MCP100 verdict
Not currently recommended. Cloud-native gateway that can expose and govern MCP traffic as part of the wider Higress API/AI gateway platform. Capabilities: Route MCP traffic; Apply gateway-level policy/governance to MCP services; Integrate MCP services into a broader API/AI gateway deployment
MCP100 Assessment
Editorial verdict
Reviewed October 21, 2026
Task Fit
Mapped
Cloud operations
Trust
Status warning
maintenance_source_health; install_supply_chain; advisory_freshness; adoption_evidence_presence; resource_type_requirements
Maintenance
Date unavailable
No dated repository or package update is currently stored.
Popularity
Signals unavailable
No independently comparable adoption metric is currently stored.
Evidence scope
9.6k shared-repository stars · not MCP-specific
No MCP-specific package metric is stored
Repository identity: higress-group/higress
Stars observed October 21, 2026 · Downloads observed October 21, 2026
Repository evidence: shared_product_repo. Not MCP-specific/comparable for MCP-server adoption. Keep as gateway/resource, not standalone MCP server. Product repo popularity is non-MCP-specific.
Package evidence: none_exact_mcp_package. Not MCP-specific/comparable for MCP-server adoption. No attributable public download metric was verified. Keep as gateway/resource, not standalone MCP server. Product repo popularity is non-MCP-specific.
Publisher activity observed October 21, 2026
Current source snapshot
Source relationship: First-party MCP
Reviewed October 21, 2026
Evidence-backed setup
This profile has type-appropriate, source-backed setup rather than an MCP-server client connector configuration.
Type-appropriate, source-backed setup for this gateway profile.
Capability
Cloud-native gateway that can expose and govern MCP traffic as part of the wider Higress API/AI gateway platform. Capabilities: Route MCP traffic; Apply gateway-level policy/governance to MCP services; Integrate MCP services into a broader API/AI gateway deployment
Not measured yet
Estimated token footprint of the MCP tool schemas exposed to the agent.
Reviewed access
Review the exact access boundary before connecting this MCP to accounts, credentials, or sensitive data.
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github:higress-group is listed as First-party MCP in MCP100’s current evidence.
Current official resources:
Original product, capability, tool, and usage documentation from the MCP publisher. Installation sections appear under Install & Agents.
Official Site | Docs | Blog | Roadmap | MCP Server QuickStart | Developer Guide | Wasm Plugin Hub |
Higress is a cloud-native API gateway based on Istio and Envoy, which can be extended with Wasm plugins written in Go/Rust/JS. It provides dozens of ready-to-use general-purpose plugins and an out-of-the-box console (try the demo here).
Higress's AI gateway capabilities support all mainstream model providers both domestic and international. It also supports hosting MCP (Model Context Protocol) Servers through its plugin mechanism, enabling AI Agents to easily call various tools and services. With the openapi-to-mcp tool, you can quickly convert OpenAPI specifications into remote MCP servers for hosting. Higress provides unified management for both LLM API and MCP API.
🌟 Try it now at https://mcp.higress.ai/ to experience Higress-hosted Remote MCP Servers firsthand:
Higress originated at Alibaba to address long-connection disruption during
gateway reloads and improve gRPC/Dubbo load balancing. It is now developed as
a vendor-neutral CNCF project and is used by organizations across multiple
industries. Public adopters and their use cases are listed in
ADOPTERS.md.
MCP Server Hosting:
Higress hosts MCP Servers through its plugin mechanism, enabling AI Agents to easily call various tools and services. With the openapi-to-mcp tool, you can quickly convert OpenAPI specifications into remote MCP servers.
Key benefits of hosting MCP Servers with Higress:
Unified authentication and authorization mechanisms
Fine-grained rate limiting to prevent abuse
Comprehensive audit logs for all tool calls
Rich observability for monitoring performance
Simplified deployment through Higress's plugin mechanism
Dynamic updates without disruption or connection drops
AI Gateway:
Higress connects to all LLM model providers using a unified protocol, with AI observability, multi-model load balancing, token rate limiting, and caching capabilities:
Higress is also listed as a conformant Gateway API Inference Extension implementation, supporting inference-aware routing on Kubernetes.
Kubernetes ingress controller:
Higress can function as a feature-rich ingress controller and is listed in the official Kubernetes Ingress Controllers documentation. It is compatible with many annotations of the Kubernetes NGINX Ingress Controller.
Higress supports the Gateway API standard and is listed as a conformant Gateway API implementation, enabling smooth migration from the Ingress API to the Gateway API.
Compared to ingress-nginx, the resource overhead has significantly decreased, and the speed at which route changes take effect has improved by ten times.
The following resource overhead comparison comes from sealos.
For details, you can read this article to understand how sealos migrates the monitoring of tens of thousands of ingress resources from nginx ingress to higress.
Microservice gateway:
Higress can function as a microservice gateway, which can discovery microservices from various service registries, such as Nacos, ZooKeeper, Consul, Eureka, etc.
It deeply integrates with Dubbo, Nacos, Sentinel and other microservice technology stacks.
Security gateway:
Higress can be used as a security gateway, supporting WAF and various authentication strategies, such as key-auth, hmac-auth, jwt-auth, basic-auth, oidc, etc.
Production Grade
Born from Alibaba's internal product with over 2 years of production validation, supporting large-scale scenarios with hundreds of thousands of requests per second.
Completely eliminates traffic jitter caused by Nginx reload, configuration changes take effect in milliseconds and are transparent to business. Especially friendly to long-connection scenarios such as AI businesses.
Streaming Processing
Supports true complete streaming processing of request/response bodies, Wasm plugins can easily customize the handling of streaming protocols such as SSE (Server-Sent Events).
In high-bandwidth scenarios such as AI businesses, it can significantly reduce memory overhead.
Easy to Extend
Provides a rich official plugin library covering AI, traffic management, security protection and other common functions, meeting more than 90% of business scenario requirements.
Focuses on Wasm plugin extensions, ensuring memory safety through sandbox isolation, supporting multiple programming languages, allowing plugin versions to be upgraded independently, and achieving traffic-lossless hot updates of gateway logic.
Secure and Easy to Use
Based on Ingress API and Gateway API standards, provides out-of-the-box UI console, WAF protection plugin, IP/Cookie CC protection plugin ready to use.
Supports connecting to Let's Encrypt for automatic issuance and renewal of free certificates, and can be deployed outside of K8s, started with a single Docker command, convenient for individual developers to use.
Join our Discord community! This is where you can connect with developers and other enthusiastic users of Higress.
Join the monthly Higress Community Meeting for public project updates, technical discussions, roadmap planning, and community questions.
The complete inventory of public and private communication channels,
subproject channels, meeting information, and contributor activity is in
COMMUNITY.md.
The Higress community follows the
CNCF Code of Conduct.
The project's adopted Code of Conduct is documented in
CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md.
Please review it before
participating in the community.
Project governance, the maintainer roster, and the contribution model are
described in GOVERNANCE.md
and MAINTAINERS.md.
New contributors are encouraged to start
with CONTRIBUTING_EN.md. Forward planning and release
procedures are documented in ROADMAP.md
and
RELEASE.md.
Please report security vulnerabilities following the process described in
SECURITY.md.
Higress would not be possible without the valuable open-source work of projects in the community. We would like to extend a special thank you to Envoy and Istio.
We are a Cloud Native Computing Foundation sandbox project.
The Linux Foundation® (TLF) has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of TLF trademarks, see Trademark Usage.
Copyright Higress a Series of LF Projects, LLC. For website terms of use, trademark policy and other project policies please see https://lfprojects.org/policies/.