# Istio Reviews **Vendor:** Banzai Cloud **Category:** [Service Mesh Tools](https://www.g2.com/categories/service-mesh-tools) **Average Rating:** 4.2/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 18 ## About Istio Istio‚Äôs 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 Reviews ### 1. Secure Microservice Communication with Room for Simplification **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Santhosh B. | Cloud Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 24, 2021 **What do you like best about Istio?** I use Istio to secure east-west traffic between my microservices, ensuring that only legitimate traffic flows between them and blocking unwanted traffic. I appreciate that it enables mutual TLS, providing additional security. I like the way Istio allows connectivity between microservices, especially as we transition from traditional three-tier web architecture to microservices architecture. It also offers both security and tracing capabilities, which are crucial. Also, while Kiali was helpful before, now I find Jaeger does a great job. **What do you dislike about Istio?** Initially, Istio was not easy to set up. Also, the way Istio injected the Envoy proxy into every microservice was hogging the microservices and caused high resource utilization. They could also work on simplifying the complexity, similar to how Linkerd is. **What problems is Istio solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Istio to secure microservices by ensuring only legitimate traffic flows between them. It enables mutual TLS for added security and helps with traffic tracing, which is crucial when transitioning to microservice architecture. ### 2. Istio Makes Zero-Trust Security and Observability Effortless **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Pasquale M. | Devops Manager, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 18, 2026 **What do you like best about Istio?** What engineers love about Istio in 2026 is how it moves complex networking logic out of the application code and into the infrastructure layer transparently. Zero-Trust Security & Observability: It provides automatic mTLS encryption and deep "Golden Signal" metrics (latency, errors, traffic) for every service-to-service interaction without touching a single line of your code. Ambient Mode Efficiency: The shift to sidecar-less "Ambient Mode" significantly reduces resource overhead and operational friction, finally making enterprise-grade traffic management lightweight and easy to maintain. **What do you dislike about Istio?** Its primary drawback is the crushing operational complexity and steep learning curve required to manage its vast array of Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) and troubleshooting layers. The significant resource overhead of sidecar proxies—injecting extra CPU/RAM usage and millisecond latency—can become a "service mesh tax" that outweighs benefits for smaller architectures. **What problems is Istio solving and how is that benefiting you?** Istio solves the "microservices sprawl" problem by offloading complex networking, mTLS security, and real-time observability from your application code into a unified infrastructure layer. It benefits you by providing a standardized control plane that replaces fragmented Nginx sidecars, eliminating the "EOL" manual configuration burden of legacy ingress controllers for modern traffic. ### 3. Istio - Observability Simplified **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Telecommunications | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 31, 2024 **What do you like best about Istio?** With Istio kubernetes oprtator it is easy to deploy in any kubernetes cluster and it provides end to end traffic visibility and it has core features like traffic amangement and security. Istio sidecar proxy container will be injected to the pod without any modification in the application we run. **What do you dislike about Istio?** Due to istio installation addition overload to the cluster in terms of resource availablity but that justifies the performance and use case **What problems is Istio solving and how is that benefiting you?** it decouples the observabilty and security from the application code make developer to focus on qulaity of code ### 4. Rafayel's G2 review on Istio product **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** rafayel j. | Research Assistant (Machine /Deep Learning and Data Science), Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 12, 2021 **What do you like best about Istio?** Managing microservices Traffic Forwarding Service Discovery **What do you dislike about Istio?** The complexity of kube-proxy route forwarding function in each pod increasing response latency — due to more hops when the sidecar intercepts the traffic and consuming more resources **What problems is Istio solving and how is that benefiting you?** Microservice Segmentation Security Access control Traffic Segmentation Kubernetes Policy ### 5. Open source micro-service service discovery for Enterprise ready **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Prabakaran A. | Senior Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 03, 2021 **What do you like best about Istio?