head to head · open source
cilium vs monolog
cilium has 25,232 GitHub stars, 4,071 forks, 1,085 open issues and last shipped yesterday. monolog has 21,406 stars, 1,910 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 9 days ago. cilium leads on adoption by 18% (25,232 vs 21,406 stars). cilium is written in Go under Apache-2.0; monolog is written in PHP under MIT. cilium has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, monolog 9%. 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 | monolog | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 25K | ★ 21K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.1K | ⑂ 1.9K |
| 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 monolog if
- You want the monolog feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and monolog 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 monolog
Monolog is a logging library for PHP that sends log records to files, sockets, inboxes, databases, and various web services. It ships with the handlers, formatters, and processors needed to route records where they belong, and special handlers allow more advanced logging strategies than a single output stream. The library lives in the PHP ecosystem and is distributed through Packagist as monolog/monolog . It is released under the MIT license and has been developed for sixteen years, with more than twenty one thousand stars and roughly nineteen hundred forks on GitHub.
read the full monolog overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is cilium or monolog more popular?
cilium has 25,232 GitHub stars and monolog has 21,406. cilium has the larger community by that measure.
Are cilium and monolog free?
Both are open source. cilium is licensed under Apache-2.0 and monolog under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between cilium and monolog?
cilium is written in Go and monolog in PHP. 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 monolog?
Choose cilium if you want the larger community (25,232 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose monolog if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.