head to head · open source
traefik vs coredns
traefik has 64,895 GitHub stars, 6,201 forks, 939 open issues and last shipped yesterday. coredns has 14,329 stars, 2,532 forks, 282 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. traefik leads on adoption by 353% (64,895 vs 14,329 stars). traefik is written in Go under MIT; coredns is written in Go under Apache-2.0. traefik has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, coredns 18%. traefik was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (go), 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 | coredns | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 65K | ★ 14K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.2K | ⑂ 2.5K |
| 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 coredns if
- You want the coredns 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 coredns 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 coredns
CoreDNS is a CNCF graduated DNS server and forwarder written in Go that resolves queries through a chain of plugins, aimed at platform and infrastructure engineers who run DNS for Kubernetes clusters, service discovery, or authoritative zones and need to extend its behaviour without forking the core.
read the full coredns overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is traefik or coredns more popular?
traefik has 64,895 GitHub stars and coredns has 14,329. traefik has the larger community by that measure.
Are traefik and coredns free?
Both are open source. traefik is licensed under MIT and coredns under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between traefik and coredns?
traefik is written in Go and coredns 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 coredns?
Choose traefik if you want the larger community (64,895 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose coredns if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.