head to head · open source
SigNoz vs cilium
SigNoz has 32,116 GitHub stars, 2,493 forks, 1,557 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cilium has 25,232 stars, 4,071 forks, 1,085 open issues and last shipped yesterday. SigNoz leads on adoption by 27% (32,116 vs 25,232 stars). SigNoz is written in TypeScript under a custom or non-standard licence; cilium is written in Go under Apache-2.0. SigNoz has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, cilium 16%. SigNoz 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
| SigNoz | cilium | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 25K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.5K | ⑂ 4.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick SigNoz if
- You weight community size — 32K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- 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 SigNoz
SigNoz is an open source, OpenTelemetry native observability platform for cloud native applications. It unifies logs, metrics, traces, alerts, and dashboards into a single tool, replacing fragmented monitoring stacks with a correlated signal pipeline. It lives in the observability ecosystem alongside tools like Prometheus, Jaeger, and Grafana, and is positioned as an open alternative to Datadog.
read the full SigNoz 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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is SigNoz or cilium more popular?
SigNoz has 32,116 GitHub stars and cilium has 25,232. SigNoz has the larger community by that measure.
Are SigNoz and cilium free?
Both are open source. SigNoz 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 SigNoz and cilium?
SigNoz is written in TypeScript 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, SigNoz or cilium?
Choose SigNoz if you want the larger community (32,116 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.