head to head · open source
cilium vs effect
cilium has 25,759 GitHub stars, 4,207 forks, 1,085 open issues and last shipped yesterday. effect has 17,464 stars, 892 forks, 253 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cilium leads on adoption by 47% (25,759 vs 17,464 stars). cilium is written in Go under Apache-2.0; effect is written in TypeScript under MIT. cilium has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, effect 5%. 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| cilium | effect | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 17K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 892 |
| 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 effect if
- You want the effect feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and effect 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 effect
Effect Effect is a library for building robust, maintainable, type safe, and production grade applications in TypeScript. It helps you handle the hard problems at scale: typed errors, dependency injection, structured concurrency, scheduling, tracing, and unified schema validation. Effect V4 is currently a release candidate. The main branch contains v4 development. Install V4 RC Requirements TypeScript 5.9 or newer. TypeScript 7 is recommended for the best performance and compatibility with Effect's TypeScript tooling. Node.js 18 or newer is the general minimum for running Effect on Node.js. Some integration…
read the full effect overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Monitoring & Observability projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Monitoring & Observability field.
Frequently asked questions
Is cilium or effect more popular?
cilium has 25,759 GitHub stars and effect has 17,464. cilium has the larger community by that measure.
Are cilium and effect free?
Both are open source. cilium is licensed under Apache-2.0 and effect under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between cilium and effect?
cilium is written in Go and effect 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 effect?
Choose cilium if you want the larger community (25,759 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose effect if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.