Istio is described as 'Open platform for providing a uniform way to integrate microservices, manage traffic flow across microservices, enforce policies and aggregate telemetry data. Istio's control plane provides an abstraction layer over the underlying cluster management platform' and is an app in the security & privacy category. There are four alternatives to Istio for a variety of platforms, including Linux, Self-Hosted, SaaS, Mac and Windows apps. The best Istio alternative is Apache APISIX, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like Istio are Kong, Cilium and AWS App Mesh.