head to head · open source
cilium vs telegraf
cilium has 25,296 GitHub stars, 4,075 forks, 1,085 open issues and last shipped today. telegraf has 17,808 stars, 5,839 forks, 449 open issues and last shipped today. cilium leads on adoption by 42% (25,296 vs 17,808 stars). cilium is written in Go under Apache-2.0; telegraf is written in Go under MIT. cilium has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, telegraf 33%. cilium 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 | telegraf | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 25K | ★ 18K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.1K | ⑂ 5.8K |
| 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 telegraf if
- You want the telegraf feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and telegraf 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 telegraf
Telegraf is a Go based, MIT licensed open source agent that collects, processes, aggregates, and writes metrics, logs, and other arbitrary data, and it is aimed at engineers who run their own monitoring and observability pipelines.
read the full telegraf overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is cilium or telegraf more popular?
cilium has 25,296 GitHub stars and telegraf has 17,808. cilium has the larger community by that measure.
Are cilium and telegraf free?
Both are open source. cilium is licensed under Apache-2.0 and telegraf under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between cilium and telegraf?
cilium is written in Go and telegraf 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 telegraf?
Choose cilium if you want the larger community (25,296 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose telegraf if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.