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Developer Tools · head to head

Envoy vs Luzmo

Envoy logo

Envoy

Developer Tools

A high-performance L7 proxy written in C++ that is configured by an API rather than a config file, and is usually deployed under a control plane.

From
Free
Free plan
Yes
Visit EnvoyFull review
Luzmo logo

Luzmo

Business Intelligence

Embedded analytics for SaaS products, billed by monthly active dashboard users

From
€995/month
Free plan
No
Visit LuzmoFull review

The short version

  • Envoy is free; Luzmo starts at €995/mo.
  • Only Envoy lists xDS dynamic configuration; only Luzmo lists multi-tenant row-level security.
  • Prices and features on this page were last checked on 13 November 2026.

Where they differ

Only the attributes on which Envoy and Luzmo actually diverge.

Attributes where Envoy and Luzmo differ
AttributeEnvoyLuzmo
Starting priceFree€995/month
Pricing modelOpen-sourcePer month by monthly active user count
Free tierYesNo
CategoryDeveloper ToolsBusiness Intelligence

Identical on both: platforms (Web).

What each one covers

Drawn from each product's published feature list. An absence here means we hold no record of it - not that the product lacks it.

Only in Envoy

  • xDS dynamic configuration
  • Protocol breadth
  • Filter chain architecture
  • Observability by default
  • Outlier detection
  • Traffic shaping
  • mTLS termination and origination
  • Hot restart

Only in Luzmo

  • Multi-tenant row-level security
  • Embeddable editor
  • Theming and white labelling
  • SDKs and APIs
  • Luzmo IQ
  • Scheduled exports

What people use each for

The jobs each tool is most often brought in to do.

Envoy

  • Acting as the data plane under a service mesh or Gateway API implementation, which is how the overwhelming majority of deployments use itnot Luzmo
  • An edge or API gateway that needs per-route retry budgets, circuit breaking and outlier detection rather than round-robin proxyingnot Luzmo
  • Migrating traffic between service versions or between a monolith and its replacement, using weighted splits and shadow trafficnot Luzmo
  • Standardising observability across a polyglot estate, so that latency, error rates and tracing look the same regardless of the language a service is written innot Luzmo

Luzmo

  • A B2B SaaS product that needs customer-facing dashboards without hiring a front-end data visualisation teamnot Envoy
  • A vertical software vendor that wants to sell an analytics module as a paid add-onnot Envoy
  • A product where each customer must only see their own rows and the security boundary has to be provable to an auditornot Envoy
  • A team that wants end customers to build their own charts rather than filing feature requests for every new reportnot Envoy

Where each one falls short

Documented limitations, not opinions. Every one is a constraint you would hit in normal use.

Envoy

  • The configuration surface is very large and hand-written bootstrap YAML runs to hundreds of lines for routing that Nginx expresses in twenty, which is why nearly every production deployment sits under a control plane and inherits that control plane's constraints as well
  • xDS is the real API and it is not stable in the comfortable sense; the v2 API set was removed outright, resource types continue to be deprecated, and your control plane and Envoy binaries have to be upgraded roughly in step or the proxies stop accepting configuration
  • Extending it properly means writing a C++ filter and building and maintaining your own Envoy binary; the alternatives are Lua, which adds per-request overhead, and proxy-wasm, whose ABI has remained effectively experimental for years with a real performance cost
  • At sidecar density the per-proxy memory and CPU footprint is a measurable share of cluster capacity, since thousands of workloads each carry a full proxy, and this is precisely the cost that has pushed mesh projects towards node-level or ambient architectures
  • There is no single vendor selling support for Envoy itself; you get the community plus control-plane vendors such as Solo.io and Tetrate, so an Envoy-level production bug is your own engineers in a C++ codebase unless a support contract happens to cover it
  • Diagnosing why a request got a particular response involves reading config dumps, the stats endpoint and the RESPONSE_FLAGS codes in access logs rather than a readable error, which is a specific skill you must hire or spend months growing

Luzmo

  • Billing by monthly active users means commercial success is punished: getting every one of your customers into the dashboard weekly is exactly the outcome that pushes you into the next tier
  • The entry price of EUR 995 per month billed annually rules it out for early-stage products, so the realistic buyer already has meaningful revenue
  • It is built for embedding rather than internal analysis, so most customers still pay for a second BI tool for their own staff, doubling the analytics line item
  • The semantic modelling layer is lighter than a dedicated one such as dbt or Cube, so complex metric definitions often have to be pre-computed in the warehouse before Luzmo sees them
  • As a smaller European vendor it has less connector breadth and a smaller partner ecosystem than the US incumbents, and unusual data sources frequently need an intermediate warehouse hop

Pricing, plan by plan

Envoy

Free

No published plan breakdown. See the Envoy review.

