head to head · open source
worldmonitor vs cilium
worldmonitor has 86,684 GitHub stars, 13,147 forks, 313 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cilium has 25,232 stars, 4,071 forks, 1,085 open issues and last shipped yesterday. worldmonitor leads on adoption by 244% (86,684 vs 25,232 stars). worldmonitor is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; cilium is written in Go under Apache-2.0. worldmonitor has attracted 15% as many forks as stars, cilium 16%. worldmonitor 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
| worldmonitor | cilium | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 87K | ★ 25K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 13K | ⑂ 4.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick worldmonitor if
- You weight community size — 87K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 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 worldmonitor
World Monitor is an open source, real time global intelligence dashboard in TypeScript that aggregates news with AI, monitors geopolitics and infrastructure, and unifies all of it into a single situational awareness interface for analysts, journalists, researchers, and operations teams who need cross domain awareness they can self host.
read the full worldmonitor 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 worldmonitor or cilium more popular?
worldmonitor has 86,684 GitHub stars and cilium has 25,232. worldmonitor has the larger community by that measure.
Are worldmonitor and cilium free?
Both are open source. worldmonitor is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and cilium under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between worldmonitor and cilium?
worldmonitor 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, worldmonitor or cilium?
Choose worldmonitor if you want the larger community (86,684 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose cilium if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.