head to head · open source
SigNoz vs cilium
SigNoz has 32,509 GitHub stars, 2,573 forks, 1,557 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cilium has 25,759 stars, 4,207 forks, 1,085 open issues and last shipped yesterday. SigNoz leads on adoption by 26% (32,509 vs 25,759 stars). SigNoz is written in TypeScript under a custom or non-standard licence; cilium is written in Go under Apache-2.0. SigNoz has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, cilium 16%. 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
| SigNoz | cilium | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 33K | ★ 26K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.6K | ⑂ 4.2K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick SigNoz if
- You weight community size — 33K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other 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 SigNoz
中文 · Deutsch · Português SigNoz is an open source observability platform built on OpenTelemetry. We’re building an enterprise grade alternative to fragmented monitoring stacks, with logs, metrics, traces, alerts, and dashboards in one place. Choose how to run SigNoz SigNoz Cloud (Recommended) Fully managed SigNoz with a 30 day free trial, no credit card required, usage based pricing that starts at $49, and regional data hosting. Start free → Enterprise Enterprise Cloud, BYOC, or Enterprise Self Hosted with compliance, support, custom retention, RBAC, ingestion controls, data residency, and region selection…
read the full SigNoz overview →
About cilium
.. raw:: html Cilium is a networking, observability, and security solution with an eBPF based dataplane. It provides a simple flat Layer 3 network with the ability to span multiple clusters in either a native routing or overlay mode. It is L7 protocol aware and can enforce network policies on L3 L7 using an identity based security model that is decoupled from network addressing. Cilium implements distributed load balancing for traffic between pods and to external services, and is able to fully replace kube proxy, using efficient hash tables in eBPF, allowing for almost unlimited scale. It also supports advanced…
read the full cilium overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is SigNoz or cilium more popular?
SigNoz has 32,509 GitHub stars and cilium has 25,759. SigNoz has the larger community by that measure.
Are SigNoz and cilium free?
Both are open source. SigNoz has no licence declared in this registry, and cilium is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between SigNoz and cilium?
SigNoz 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, SigNoz or cilium?
Choose SigNoz if you want the larger community (32,509 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose cilium if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.