head to head · open source
cilium vs hertzbeat
cilium has 25,360 GitHub stars, 4,082 forks, 1,085 open issues and last shipped today. hertzbeat has 7,398 stars, 1,330 forks, 313 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. cilium leads on adoption by 243% (25,360 vs 7,398 stars). cilium is written in Go under Apache-2.0; hertzbeat is written in Java under Apache-2.0. cilium has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, hertzbeat 18%. 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 | hertzbeat | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 25K | ★ 7.4K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.1K | ⑂ 1.3K |
| 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 hertzbeat if
- You want the hertzbeat feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and hertzbeat 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 hertzbeat
Apache HertzBeat is an AI powered, next generation open source real time observability system written in Java under the Apache 2.0 licence, built for teams that need unified metrics and logs collection, centralized alerting distribution, and intelligent management and analysis without deploying an agent on every monitored host.
read the full hertzbeat overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is cilium or hertzbeat more popular?
cilium has 25,360 GitHub stars and hertzbeat has 7,398. cilium has the larger community by that measure.
Are cilium and hertzbeat free?
Both are open source. cilium is licensed under Apache-2.0 and hertzbeat under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between cilium and hertzbeat?
cilium is written in Go and hertzbeat in Java. 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 hertzbeat?
Choose cilium if you want the larger community (25,360 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose hertzbeat if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.