head to head · open source
traefik vs DNS-collector
traefik has 65,105 GitHub stars, 6,228 forks, 939 open issues and last shipped yesterday. DNS-collector has 570 stars, 89 forks, 2 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. traefik leads on adoption by 11,322% (65,105 vs 570 stars). traefik is written in Go under MIT; DNS-collector is written in Go under MIT. traefik has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, DNS-collector 16%. traefik was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (golang), 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 | DNS-collector | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 65K | ★ 570 |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-07 | 2026-10-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.2K | ⑂ 89 |
| 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 DNS-collector if
- You want the DNS-collector feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and DNS-collector 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 DNS-collector
DNS collector is a lightweight, open source DNS telemetry pipeline in Go that captures queries and responses from DNS servers and forwards normalized, enriched events to monitoring, analytics, and security systems.
read the full DNS-collector overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is traefik or DNS-collector more popular?
traefik has 65,105 GitHub stars and DNS-collector has 570. traefik has the larger community by that measure.
Are traefik and DNS-collector free?
Both are open source. traefik is licensed under MIT and DNS-collector under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between traefik and DNS-collector?
traefik is written in Go and DNS-collector 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 DNS-collector?
Choose traefik if you want the larger community (65,105 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose DNS-collector if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.