Luzmo

€995/month
  • Starter€995/mo
    • Embedded dashboards with white labelling
    • Custom charts
    • APIs and SDKs
  • Premium€2,495/mo
    • Everything in Starter
    • End-customer self-service dashboard building
    • Luzmo IQ conversational insights
  • EnterpriseOn request
    • Dedicated VPC option
    • Flexible hosting region
    • OIDC single sign-on

Which should you pick?

Choose Envoy if

  • You need xds dynamic configuration.
  • You want to start without paying.
  • You also want protocol breadth.
Envoy review

Choose Luzmo if

  • You need multi-tenant row-level security.
  • You also want embeddable editor.
Luzmo review

Questions people ask

Is Envoy or Luzmo better?
Neither clearly leads. Envoy starts at Free and Luzmo at €995/month, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
Which is cheaper, Envoy or Luzmo?
Envoy has a free tier; the other does not. Paid plans start at Free for Envoy and €995/month for Luzmo.
Does Envoy or Luzmo run on more platforms?
Both run on Web, so platform support will not decide this one for you.
Can I use Envoy for free?
Yes. Envoy has a free tier, so you can try it without paying. Luzmo starts at €995/month.
What is Envoy best used for?
Envoy is most often used for acting as the data plane under a service mesh or gateway api implementation, which is how the overwhelming majority of deployments use it, an edge or api gateway that needs per-route retry budgets, circuit breaking and outlier detection rather than round-robin proxying, migrating traffic between service versions or between a monolith and its replacement, using weighted splits and shadow traffic, standardising observability across a polyglot estate, so that latency, error rates and tracing look the same regardless of the language a service is written in. Of those, acting as the data plane under a service mesh or gateway api implementation, which is how the overwhelming majority of deployments use it and an edge or api gateway that needs per-route retry budgets, circuit breaking and outlier detection rather than round-robin proxying are not what Luzmo is typically brought in for.
What can Envoy do that Luzmo cannot?
Envoy covers xDS dynamic configuration, Protocol breadth, Filter chain architecture, Observability by default. Luzmo covers Multi-tenant row-level security, Embeddable editor, Theming and white labelling, SDKs and APIs.

Answered from the vendors’ own pages

Envoy: Should I run Envoy on its own, or under a control plane?

Almost always under one. Directly authoring xDS or static bootstrap configuration is viable for a handful of routes and becomes unmanageable beyond that. Envoy Gateway, Istio, Contour, Gloo and Consul all exist to generate that configuration for you.

Luzmo: Is Luzmo the same as Cumul.io?

Yes. Cumul.io rebranded to Luzmo; it is the same company and product line.

Envoy: How does it compare with Nginx or HAProxy?

Envoy is dynamically configured over an API and instrumented far more heavily; Nginx and HAProxy are faster to configure and lighter for straightforward reverse proxying. If you never need to change routing without a reload, Envoy is more machinery than the problem requires.

Luzmo: How is it priced?

By monthly active users of your embedded dashboards, from EUR 995 per month on Starter billed annually.

Envoy: What does it cost?

Nothing to licence; it is Apache 2.0 and there is no paid edition. The cost is engineering time and, for most organisations, a commercial control plane or cloud service that packages it.

Luzmo: Is there a free tier?

No, only a trial. There is no perpetual free plan.

Envoy: Can I write extensions without C++?

You can write Lua filters or proxy-wasm modules in Rust, Go, C++ or AssemblyScript. Both carry per-request overhead compared with a native filter, and the Wasm path has been slower to stabilise than the project originally projected.

Luzmo: Can our customers build their own dashboards?

Yes, but the embeddable editor for end-customer self-service sits on the Premium tier.

Envoy: Is it a CNCF project?

Yes, it is a graduated CNCF project licensed under Apache 2.0, which means the trademark and governance sit with the foundation rather than with Lyft or any vendor.

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