Best Self Hosted Alternatives to Zuplo

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.

Zoraxy is a general-purpose HTTP reverse-proxy and forwarding gateway designed for homelab and self-hosted services. It provides a web UI for configuring proxies, TLS, routing and runtime utilities so users can expose and manage services from a single gateway. (github.com)

Key Features

• HTTP reverse proxy supporting virtual directories, alias hostnames and custom headers. (github.com)
• Automatic WebSocket proxying and stream proxy support for TCP/UDP forwarding.
• TLS/SSL management with ACME (Let's Encrypt) support, auto-renew and SNI/SAN certificate handling; includes DNS challenge integrations. (github.com)
• Load balancing, basic auth, redirection rules and blacklist/whitelist controls (IP/CIDR/country). (github.com)
• Real-time analytics and uptime monitoring with instant network/visitor statistics and no-reload access control. (zoraxy.aroz.org)
• Plugin system and built-in utilities (mDNS scanner, Wake-on-LAN, IP/port scanners, debug forward proxy). (github.com)
• Web-based SSH terminal for in-browser administration. (github.com)

Use Cases

• Expose and route multiple self-hosted web apps (home server, NAS, media servers) behind a single, manageable reverse proxy. (github.com)
• Provide TLS/ACME certificate automation and DNS-challenge workflows for services without manual cert management. (github.com)
• Monitor service availability and traffic in real time, and run network utilities (scans, WOL) from the gateway UI. (zoraxy.aroz.org)

Limitations and Considerations

• Some advanced modules are community-maintained or seeking maintainers (notably ACME integration improvements and an extended logging/analysis module), which may affect feature completeness for large-scale deployments. (github.com)

Zoraxy is lightweight and targeted at homelab users and small deployments that need a single gateway for routing, TLS and basic observability. It is distributed with prebuilt binaries and Docker artifacts and can be built from source with Go, making it suitable for ARM/SBC and x86 environments. (zoraxy.aroz.org)

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.