Quay.io vs Envoy Proxy
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Quay.io and Envoy Proxy.
Quick Verdict
3.7/5
Quay.io
0 reviews
4.2/5
Envoy Proxy
0 reviews
Envoy Proxy is rated higher (4.2 vs 3.7). Red Hat's hosted container image registry: unlimited free public repos, per-private-repository pricing from $15/month, automatic Clair v4 CVE scanning, robot accounts, teams, and exportable audit logs. Envoy is an open source L7 proxy and service mesh foundation. Used as the data plane in Istio, AWS App Mesh, and Consul Connect. High performance, built for microservices and Kubernetes.
Quay.io Hosted container registry from Red Hat: free public repos, CVE scanning, per-private-repo pricing | Envoy Proxy Cloud-native proxy and service mesh sidecar | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 3.7 (0 reviews) | 4.2 (0 reviews)✓ |
| Pricing model | freemium | free |
| Starting price | Free tier available | Free |
| Best for | Open-source projects needing free public image hosting, and Red Hat-centric enterprises wanting managed registries with SSO, robot accounts and audit logging | Platform engineering teams on Kubernetes standardising ingress, mesh and egress traffic management on one open data plane, with the in-house or vendor expertise to own a control plane. |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ||
| DDoS protection | ||
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ||
| Free tier | ||
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tierteam featuresssoapi access | free tieropen source |
| Visit Quay.io → | Visit Envoy Proxy → | |
Quay.io
Pros
- + Unlimited free public repositories with automatic CVE scanning on every push
- + Public, predictable per-repository pricing from $15/month for 5 private repos
- + Robot accounts, team permissions, SSO and exportable audit logs aimed at compliance teams
- + Decade-plus production track record (launched 2013) with a supported upgrade path to self-managed Red Hat Quay
- + Full API, image rollback, zero-downtime garbage collection and Git build triggers
Cons
- - Per-repository billing punishes micro-repo layouts; large tiers get expensive fast
- - No published uptime SLA for the hosted service
- - Clair does not cover every language ecosystem, and remediation is entirely on the customer
- - Free tier fair-use caps (100 GB storage, 1 TB egress) are enforceable quotas
- - Overlapping product lineup (Quay.io vs Red Hat Quay vs OpenShift Platform Plus) complicates buying
Envoy Proxy
Pros
- + Free forever: Apache 2.0, no seats, no per-node licence, no usage metering
- + CNCF graduated with neutral governance and multi-vendor support options
- + xDS APIs are the de facto standard control-plane interface for service meshes and gateways
- + Depth of features: HTTP/3, gRPC-aware load balancing, circuit breaking, external auth, rate limiting, hot cert rotation
- + Documented support window (four minor versions patched) and a decade of production track record
- + Extensive observability hooks: stats, tracing headers, structured access logs
Cons
- - Configuration complexity is high; production-grade setups need a control plane or serious in-house expertise
- - No SLA or commercial support bundled — community support only
- - Sidecar overhead (latency and memory per proxy) is a real cost in large mesh deployments
- - C++ codebase narrows the pool of people who can debug core-level issues
- - Troubleshooting spans both Envoy docs and whatever control plane generates your config
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