** Istio with Kubernetes sidecar will make the micro-service service discovery go to the next level. It comes with the following logging tools pre-configured with, 1. Prometheus 2. Jaegar 3. Kiali 4. Grafana It supports advance newtwork traffing control, 1. dns routing with conditions 2. traffic limiting for micro-service 3. mutal tls between micro service to micro service **What do you dislike about Istio?** Istio is not a light service discovery; the learning curve is steep. **What problems is Istio solving and how is that benefiting you?** Solved Micro-service service discovery, we have used istio-ingress over Kubernetes-ingress. For security concerns, we even needed mutual transport layer security for micro-service to micro-service communication For security concerns, we even bear tokens [jwt token] for micro-service to micro-service communication. For scalability concerns, we need an auto-scaled Kubernetes cluster, istio done a great job finding micro-service in clusters ### 6. best service mesh in the market today **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Arindam B. | Lead Cloud and AI Consultant, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 09, 2021 **What do you like best about Istio?** I like traffic managment, rate limiting via envot proxy ,fault injection,cicuit breaking,request routing etc. **What do you dislike about Istio?** Istio should be compatiable with other ingress controllers , right now its only Istio gateway. Adoption is also very slow. Moreover istio should come as add on to kubernetes cluster . More over managing istio is an overhead, app mesh from aws is better maanged solution. **What problems is Istio solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are getting multiple benifits Zero code for logging and monitoring Great Service Mesh Great flexibility custom Ingress controller Resiliency Easy integration with Kubernetes and Docker Full Security Powerful authorization mechanisms ### 7. Istio : The Service Mesh Kubernetes Needs!!! **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Banking | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 21, 2021 **What do you like best about Istio?** Traffic Management and security would be the top two features out of the many available. **What do you dislike about Istio?** A little complicated to set up if you are not well versed with the specific terminology used by the tool. **What problems is Istio solving and how is that benefiting you?** Canary releases and traffic management are the two most important problems we have solved with Istio. ### 8. Out of the box support for your microservices **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Saiteja O. | Software Engineer-II Devops (Platform-Engineer), Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 19, 2021 **What do you like best about Istio?** Gives insight into network performance . Manages traffic with ease Simplifies load balancing. Easily deploy applications using kubernetes **What do you dislike about Istio?** Setting up is difficult. Time consuming to setup the complete process Requires a high level understanding of micro service architecture **What problems is Istio solving and how is that benefiting you?** Production level performance has been highly imporved. Easy setting up the traffic. Canary deployment ### 9. I'm very happy to use Istio to manage my cluster **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Internet | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 31, 2021 **What do you like best about Istio?** tracing, traffic management, and fault injection **What do you dislike about Istio?** The deployment is a bit tricky on a private GKE cluster with NAT gateway **Recommendations to others considering Istio:** do plenty of research before you use istio. But once you start, it is very helpful **What problems is Istio solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Istio to get more insights into the traffic flows within my cluster. And I can use Istio to practice Chaos Engineering within the cluster ### 10. Tool is far from production ready **Rating:** 0.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Marketing and Advertising | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 08, 2021 **What do you like best about Istio?** The concept of istio inwhich it provides circuit breaking and load balancing on top of k8s network and pod management **What do you dislike about Istio?** Can only work with predefined services. Does not work for round robin load distribution. Does not work for more complex scenarios with databases with direct ip connections **What problems is Istio solving and how is that benefiting you?** Was trying to get knative to run to reduce overhead of low usage business service pods in k8s ### 11. My experience with Istio **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Hospital & Health Care | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 29, 2021 **What do you like best about Istio?** I have used Istio on Kubernetes. Setup was easy, and it added lots of useful features like API Gateway, security, better load balancing, and distributed tracing. Which made managing prod issues match simple and save a lot of time. **What do you dislike about Istio?** Adding lots of features means it will use more resources, which could slightly increase infrastructure cost, but it's worth it. **What problems is Istio solving and how is that benefiting you?