Compare the Top Free Service Mesh as of August 2025

What is Free Service Mesh?

A service mesh is an infrastructure layer that manages the communication between microservices within a distributed application. It provides features such as load balancing, service discovery, traffic routing, security (such as encryption and authentication), and observability (monitoring and logging) without requiring changes to the application code. Service meshes are typically used in microservices architectures to ensure that services can communicate efficiently and securely across a network. They help with managing complex communication patterns, ensuring reliable and secure service-to-service interactions, and providing valuable insights into the health and performance of the services. Service meshes are often integrated with container orchestration platforms. Compare and read user reviews of the best Free Service Mesh currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.

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    Istio

    Istio

    Istio

    Connect, secure, control, and observe services. Istio’s traffic routing rules let you easily control the flow of traffic and API calls between services. Istio simplifies configuration of service-level properties like circuit breakers, timeouts, and retries, and makes it easy to set up important tasks like A/B testing, canary rollouts, and staged rollouts with percentage-based traffic splits. It also provides out-of-box failure recovery features that help make your application more robust against failures of dependent services or the network. Istio Security provides a comprehensive security solution to solve these issues. This page gives an overview on how you can use Istio security features to secure your services, wherever you run them. In particular, Istio security mitigates both insider and external threats against your data, endpoints, communication, and platform. Istio generates detailed telemetry for all service communications within a mesh.
  • 2
    Apache ServiceComb
    Open-source, full-stack microservice solution. With out-of-the-box, high performance, compatible with popular ecology, and multi-language support. Service contract guarantee based on OpenAPI. One-click scaffolding, out of the box, speeds up the building of microservice applications. The ecological extension supports multiple development languages such as Java/Golang/PHP/NodeJS. Apache ServiceComb is an open-source solution for microservices. It consists of multiple components that can be flexibly adapted to different scenarios through the combination of components. This guide can help you get started quickly with Apache ServiceComb, which is the best place to start trying for first-time users. To decouple the programming and communication models, so that a programming model can be combined with any communication models as needed. Application developers only need to focus on APIs during development and can flexibly switch communication models during deployment.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 3
    Kong Mesh
    Enterprise service mesh based on Kuma for multi-cloud and multi-cluster on both Kubernetes and VMs. Deploy with a single command. Connect to other services automatically with built-in service discovery, including an Ingress resource and remote CPs. Support across any environment, including multi-cluster, multi-cloud and multi-platform on both Kubernetes and VMs. Accelerate initiatives like zero-trust and GDPR with native mesh policies, improving the speed and efficiency of every application team. Deploy a single control plane that can scale horizontally to many data planes, or support multiple clusters or even hybrid service meshes running on both Kubernetes and VMs combined. Simplify cross-zone communication using an Envoy-based ingress deployment on both Kubernetes and VMs, as well as the built-in DNS resolver for service-to-service communication. Built on top of Envoy with 50+ observability charts out of the box, you can collect metrics, traces, and logs of all L4-L7 traffic.
    Starting Price: $250 per month
  • 4
    Network Service Mesh

    Network Service Mesh

    Network Service Mesh

    A common flat vL3 domain allowing DBs running in multiple clusters/clouds/hybrid to communicate just with each other for DB replication. Workloads from multiple companies connecting to a single ‘collaborative’ Service Mesh for cross company interactions. Each workload has a single option of what connectivity domain to be connected to, and only workloads in a given runtime domain could be part of its connectivity domain. In short: Connectivity Domains are Strongly Coupled to Runtime Domains. A central tenant of Cloud Native is Loose Coupling. In a Loosely Coupled system, the ability for each workload to receive service from alternative providers is preserved. What Runtime Domain a workload is running in is a non-sequitur to its communications needs. Workloads that are part of the same App need Connectivity between each other no matter where they are running.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 5
    AWS App Mesh

    AWS App Mesh

    Amazon Web Services

    AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to facilitate communication between your services across various types of computing infrastructure. App Mesh offers comprehensive visibility and high availability for your applications. Modern applications are generally made up of multiple services. Each service can be developed using various types of compute infrastructure, such as Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, and AWS Fargate. As the number of services within an application grows, it becomes difficult to pinpoint the exact location of errors, redirect traffic after errors, and safely implement code changes. Previously, this required creating monitoring and control logic directly in your code and redeploying your services every time there were changes.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 6
    HashiCorp Consul
    A multi-cloud service networking platform to connect and secure services across any runtime platform and public or private cloud. Real-time health and location information of all services. Progressive delivery and zero trust security with less overhead. Receive peace of mind that all HCP connections are secured out of the box. Gain insight into service health and performance metrics with built-in visualization directly in the Consul UI or by exporting metrics to a third-party solution. Many modern applications have migrated towards decentralized architectures as opposed to traditional monolithic architectures. This is especially true with microservices. Since applications are composed of many inter-dependent services, there's a need to have a topological view of the services and their dependencies. Furthermore, there is a desire to have insight into health and performance metrics for the different services.
  • 7
    Netmaker

    Netmaker

    Netmaker

    Netmaker is an open source tool based on the groundbreaking WireGuard protocol. Netmaker unifies distributed environments with ease, from multi-cloud to Kubernetes. Netmaker enhances Kubernetes clusters by providing flexible and secure networking for cross-environment scenarios. Netmaker uses WireGuard for modern, secure encryption. It is built with zero trust in mind, utilizes access control lists, and follows leading industry standards for secure networking. Netmaker enables you to create relays, gateways, full VPN meshes, and even zero trust networks. Netmaker is fully configurable to let you maximize the power of Wireguard.
  • 8
    Traefik Mesh

    Traefik Mesh

    Traefik Labs

    Traefik Mesh is a straight-forward, easy to configure, and non-invasive service mesh that allows visibility and management of the traffic flows inside any Kubernetes cluster. By improving monitoring, logging, and visibility, as well as implementing access controls. Allows administrators to increase the security of their clusters easily and quickly. By being able to monitor and trace how applications communicate in your Kubernetes cluster, administrators are able to optimize internal communications, and improve application performance. Reducing the time to learn, install, and configure makes it easier to implement, and to provide value for the time actually spent implementing. Administrators can focus on their business applications. Being open source means that there is no vendor lock-in, as Traefik Mesh is opt-in by design.
  • 9
    Calisti

    Calisti

    Cisco

    Calisti enables security, observability, traffic management for microservices and cloud native applications, and allows admins to switch between live and historical views. Configuring Service Level Objectives (SLOs), burn rate, error budget and compliance monitoring, Calisti sends a GraphQL alert to automatically scale based on SLO burn rate. Calisti manages microservices running on containers and virtual machines, allowing for application migration from VMs to containers in a phased manner. Reducing management overhead by applying policies consistently and meeting application Service Level Objectives across both K8s and VMs. Istio has new releases every three months. Calisti includes our Istio Operator that automates lifecycle management, and even enables canary deployment of the platform itself.
  • 10
    Linkerd

    Linkerd

    Buoyant

    Linkerd adds critical security, observability, and reliability features to your Kubernetes stack—no code change required. Linkerd is 100% Apache-licensed, with an incredibly fast-growing, active, and friendly community. Built in Rust, Linkerd's data plane proxies are incredibly small (<10 mb) and blazing fast (p99 < 1ms). No complex APIs or configuration. For most applications, Linkerd will “just work” out of the box. Linkerd's control plane installs into a single namespace, and services can be safely added to the mesh, one at a time. Get a comprehensive suite of diagnostic tools, including automatic service dependency maps and live traffic samples. Best-in-class observability allows you to monitor golden metrics—success rate, request volume, and latency—for every service.
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