head to head · open source
beszel vs cilium
beszel has 26,783 GitHub stars, 1,138 forks, 313 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. cilium has 25,759 stars, 4,207 forks, 1,085 open issues and last shipped yesterday. beszel leads on adoption by 4% (26,783 vs 25,759 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%. cilium 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 | ★ 27K | ★ 26K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-01 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.1K | ⑂ 4.2K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick beszel if
- You weight community size — 27K 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 Beszel is a lightweight server monitoring platform that includes Docker statistics, historical data, and alert functions. It has a friendly web interface, simple configuration, and is ready to use out of the box. It supports automatic backup, multi user, OAuth authentication, and API access. Features Lightweight : Smaller and less resource intensive than leading solutions. Simple : Easy setup with little manual configuration required. Docker stats : Tracks CPU, memory, and network usage history for each container. ZFS : Tracks pool capacity, health, and I/O, plus per dataset usage. Alerts : Configurable…
read the full beszel overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is beszel or cilium more popular?
beszel has 26,783 GitHub stars and cilium has 25,759. 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 (26,783 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose cilium if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.