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NGINX Ingress Controller vs Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE [EOL] comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 1, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

NGINX Ingress Controller
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
Container Management (7th)
Nutanix Kubernetes Engine N...
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

Suleiman  Mohammed - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Database Engineer, SRE at Interswitch Group
Routing for long-lived data connections has improved but protocol-aware checks still need work
NGINX Ingress Controller can be improved, and my team's concern would be database protocol-aware health checks for Transport Server since that is what NGINX is more focused on. Right now, even on Plus, a Transport Server health check is essentially a TCP connect or maybe a basic send-expect. For a database, that is a weak signal. The listener being up tells you almost nothing about whether Postgres is actually serving, whether a replica is lagging, or whether it is in recovery. I would love a way to define a health check that does something protocol-aware, even something as simple as you open a connection, run a SELECT one, which is the most popular test, and expect a row for Postgres or a PING for Redis. Without that, I am relying on the database's own infrastructure to pull bad replicas, and the ingress will happily continue routing to a replica that answers TCP but is serving stale reads. Better idle connection management for long-lived stream connections can also be improved. A pooled database connection sitting idle between transactions is healthy in my opinion, but the proxy's instinct is to reap idle connections. You can crank timeouts way up, but that is a blunt instrument. I would like to add that specifically for databases, the need for improvement becomes clearer. Every client connection through NGINX becomes a backend connection, one-to-one. A client connection through NGINX and a client connection through a connection pooler are sitting because they are going to get sent to the backend connection. It does not multiplex; it does not understand transaction boundaries. It cannot reuse a connection across clients. If you put it in front of Postgres without a real pooler behind it, you have just built a very efficient way to exhaust the max connection. The architecture is always client, ingress, connection pooler which is either pgBouncer or ProxySQL, then the actual engine which is Postgres or MySQL. Never let it be clients straight to the database. NGINX Ingress Controller's mode is one client connection to one backend connection with no multiplexing and no protocol awareness, which would be an issue for you.
reviewer2741271 - PeerSpot reviewer
Nutanix Administrator at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
Has provided seamless upgrade experiences and robust technical support
I have heard there are many features added in NKP that are not available in Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE, such as load balancer features. The unified control plane feature is not being used in Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE. We are currently using a third-party tool for load balancing, but going forward, NKP will include load balancer, ingress, and egress features, making infrastructure management much easier. There is no auto-scaling feature in Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE; however, NKP offers it. In NKE, we created additional worker nodes and increased CPU and RAM capacity, but it required manual intervention. Concerning policy-driven governance in Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE, we have the ability to implement RBAC at the cluster level, which helps maintain security by not granting full admin privileges to every end user, thus restricting access effectively.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The best features that NGINX Ingress Controller offers in my experience are that the ingress controller can perform content-based routing and SSL termination, which is usually not available on software-only solutions and typically comes with hardware-based solutions."
"NGINX Ingress Controller is very easy to set up, easy to deploy, and easy to maintain."
"We are using NGINX Ingress Controller for the past three to four years, and it is very reliable for us and it can handle the traffic based on our load as well."
"This shift away from manual config management has made my team's productivity and efficiency much easier."
"NGINX Ingress Controller has positively impacted my organization by helping us with exposing our applications and managing security and auto-scaling."
"NGINX Ingress Controller has positively impacted my organization by definitely improving my team's efficiency in terms of multiple load balancers and complex routing rules we can configure there, resulting in a single, easy-to-manage layer."
"However, the response, throughput, and solid performance we receive after implementation are often worth it."
"NGINX Ingress Controller has positively impacted the organizations where I have worked by providing a very easy and cost-free way to add layer 8 security to their infrastructure."
"We can do a lot of provisioning."
"We can add some add-ons and plugins to the product if we need to."
"The platform is valuable due to its ease of use and quick deployment capabilities."
"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The most valuable features of the Nutanix Kubernetes Engine (NKE) are its simplicity and efficiency during the initial cluster creation phase."
"The product integrates well with our infrastructure."
"Nutanix is very stable and reliable, based on my experience with many customers, including large banks and telcos."
"Karbon is embedded in the hypervisor, there are no deployment costs and the administration is via Prism Central."
 

Cons

"NGINX Ingress Controller itself is a great product, but when considering a complete solution, there are limitations."
"NGINX Ingress Controller can be improved by implementing faster deployment of new services, simplifying SSL or TLS management, and enhancing faster troubleshooting by providing more logs."
"However, the limitations include that annotations can be difficult to govern, and a misconfiguration can put all your cloud infrastructure at risk."
"In terms of stability regarding crashing, it used to happen sometimes. NGINX Ingress Controller needs to give more traffic configurational control to the user."
"I think NGINX Ingress Controller could be improved by adding many features and functions regarding firewalls, similar to what a professional API gateway offers, so those functionalities can be integrated with NGINX Ingress Controller."
"The core dynamics and core features for databases involve the paywall; the paywall is what concerns me."
"The main feature I want to see included is the ability to reduce namespace specifications."
"Overall NGINX Ingress Controller is a good tool to use, but the main drawback is the annotation part, as managing many paths and features can get quite tedious and complicated."
"I would like to have more nodes for availability and storage."
"There is no auto-scaling feature in Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE; however, NKP offers it. In NKE, we created additional worker nodes and increased CPU and RAM capacity, but it required manual intervention."
"There have been challenges related to software bugs, especially regarding long-term licensing options and issues within our customer network."
"It's mostly for lab purposes; we haven't seen a lot of traction in the market from enterprise customers yet."
"There have been cases where we've deployed with Karbon and haven't seen that it includes errors."
"We need a backup of production clusters."
"GUI lacks sufficient information to help with understanding the installation and process."
"Nutanix has limitations compared to VMware, particularly in testing and industry tie-ups with different OEMs. Deploying virtual machines, especially for industrial automation, can be challenging due to compatibility issues."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The product's licenses are included in the software version deployed in our data center."
"The platform is averagely priced. I rate the pricing as four out of ten."
"I rate the product price a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."
"I rate NKE's pricing a six out of ten."
"While deploying Kubernetes clusters on Nutanix is cost-effective, there may be additional costs for remote branch offices where Kubernetes is less common."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
24%
Computer Software Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise10
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NGINX Ingress Controller?
NGINX Ingress Controller was used through the Azure Marketplace, allowing control over precious aspects including pricing, setup cost, and licensing for clients. The best cost-effective solution ca...
What needs improvement with NGINX Ingress Controller?
NGINX Ingress Controller can be improved as it has many features that could be further refined.
What is your primary use case for NGINX Ingress Controller?
NGINX Ingress Controller is used to manage traffic, including HTTPS traffic. For containerized-based applications, NGINX Ingress Controller can be enabled as an event-based request that goes to the...
What needs improvement with Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE?
In terms of features, I cannot comment technically, but the real value is the consolidated out-of-the-box solution that Nutanix offers. Nutanix has built great branding and a lot of credibility and...
What is your primary use case for Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE?
I have experience with OpenShift, Kubernetes, and Nutanix, as we are one of the largest Nutanix resellers in the Middle East. We handle Kubernetes on the cloud as well, so we manage most of the Kub...
What advice do you have for others considering Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE?
I don't have a technical role, but we are a system integrator, so we sell solutions such as OpenShift and Kubernetes as part of the sales team. We are a reseller called eSky IT, and I serve as the ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Nutanix Karbon
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
JetBlue, International Speedway Corporation, SAIC Volkswagen
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