head to head · open source
cilium vs Checkmate
cilium has 25,768 GitHub stars, 4,210 forks, 1,085 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Checkmate has 11,021 stars, 1,236 forks, 114 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. cilium leads on adoption by 134% (25,768 vs 11,021 stars). cilium is written in Go under Apache-2.0; Checkmate is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0. cilium has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, Checkmate 11%. cilium 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
| cilium | Checkmate | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 11K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| 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 Checkmate if
- You want the Checkmate feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and Checkmate 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 Checkmate
🇺🇸 English 🇸🇦 العربية 🇪🇸 Català 🇨🇿 Čeština 🇩🇪 Deutsch 🇪🇸 Español 🇫🇮 Suomi 🇫🇷 Français 🇮🇹 Italiano 🇯🇵 日本語 🇧🇷 Português (Brasil) 🇷🇺 Русский 🇹🇭 ไทย 🇹🇷 Türkçe 🇺🇦 Українська 🇻🇳 Tiếng Việt 🇨🇳 简体中文 🇹🇼 繁體中文 Checkmate An open source uptime and infrastructure monitoring application This repository contains both the frontend and the backend of Checkmate, an open source, self hosted monitoring tool for tracking server hardware, uptime, response times, and incidents in real time with beautiful visualizations. Checkmate regularly checks whether a server/website is accessible and performs…
read the full Checkmate overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is cilium or Checkmate more popular?
cilium has 25,768 GitHub stars and Checkmate has 11,021. cilium has the larger community by that measure.
Are cilium and Checkmate free?
Both are open source. cilium is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Checkmate under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between cilium and Checkmate?
cilium is written in Go and Checkmate in TypeScript. 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 Checkmate?
Choose cilium if you want the larger community (25,768 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Checkmate if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.