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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 (8th)
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

"NGINX Ingress Controller has positively impacted my organization in that all my ingress resources, services, and internal and external communications between different services are quite smooth, and we can control our service exposure and service access easily using NGINX Ingress Controller, which makes my organization really happy."
"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 since I have been using it in production for over three to four years."
"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."
"In many ways, NGINX Ingress Controller has provided cost reduction by eliminating our per-service load balancers."
"Regarding scalability, there is no weakness in NGINX Ingress Controller."
"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."
"NGINX Ingress Controller is a truly good tool that has proven its capability in the market."
"The most valuable features of the Nutanix Kubernetes Engine (NKE) are its simplicity and efficiency during the initial cluster creation phase."
"I would recommend using this product, it's very good."
"We can do a lot of provisioning."
"The solution is easy to manage. You can get everything in a single platform. It is also easy to work with Terraform as a code."
"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"Nutanix's support is really good."
"We can add some add-ons and plugins to the product if we need to."
"The solution provides no downtime features. If we face issues, we create a new port, deploy it there, and then drop the existing one. This way, we avoid NKE downtime on our website."
 

Cons

"In my use case with NGINX Ingress Controller, when we have multiple services, it becomes messy and overburdened to add the annotations to define the policy and the annotations of each service, making it a bit complex."
"I think NGINX Ingress Controller can be improved by not being deprecated."
"In terms of stability regarding crashing, it used to happen sometimes. NGINX Ingress Controller needs to give more traffic configurational control to the user."
"Nowadays, the quality has been degrading, and I do not expect the same level of service."
"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."
"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."
"There have been cases where we've deployed with Karbon and haven't seen that it includes errors."
"NKE could benefit from additional features that support more advanced Kubernetes functionalities and configurations."
"I have issues with the product's interoperability."
"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."
"It's mostly for lab purposes; we haven't seen a lot of traction in the market from enterprise customers yet."
"There have been challenges related to software bugs, especially regarding long-term licensing options and issues within our customer network."
"The product lacks some virtualization capabilities, making it an area for improvement where the solution can focus on providing users with more virtualization capabilities related to disk systems."
"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
"While deploying Kubernetes clusters on Nutanix is cost-effective, there may be additional costs for remote branch offices where Kubernetes is less common."
"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 NKE's pricing a six 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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
24%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
12%
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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