head to head · open source
traefik vs cloudflared
traefik has 64,908 GitHub stars, 6,201 forks, 939 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. cloudflared has 15,829 stars, 1,451 forks, 545 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. traefik leads on adoption by 310% (64,908 vs 15,829 stars). traefik is written in Go under MIT; cloudflared is written in Go under Apache-2.0. traefik has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, cloudflared 9%. traefik was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (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.
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Side by side
| traefik | cloudflared | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 65K | ★ 16K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.2K | ⑂ 1.5K |
| 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 cloudflared if
- You want the cloudflared 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 cloudflared 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 cloudflared
cloudflared is the open source command line client and tunneling daemon for Cloudflare Tunnel, a Go program under the Apache 2.0 licence that proxies traffic from the Cloudflare network to your origins so a webserver can stay closed to the public internet, and it is aimed at operators, platform teams and developers who need to publish HTTP services or reach private origins without opening inbound firewall ports.
read the full cloudflared overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is traefik or cloudflared more popular?
traefik has 64,908 GitHub stars and cloudflared has 15,829. traefik has the larger community by that measure.
Are traefik and cloudflared free?
Both are open source. traefik is licensed under MIT and cloudflared under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between traefik and cloudflared?
traefik is written in Go and cloudflared 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 cloudflared?
Choose traefik if you want the larger community (64,908 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose cloudflared if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.