head to head · open source
cilium vs jaeger
cilium has 25,759 GitHub stars, 4,207 forks, 1,085 open issues and last shipped yesterday. jaeger has 23,366 stars, 3,220 forks, 547 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cilium leads on adoption by 10% (25,759 vs 23,366 stars). cilium is written in Go under Apache-2.0; jaeger is written in Go under Apache-2.0. cilium has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, jaeger 14%. cilium was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (cncf), 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
| cilium | jaeger | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 23K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 3.2K |
| 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 jaeger if
- You want the jaeger 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 jaeger 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 jaeger
[![Slack chat][slack img]]( get in touch) [![Unit Tests][ci img]][ci] [![Coverage Status][cov img]][cov] [![Project+Community stats][community badge]][community stats] [![FOSSA Status][fossa img]][fossa] [![OpenSSF Scorecard][openssf img]][openssf] [![OpenSSF Best Practices][openssf bp img]][openssf bp] [![CLOMonitor][clomonitor img]][clomonitor] [![Artifact Hub][artifacthub img]][artifacthub] Jaeger a Distributed Tracing System 💥💥💥 Jaeger v2 is out! Read the blog post and try it out. Quick Start Get Jaeger running in seconds with Docker: For production deployments and more options, see the Getting Started…
read the full jaeger overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is cilium or jaeger more popular?
cilium has 25,759 GitHub stars and jaeger has 23,366. cilium has the larger community by that measure.
Are cilium and jaeger free?
Both are open source. cilium is licensed under Apache-2.0 and jaeger under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between cilium and jaeger?
cilium is written in Go and jaeger 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, cilium or jaeger?
Choose cilium if you want the larger community (25,759 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose jaeger if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.