head to head · open source
cilium vs opensre
cilium has 25,360 GitHub stars, 4,082 forks, 1,085 open issues and last shipped yesterday. opensre has 11,150 stars, 1,627 forks, 67 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cilium leads on adoption by 127% (25,360 vs 11,150 stars). cilium is written in Go under Apache-2.0; opensre is written in Python under Apache-2.0. cilium has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, opensre 15%. 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 | opensre | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 25K | ★ 11K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.1K | ⑂ 1.6K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick cilium if
- You weight community size — 25K 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 opensre if
- You want the opensre feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and opensre fits your workflow better
About cilium
Cilium is a networking, observability, and security solution built on an eBPF based dataplane, written in Go and licensed under Apache 2.0. It lives in the Kubernetes ecosystem as a CNI implementation, and it is a CNCF project. At its foundation is eBPF, a Linux kernel technology that allows dynamic insertion of bytecode at integration points such as network IO, application sockets, and tracepoints, which is where Cilium implements its networking, security, and visibility logic. The project provides a flat Layer 3 network that can span multiple clusters in either native routing or overlay mode, and it is L7 proto…
read the full cilium overview →
About opensre
OpenSRE is an open source Python framework for building AI SRE agents, distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. It lives in the infrastructure and operations ecosystem, specifically the monitoring and observability space, and it describes itself as the toolkit for AI era site reliability engineering. The project is currently at v0.1 and is published as a public alpha, meaning the core workflows are usable for early exploration but are not yet fully stable, and both APIs and integrations may evolve as development continues.
read the full opensre overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is cilium or opensre more popular?
cilium has 25,360 GitHub stars and opensre has 11,150. cilium has the larger community by that measure.
Are cilium and opensre free?
Both are open source. cilium is licensed under Apache-2.0 and opensre under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between cilium and opensre?
cilium is written in Go and opensre in Python. 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 opensre?
Choose cilium if you want the larger community (25,360 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose opensre if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.