head to head · open source
Sentry vs cilium
Sentry has 44,792 GitHub stars, 4,854 forks, 2,265 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cilium has 25,232 stars, 4,071 forks, 1,085 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Sentry leads on adoption by 78% (44,792 vs 25,232 stars). Sentry is written in Python under a custom or non-standard licence; cilium is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Sentry has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, cilium 16%. Sentry 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.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Sentry | cilium | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 45K | ★ 25K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.9K | ⑂ 4.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Sentry if
- You weight community size — 45K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick cilium if
- You want the cilium 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 cilium fits your workflow better
About Sentry
Sentry is an open source debugging platform for detecting, tracing, and fixing software issues in real time. It lives in the developer infrastructure ecosystem and provides error tracking and performance monitoring across languages, frameworks, and runtime environments.
read the full Sentry overview →
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 →
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 Sentry or cilium more popular?
Sentry has 44,792 GitHub stars and cilium has 25,232. Sentry has the larger community by that measure.
Are Sentry and cilium free?
Both are open source. Sentry has no licence declared in this registry, and cilium is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Sentry and cilium?
Sentry is written in Python and cilium 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, Sentry or cilium?
Choose Sentry if you want the larger community (44,792 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose cilium if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.