head to head · open source
beszel vs cilium
beszel has 25,459 GitHub stars, 1,019 forks, 313 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cilium has 25,232 stars, 4,071 forks, 1,085 open issues and last shipped yesterday. beszel leads on adoption by 1% (25,459 vs 25,232 stars). beszel is written in Go under MIT; cilium is written in Go under Apache-2.0. beszel has attracted 4% as many forks as stars, cilium 16%. beszel was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (monitoring), 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
| beszel | cilium | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 25K | ★ 25K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.0K | ⑂ 4.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick beszel if
- You weight community size — 25K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick cilium if
- You want the cilium feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and cilium fits your workflow better
About beszel
Beszel is a lightweight server monitoring platform written in Go and released under the MIT License. It consists of two components: a hub, which is a web application built on PocketBase and provides the dashboard for viewing and managing connected systems, and an agent, which runs on each system being monitored and communicates system metrics back to the hub. The project lives in the self hosted, homelab oriented monitoring ecosystem, alongside the broader category of Infrastructure and Operations tooling, and it is distributed primarily through Docker images published as henrygd/beszel for the hub and henrygd/be…
read the full beszel overview →
About cilium
Cilium is a networking, observability, and security solution built on an eBPF based dataplane, written in Go and licensed under Apache 2.0. It lives in the Kubernetes ecosystem as a CNI implementation, and it is a CNCF project. At its foundation is eBPF, a Linux kernel technology that allows dynamic insertion of bytecode at integration points such as network IO, application sockets, and tracepoints, which is where Cilium implements its networking, security, and visibility logic. The project provides a flat Layer 3 network that can span multiple clusters in either native routing or overlay mode, and it is L7 proto…
read the full cilium overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is beszel or cilium more popular?
beszel has 25,459 GitHub stars and cilium has 25,232. beszel has the larger community by that measure.
Are beszel and cilium free?
Both are open source. beszel is licensed under MIT and cilium under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between beszel and cilium?
beszel is written in Go and cilium in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, beszel or cilium?
Choose beszel if you want the larger community (25,459 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose cilium if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.