head to head · open source
cilium vs voltagent
cilium has 25,360 GitHub stars, 4,082 forks, 1,085 open issues and last shipped today. voltagent has 10,647 stars, 1,135 forks, 86 open issues and last shipped 24 days ago. cilium leads on adoption by 138% (25,360 vs 10,647 stars). cilium is written in Go under Apache-2.0; voltagent is written in TypeScript under MIT. cilium has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, voltagent 11%. 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 | voltagent | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 25K | ★ 11K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-08-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.1K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| 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 voltagent if
- You want the voltagent feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and voltagent 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 voltagent
VoltAgent is an end to end AI Agent Engineering Platform built around an open source TypeScript framework. It lives in the JavaScript and TypeScript ecosystem, distributed through npm packages such as @voltagent/core and @voltagent/mcp docs server , and it is released under the MIT license. The project is roughly one year old, carries 10,619 stars and 1,126 forks on GitHub, and its most recent push landed on 27 August 2026. The platform has two halves: the open source framework, which supplies memory, RAG, guardrails, tools, MCP, voice, and workflow primitives, and the VoltOps Console, which is offered as either …
read the full voltagent overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is cilium or voltagent more popular?
cilium has 25,360 GitHub stars and voltagent has 10,647. cilium has the larger community by that measure.
Are cilium and voltagent free?
Both are open source. cilium is licensed under Apache-2.0 and voltagent under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between cilium and voltagent?
cilium is written in Go and voltagent in TypeScript. 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 voltagent?
Choose cilium if you want the larger community (25,360 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose voltagent if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.