and other parts of the API lifecycle.
Many standalone options can easily plug into your stack if you're just looking for a developer portal or documentation generator. Many of the gateways above also don’t offer out-of-the-box API monetization, but purpose-built tools are available if that’s on your roadmap. And since most solutions hinge on OpenAPI for interoperability, it never hurts to consider linters, validators, and other utilities to keep your specs in top shape.
Key Takeaways: It Depends On Your Situation
Most software providers talk about 'reducing vendor lock-in,' but the truth is that an API gateway is challenging to remove once you're using it in production. Migrations can easily cause broken client integrations. So, it's really important to put in the effort up front to decide which is best for your specific use case.
API gateways are important for establishing high-grade protection and performance for your APIs. As you can see above, each gateway has a differentiating factor that might make sense given your target consumer, existing stack, and deployment preferences. Industry compliance requirements may be a dealbreaker too — for instance, is it SOC2 Type 2 or PCI DSS certified?
Beyond specific API gateway features, it's also worth considering non-functional requirements. Like, the team backing it, their support guarantees, the organization's stability, its commitment to open standards, and so on.
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