head to head · open source
beszel vs kubeshark
beszel has 25,541 GitHub stars, 1,025 forks, 313 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kubeshark has 12,082 stars, 549 forks, 149 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. beszel leads on adoption by 111% (25,541 vs 12,082 stars). beszel is written in Go under MIT; kubeshark is written in Go under Apache-2.0. beszel has attracted 4% as many forks as stars, kubeshark 5%. beszel was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | kubeshark | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 12K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.0K | ⑂ 549 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick beszel if
- You weight community size — 26K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick kubeshark if
- You want the kubeshark 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 kubeshark 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 kubeshark
Kubeshark is an Apache 2.0, eBPF powered network observability tool for Kubernetes that indexes cluster wide L4/L7 traffic with full Kubernetes context and makes that traffic queryable by AI agents through the Model Context Protocol and by humans through a real time dashboard.
read the full kubeshark overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is beszel or kubeshark more popular?
beszel has 25,541 GitHub stars and kubeshark has 12,082. beszel has the larger community by that measure.
Are beszel and kubeshark free?
Both are open source. beszel is licensed under MIT and kubeshark under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between beszel and kubeshark?
beszel is written in Go and kubeshark 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 kubeshark?
Choose beszel if you want the larger community (25,541 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose kubeshark if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.