head to head · open source
grpc-gateway vs higress
grpc-gateway has 20,001 GitHub stars, 2,409 forks, 149 open issues and last shipped yesterday. higress has 9,397 stars, 1,304 forks, 1,114 open issues and last shipped 7 days ago. grpc-gateway leads on adoption by 113% (20,001 vs 9,397 stars). grpc-gateway is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause; higress is written in Go under Apache-2.0. grpc-gateway has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, higress 14%. grpc-gateway was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| grpc-gateway | higress | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 20K | ★ 9.4K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.4K | ⑂ 1.3K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick grpc-gateway if
- You weight community size — 20K stars and counting
- You want the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick higress if
- You want the higress feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and higress fits your workflow better
About grpc-gateway
gRPC Gateway is a plugin for protoc , the Google protocol buffers compiler. It reads protobuf service definitions and generates a reverse proxy server that translates a RESTful HTTP API into gRPC. The generated server follows the google.api.http annotations attached to those service definitions, so a single set of protobuf services can be exposed in both gRPC and RESTful style at the same time. It lives in the gRPC ecosystem, is written in Go, and is distributed under the BSD 3 Clause license.
read the full grpc-gateway overview →
About higress
Higress is a cloud native, AI native API gateway built on Istio and Envoy that targets platform engineering and AI infrastructure teams who need to route LLM API traffic and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers through a single extensible, self hosted gateway.
read the full higress overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is grpc-gateway or higress more popular?
grpc-gateway has 20,001 GitHub stars and higress has 9,397. grpc-gateway has the larger community by that measure.
Are grpc-gateway and higress free?
Both are open source. grpc-gateway is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and higress under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between grpc-gateway and higress?
grpc-gateway is written in Go and higress in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, grpc-gateway or higress?
Choose grpc-gateway if you want the larger community (20,001 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose higress if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.