** Backpressure, better session affinity, and impact analysis ### 12. Flexible and Realiable. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Internet | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 22, 2021 **What do you like best about Istio?** I can manage the orchestation easily. I also loved using Canary Deployment process and make our infrastructure more reliable because of zero downtime deployment. **What do you dislike about Istio?** For almost 2 years using and learning about istio I don't have any dislike. **Recommendations to others considering Istio:** If you looking for reliable service mesh, istio is the one you're looking for. **What problems is Istio solving and how is that benefiting you?** Deployment, the benefit is I can cut deployment time process for 50% than usual. ### 13. microservices abstraction **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 24, 2021 **What do you like best about Istio?** Abstraction of authentication/security when deploying microservices. The developer does not have to add protection inside the microservices. **What do you dislike about Istio?** more examples and documentation needed to add-on. **Recommendations to others considering Istio:** Microservices deployment in k8s. Microservices should not include the access info inside the service. **What problems is Istio solving and how is that benefiting you?** Deploying models. set up is easy with k8s deployment ### 14. Microservices and Istio, match made in heaven **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Logistics and Supply Chain | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 27, 2021 **What do you like best about Istio?** zero code for logging and monitoring, great flexibility, service mesh, ingress controller, easy to integrate, security, authorization mechanisms **What do you dislike about Istio?** Mismatch of versions between products, Lack of articles describing how to do something **What problems is Istio solving and how is that benefiting you?** securing communication among services, exposing services using ingress gateway, monitoring, etc. ### 15. Very good sidecar design tool **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 09, 2021 **What do you like best about Istio?** Easy to collect meta information like logs, monitoring metrics,service discovery **What do you dislike about Istio?** It might be very benfit if istio uses very less resources **What problems is Istio solving and how is that benefiting you?** Easy to collect meta information like logs, monitoring metrics,service discovery ### 16. Istio experience **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 09, 2021 **What do you like best about Istio?** Easy to install with the new single component istiod **What do you dislike about Istio?** I didn't find much aspects to dislike really **What problems is Istio solving and how is that benefiting you?** TLS handling, FIPS enforcement, Canary deployments ### 17. I was working in istio for making service mess for Rakuten Mobile for kubernetes swrvice **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Internet | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 24, 2021 **What do you like best about Istio?** Easy to understand and good documentation **What do you dislike about Istio?** I did not have specific to tell I don't like anything. **Recommendations to others considering Istio:** Sure we recommended lots of time istio **What problems is Istio solving and how is that benefiting you?** Loadbalancing and service exposing ### 18. Istio service mesh is really good for kubernetes service **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Airlines/Aviation | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 29, 2021 **What do you like best about Istio?** gateway and virtualservice are really fantastic feature **What do you dislike about Istio?** I dont find personally any drawbacks on istio **Recommendations to others considering Istio:** user-friendly documentation **What problems is Istio solving and how is that benefiting you?** https connections issues ## Istio Discussions - [What is Istio used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-istio-used-for) - [View Istio pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/istio/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-06-10+22%3A35%3A00+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=a19f4d4a-c96d-4ed7-89ee-398c90e011d5&secure%5Btoken%5D=8b2017a557bb7ea1b5f0ed6d3ffb46bc47cfe983c834ece6690a461a5d802441&format=llm_user) ## Istio Features **Functionality** - Supported Protocols - Container Orchestration - Extensibility - Monitoring **Cloud Visibility** - Data Discovery - Cloud Registry - Cloud Gap Analytics **Networking** - Networking - Load Balancing - Traffic Filtering - Service Discovery **Security** - Data Security - Data loss Prevention - Security Auditing **Protection** - Policy Management - Secure Communications **Identity** - SSO - Governance - User Analytics ## Top Istio Alternatives - [HAProxy](https://www.g2.com/products/haproxy/reviews) - 4.7/5.0 (892 reviews) - [Traefik](https://www.g2.com/products/traefik/reviews) - 4.6/5.0 (32 reviews) - [HashiCorp Consul](https://www.g2.com/products/hashicorp-consul/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (20 reviews)