head to head · open source
cilium vs pinpoint
cilium has 25,768 GitHub stars, 4,210 forks, 1,085 open issues and last shipped yesterday. pinpoint has 13,870 stars, 3,737 forks, 543 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cilium leads on adoption by 86% (25,768 vs 13,870 stars). cilium is written in Go under Apache-2.0; pinpoint is written in Java under Apache-2.0. cilium has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, pinpoint 27%. pinpoint 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
| cilium | pinpoint | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 14K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Java |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 3.7K |
| 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 pinpoint if
- You want the pinpoint feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and pinpoint 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 pinpoint
Latest Release (2026/05/21) We're happy to announce the release of Pinpoint v3.1.0. Please check the release note at ( The current stable version is v3.1.0. Live Demo Take a quick look at Pinpoint with our demo! PHP, PYTHON Pinpoint also supports application written in PHP, Python. Check out our agent repository. About Pinpoint Pinpoint is an APM (Application Performance Management) tool for large scale distributed systems written in Java / PHP/PYTHON). Inspired by Dapper, Pinpoint provides a solution to help analyze the overall structure of the system and how components within them are interconnected by tracing…
read the full pinpoint overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is cilium or pinpoint more popular?
cilium has 25,768 GitHub stars and pinpoint has 13,870. cilium has the larger community by that measure.
Are cilium and pinpoint free?
Both are open source. cilium is licensed under Apache-2.0 and pinpoint under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between cilium and pinpoint?
cilium is written in Go and pinpoint in Java. 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 pinpoint?
Choose cilium if you want the larger community (25,768 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose pinpoint if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.