head to head · open source
traefik vs bfe
traefik has 65,492 GitHub stars, 6,311 forks, 939 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. bfe has 6,272 stars, 949 forks, 34 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. traefik leads on adoption by 944% (65,492 vs 6,272 stars). traefik is written in Go under MIT; bfe is written in Go under Apache-2.0. traefik has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, bfe 15%. traefik was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (golang, load-balancer), 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
| traefik | bfe | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 65K | ★ 6.3K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-06 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.3K | ⑂ 949 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick traefik if
- You weight community size — 65K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick bfe if
- You want the bfe 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 bfe fits your workflow better
About traefik
Traefik (pronounced traffic ) is a modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer that makes deploying microservices easy. Traefik integrates with your existing infrastructure components (Docker, Swarm mode, Kubernetes, Consul, Etcd, Rancher v2, Amazon ECS, ...) and configures itself automatically and dynamically. Pointing Traefik at your orchestrator should be the only configuration step you need. . Overview . Features . Supported backends . Quickstart . Web UI . Documentation . . Support . Release cycle . Contributing . Maintainers . Credits . :warning: When migrating to a new major version of Traefik, please…
read the full traefik overview →
About bfe
BFE English 中文 BFE (Beyond Front End) is a modern layer 7 load balancer from baidu. BFE is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) sandbox project. Introduction BFE opensource project includes several components, which can be used together as a integrated layer 7 load balancer and traffic management solution. BFE system consists of data plane and control plane: Data plane：responsible for forwarding user's traffic, including below component: BFE Server：BFE forward engine (this repository, bfenetworks/bfe). BFE Server performs content based routing, load balancing and forwards the traffic to backend servers…
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Frequently asked questions
Is traefik or bfe more popular?
traefik has 65,492 GitHub stars and bfe has 6,272. traefik has the larger community by that measure.
Are traefik and bfe free?
Both are open source. traefik is licensed under MIT and bfe under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between traefik and bfe?
traefik is written in Go and bfe 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, traefik or bfe?
Choose traefik if you want the larger community (65,492 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose bfe if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.