Route and ingress are intended to achieve the same end. Originally Kubernetes had no such concept and so in OpenShift the concept of a Route was developed, along with the bits for providing a load balancing proxy etc. In time it was seen as being useful to have something like this in Kubernetes, so using Route from OpenShift as a starting point for what could be done, Ingress was developed for Kubernetes. In the Ingress version they went for a more generic rules based system so how you specify them looks different, but the intent is to effectively be able to do the same thing.If you intend to deploy your application on multiple Kubernetes distributions at the same time then Ingress might be a good option.

Virtual service and istio is service mesh which is not necessary for external access of an app. You bring complexity with a service mesh. Unless the capabilities offered by a service mesh is really needed for your usecase there is no reason to use it.