What is Express Gateway and what are its top alternatives?
Top Alternatives to Express Gateway
- Kong
Kong is a scalable, open source API Layer (also known as an API Gateway, or API Middleware). Kong controls layer 4 and 7 traffic and is extended through Plugins, which provide extra functionality and services beyond the core platform. ...
- Apigee
API management, design, analytics, and security are at the heart of modern digital architecture. The Apigee intelligent API platform is a complete solution for moving business to the digital world. ...
- LoopBack
A highly-extensible, open-source Node.js framework that enables you to create dynamic end-to-end REST APIs with little or no coding. Connect to multiple data sources, write business logic in Node.js, glue on top of your existing services and data, connect using JS, iOS & Android SDKs. ...
- NGINX
nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018. ...
- Zuul
It is the front door for all requests from devices and websites to the backend of the Netflix streaming application. As an edge service application, It is built to enable dynamic routing, monitoring, resiliency, and security. Routing is an integral part of a microservice architecture. ...
- Istio
Istio is an open platform for providing a uniform way to integrate microservices, manage traffic flow across microservices, enforce policies and aggregate telemetry data. Istio's control plane provides an abstraction layer over the underlying cluster management platform, such as Kubernetes, Mesos, etc. ...
- linkerd
linkerd is an out-of-process network stack for microservices. It functions as a transparent RPC proxy, handling everything needed to make inter-service RPC safe and sane--including load-balancing, service discovery, instrumentation, and routing. ...
- Jersey
It is open source, production quality, framework for developing RESTful Web Services in Java that provides support for JAX-RS APIs and serves as a JAX-RS (JSR 311 & JSR 339) Reference Implementation. It provides it’s own API that extend the JAX-RS toolkit with additional features and utilities to further simplify RESTful service and client development. ...
Express Gateway alternatives & related posts
- Easy to maintain36
- Easy to install31
- Flexible24
- Great performance20
- Api blueprint5
- Custom Plugins4
- Kubernetes-native3
- Agnostic2
- Security1
- Documentation is clear1
- Load balancing1
related Kong posts
As for the new support of service mesh pattern by Kong, I wonder how does it compare to Istio?
We needed a lightweight and completely customizable #microservices #gateway to be able to generate #JWT and introspect #OAuth2 tokens as well. The #gateway was going to front all #APIs for our single page web app as well as externalized #APIs for our partners.
ContendersWe looked at Tyk Cloud and Kong. Kong's plugins are all Lua based and its core is NGINX and OpenResty. Although it's open source, it's not the greatest platform to be able to customize. On top of that enterprise features are paid and expensive. Tyk is Go and the nomenclature used within Tyk like "sessions" was bizarre, and again enterprise features were paid.
DecisionWe ultimately decided to roll our own using ExpressJS into Express Gateway because the use case for using ExpressJS as an #API #gateway was tried and true, in fact - all the enterprise features that the other two charge for #OAuth2 introspection etc were freely available within ExpressJS middleware.
OutcomeWe opened source Express Gateway with a core set of plugins and the community started writing their own and could quickly do so by rolling lots of ExpressJS middleware into Express Gateway
- Highly scalable and secure API Management Platform12
- Quick jumpstart6
- Good documentation5
- Fast and adjustable caching3
- Easy to use3
- Expensive9
related Apigee posts
Amazon API Gateway vs Apigee. How do they compare as an API Gateway? What is the equivalent functionality, similarities, and differences moving from Apigee API GW to AWS API GW?
- Need a nodejs ReST-API, DB, AAA, Swagger? Then loopback10
- Easy Database Migration9
- Code generator5
- The future of API's4
- GraphQL2
- Typescript1
- Community is slow7
- Backward compatibility1
related LoopBack posts
I use LoopBack because it is: * It is truly and Unbelievably Extensible * it is default integrated with OpenAPI (Swagger) Spec Driven REST API * I write lesser codes, because most of the user stories have been covered using the code generation * It's documentation is more compact and well detailed than ExpressJS * It is very easy to learn, hence you can build a basic Rest API App in minutes * It has built in NPM packages required to build my Rest API which saves me time on installation and configuration * The Datasource/Service/Controller concept is just Brilliant (that's mostly all you need to get your app speaking with an External API services) * The support for SOAP and Rest API services is amazing!
We inherited this project and the backend is using LoopBack v3. I haven't taken a look at Loopback.io v4, but I'm planning to replace it. The reason being is that Loopback v3 documentation is a bit confusing and we are having trouble packaging the build using Webpack. Not to mention, integrating unit tests (latest Jest).
I still think Loopback is a great tool, but their documentation is really "messy" and hard to navigate through. There's also a constraint of time from our side. So what's the best option out there?
Should I try upgrading to Loopback v4, or trying other stuff? (i.e. NestJS)
Thanks!
NGINX
- High-performance http server1.4K
- Performance893
- Easy to configure727
- Open source606
- Load balancer529
- Scalability287
- Free286
- Web server223
- Simplicity174
- Easy setup135
- Content caching29
- Web Accelerator20
- Capability14
- Fast13
- High-latency11
- Predictability11
- Reverse Proxy7
- Supports http/26
- The best of them5
- Great Community4
- Lots of Modules4
- Enterprise version4
- High perfomance proxy server3
- Embedded Lua scripting3
- Reversy Proxy3
- Streaming media delivery3
- Streaming media3
- Fast and easy to set up2
- Slim2
- Blash2
- Lightweight2
- saltstack2
- Virtual hosting1
- Along with Redis Cache its the Most superior1
- Ingress controller1
- Narrow focus. Easy to configure. Fast1
- GRPC-Web1
- Advanced features require subscription8
related NGINX posts

















Recently I have been working on an open source stack to help people consolidate their personal health data in a single database so that AI and analytics apps can be run against it to find personalized treatments. We chose to go with a #containerized approach leveraging Docker #containers with a local development environment setup with Docker Compose and nginx for container routing. For the production environment we chose to pull code from GitHub and build/push images using Jenkins and using Kubernetes to deploy to Amazon EC2.
We also implemented a dashboard app to handle user authentication/authorization, as well as a custom SSO server that runs on Heroku which allows experts to easily visit more than one instance without having to login repeatedly. The #Backend was implemented using my favorite #Stack which consists of FeathersJS on top of Node.js and ExpressJS with PostgreSQL as the main database. The #Frontend was implemented using React, Redux.js, Semantic UI React and the FeathersJS client. Though testing was light on this project, we chose to use AVA as well as ESLint to keep the codebase clean and consistent.
We switched to Traefik so we can use the REST API to dynamically configure subdomains and have the ability to redirect between multiple servers.
We still use nginx with a docker-compose to expose the traffic from our APIs and TCP microservices, but for managing routing to the internet Traefik does a much better job
The biggest win for naologic was the ability to set dynamic configurations without having to restart the server
Zuul
- Load blancing7
related Zuul posts
Istio
- Zero code for logging and monitoring13
- Service Mesh8
- Great flexibility7
- Powerful authorization mechanisms4
- Ingress controller4
- Full Security3
- Resiliency3
- Easy integration with Kubernetes and Docker3
- Performance15
related Istio posts
As for the new support of service mesh pattern by Kong, I wonder how does it compare to Istio?
- CNCF Project3
- Fast Integration1
- Pre-check permissions1
- Light Weight1
- Service Mesh1
related linkerd posts
- Lightweight3
- Fast Performance With Microservices1
- Java standard1