head to head · open source
cilium vs Apache SkyWalking
cilium has 25,759 GitHub stars, 4,207 forks, 1,085 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Apache SkyWalking has 24,984 stars, 6,630 forks, 41 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cilium leads on adoption by 3% (25,759 vs 24,984 stars). cilium is written in Go under Apache-2.0; Apache SkyWalking is written in Java under Apache-2.0. cilium has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, Apache SkyWalking 27%. cilium was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (ebpf), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| cilium | Apache SkyWalking | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 25K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Java |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 6.6K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick cilium if
- You weight community size — 26K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Apache SkyWalking if
- You want the Apache SkyWalking feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and Apache SkyWalking fits your workflow better
About cilium
.. raw:: html Cilium is a networking, observability, and security solution with an eBPF based dataplane. It provides a simple flat Layer 3 network with the ability to span multiple clusters in either a native routing or overlay mode. It is L7 protocol aware and can enforce network policies on L3 L7 using an identity based security model that is decoupled from network addressing. Cilium implements distributed load balancing for traffic between pods and to external services, and is able to fully replace kube proxy, using efficient hash tables in eBPF, allowing for almost unlimited scale. It also supports advanced…
read the full cilium overview →
About Apache SkyWalking
Apache SkyWalking ========== SkyWalking : an APM (Application Performance Monitoring) system, especially designed for microservices, cloud native and container based architectures. Abstract SkyWalking is an open source APM system that provides monitoring, tracing and diagnosing capabilities for distributed systems in Cloud Native architectures. Distributed Tracing End to end distributed tracing. Service topology analysis, service centric observability and APIs dashboards. Agents for your stack Java, .Net Core, PHP, NodeJS, Golang, LUA, Rust, C++, Client JavaScript and Python agents with active development and…
read the full Apache SkyWalking overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is cilium or Apache SkyWalking more popular?
cilium has 25,759 GitHub stars and Apache SkyWalking has 24,984. cilium has the larger community by that measure.
Are cilium and Apache SkyWalking free?
Both are open source. cilium is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Apache SkyWalking under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between cilium and Apache SkyWalking?
cilium is written in Go and Apache SkyWalking in Java. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, cilium or Apache SkyWalking?
Choose cilium if you want the larger community (25,759 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Apache SkyWalking if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.