head to head · open source
cilium vs witr
cilium has 25,232 GitHub stars, 4,071 forks, 1,085 open issues and last shipped yesterday. witr has 22,374 stars, 781 forks, 17 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. cilium leads on adoption by 13% (25,232 vs 22,374 stars). cilium is written in Go under Apache-2.0; witr is written in Go under Apache-2.0. cilium has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, witr 3%. cilium was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (containers, kubernetes, 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 | witr | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 25K | ★ 22K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-08-15 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.1K | ⑂ 781 |
| 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 witr if
- You want the witr 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 witr 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 witr
witr is an open source, Apache 2.0 licensed Go tool with both a command line interface and an interactive terminal UI that traces any process, port, container, or file back to the exact chain of systems that started it, and it is built for operators, SREs, and developers who need to answer "why is this running?" during debugging and incident response.
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Frequently asked questions
Is cilium or witr more popular?
cilium has 25,232 GitHub stars and witr has 22,374. cilium has the larger community by that measure.
Are cilium and witr free?
Both are open source. cilium is licensed under Apache-2.0 and witr under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between cilium and witr?
cilium is written in Go and witr 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 witr?
Choose cilium if you want the larger community (25,232 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose witr if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.