Best Self Hosted Alternatives to Cloudflare API Gateway

Traefik Proxy is a modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer designed for dynamic, cloud-native environments. It discovers services from your orchestrator or service registry and automatically configures routing without requiring manual updates for each change.

Key Features

• Automatic service discovery and dynamic configuration from providers such as Docker and Kubernetes
• Layer 7 routing based on hostnames, paths, headers, and other request attributes
• Built-in HTTPS with automatic certificate provisioning and renewal via ACME
• Load balancing with multiple strategies plus health checks
• Support for WebSocket, HTTP/2, and gRPC traffic
• Observability features including metrics, structured access logs, and a web dashboard
• Exposes an administrative API for inspecting configuration and runtime state

Use Cases

• Ingress controller for Kubernetes clusters with dynamic routing to services
• Reverse proxy for Docker or Docker Compose stacks with automatic route updates
• Central edge proxy in microservice architectures to standardize TLS and traffic management

Limitations and Considerations

• Major version upgrades can introduce breaking configuration changes and may require migration steps

Traefik Proxy is well-suited for teams running frequently changing workloads that need reliable routing, TLS automation, and visibility. It fits both small homelab deployments and production platform engineering environments where dynamic service discovery is essential.

Kong Gateway is a cloud-native, platform-agnostic gateway for managing API traffic at the edge of your services. It provides high-performance proxying, routing, and policy enforcement, and extends functionality through a large ecosystem of plugins.

Key Features

• Reverse proxy and routing for L7 traffic, with load balancing and active health checks
• Centralized authentication and authorization using plugins (for example JWT, OAuth 2.0, and ACL-based policies)
• Rate limiting, request/response transformations, and traffic controls via plugins
• Admin API for configuration and automation, plus support for declarative configuration (DB-less mode)
• Observability integrations and export of gateway telemetry via OpenTelemetry-compatible tooling
• Kubernetes-native operation via official ingress controller integration

Use Cases

• Secure and manage microservices APIs with a centralized gateway layer
• Standardize authentication, rate limiting, and request transformations across multiple services
• Operate an ingress/gateway layer for Kubernetes workloads with consistent policies

Limitations and Considerations

• Some capabilities advertised on the vendor site may be specific to enterprise or hosted offerings rather than the open-source edition

Kong Gateway is a strong fit for teams that need a scalable, extensible API gateway with broad plugin support and modern cloud-native deployment options. It helps centralize cross-cutting concerns like security, traffic management, and observability for API-driven systems.

Tyk Gateway is a cloud-native, open source API gateway used to publish, secure, and manage APIs across on-prem, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. It sits in front of upstream services to enforce authentication, traffic controls, and governance for multiple protocols.

Key Features

• Supports multiple protocols including REST, GraphQL, gRPC, and TCP proxying
• Authentication and authorization options including JWT and OpenID Connect
• Rate limiting, quotas, and traffic controls to protect upstream services
• Policy-based access control with per-API and per-endpoint restrictions
• Request/response transformation and content mediation
• Plugin and middleware extensibility (including gRPC-based plugins)
• Analytics and event hooks such as webhooks on gateway events
• Hot reload / hitless configuration reloads for minimal disruption

Use Cases

• Central API gateway for microservices with consistent auth and rate limits
• Exposing internal services to partners with granular access policies
• Managing mixed API styles (REST/GraphQL/gRPC) behind a single edge layer

Tyk Gateway is suitable for teams that need a flexible, high-performance gateway with strong policy controls and broad protocol support. It can be deployed as a lightweight gateway layer and expanded with additional Tyk components for broader API management needs.

Lura is an open framework for building ultra high-performance API gateways and reverse proxies, designed to sit between clients and multiple backend services. It helps consolidate and tailor API responses for frontends by aggregating, transforming, and shrinking payloads, while staying stateless and extensible.

Key Features

• Aggregates multiple backend services into single gateway endpoints
• Response transformation features such as grouping, wrapping, and field selection to reduce payload size
• Extensible middleware and plugin architecture to add functionality (for example, authorization layers)
• Designed for stateless operation suitable for cloud-native and on-prem deployments
• Built as reusable Go libraries to embed gateway capabilities into your own applications

Use Cases

• Build a backend-for-frontend (BFF) layer to reduce client-side complexity in microservice architectures
• Create a reverse proxy that centralizes cross-cutting concerns like authentication and request/response handling
• Expose simplified, optimized endpoints for mobile or web applications that otherwise require multiple backend calls

Lura is a strong fit when you need a fast, composable API gateway foundation and prefer assembling your gateway behavior through reusable components and middleware. It can be used as a framework in custom Go services or as the core technology behind production-ready gateway distributions.

KrakenD Community Edition is an open-source, high-performance API gateway designed for microservices and distributed architectures. It provides a stateless runtime that scales horizontally without centralized coordination, using declarative configuration to define routing and gateway behavior.

Key Features

• Stateless, distributed architecture designed for linear horizontal scalability
• Declarative configuration suited for GitOps-style API lifecycle management
• Reverse proxy and API gateway capabilities for REST-style backends
• API aggregation/composition and response shaping (filtering and transformation)
• Traffic control features such as throttling and rate limiting
• Security features including CORS support and token-based auth patterns (for example JWT)
• Observability integrations via exporters for metrics, logs, and traces
• Extensibility through plugins and scripting (including Go plugins and Lua)

Use Cases

• Unified gateway for microservices with centralized policy enforcement
• Backend-for-Frontend (BFF) APIs that aggregate multiple services into one endpoint
• High-throughput edge gateway with rate limiting and observability integration

KrakenD-CE is a strong fit when you want a fast, lightweight API gateway delivered as a single binary, while keeping configuration and operational workflows compatible with modern CI/CD and infrastructure automation practices.

UUSEC WAF is a web application firewall (WAF) and WAAP-style API security gateway designed to protect websites and HTTP APIs by running as a reverse proxy in front of upstream services. It combines semantic detection engines with a flexible rule system and a management UI for configuring sites, certificates, and protections.

Key Features

• Reverse-proxy protection for websites and APIs (traffic-layer defense)
• Semantic detection engines targeting common web attacks (including SQLi and XSS)
• Deep decoding of request content to reduce bypass techniques
• Rule engine with immediate effect after publishing, without restarting services
• Management console for adding protected sites and configuring policies
• TLS certificate management, including automated issuance/renewal via Let’s Encrypt
• Extensible advanced rules via Lua scripting for custom protections

Use Cases

• Protect internet-facing web applications from common OWASP-style attacks
• Front multiple backend services with a single security and TLS termination layer
• Add centrally managed security rules for legacy apps without code changes

Limitations and Considerations

• Typically requires control of ports 80/443 on the host due to reverse-proxy deployment
• Best suited to Linux x86_64 environments per project guidance

UUSEC WAF fits teams that want a self-managed WAF/WAAP layer with a UI, certificate automation, and flexible rule authoring. It is especially useful when you need protective controls without modifying application code.