head to head · open source
traefik vs bfe
traefik has 64,942 GitHub stars, 6,201 forks, 939 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. bfe has 6,264 stars, 950 forks, 34 open issues and last shipped yesterday. traefik leads on adoption by 937% (64,942 vs 6,264 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%. bfe was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (golang, load-balancer, reverse-proxy), 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| traefik | bfe | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 65K | ★ 6.3K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-23 | 2026-09-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.2K | ⑂ 950 |
| 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 "The Cloud Native Application Proxy": an MIT licensed, Go based HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer that watches your orchestrator or service registry and generates its own routes, aimed at teams running microservices on Docker, Swarm, Kubernetes, Consul, Etcd, Rancher v2, or Amazon ECS.
read the full traefik overview →
About bfe
BFE (Beyond Front End) is an open source, Apache 2.0 licensed layer 7 load balancer written in Go, originally built at Baidu and now a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) sandbox project, intended for platform, infrastructure, and networking engineers who need content based routing and centralized traffic management in front of backend services.
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Networking & Connectivity projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Networking & Connectivity field.
Frequently asked questions
Is traefik or bfe more popular?
traefik has 64,942 GitHub stars and bfe has 6,264. 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 (64,942 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose bfe if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.