head to head · open source
traefik vs FastTunnel
traefik has 65,105 GitHub stars, 6,228 forks, 939 open issues and last shipped yesterday. FastTunnel has 1,702 stars, 341 forks, 18 open issues and last shipped 22 days ago. traefik leads on adoption by 3,725% (65,105 vs 1,702 stars). traefik is written in Go under MIT; FastTunnel is written in C# under Apache-2.0. traefik has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, FastTunnel 20%. 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 | FastTunnel | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 65K | ★ 1.7K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | C# |
| Last push | 2026-10-07 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.2K | ⑂ 341 |
| 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 FastTunnel if
- You want the FastTunnel feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C#
- You evaluated both and FastTunnel 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 FastTunnel
FastTunnel is a cross platform intranet penetration framework written in C that lets developers and operators expose services running on machines behind NAT to the public internet.
read the full FastTunnel overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is traefik or FastTunnel more popular?
traefik has 65,105 GitHub stars and FastTunnel has 1,702. traefik has the larger community by that measure.
Are traefik and FastTunnel free?
Both are open source. traefik is licensed under MIT and FastTunnel under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between traefik and FastTunnel?
traefik is written in Go and FastTunnel in C#. 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 FastTunnel?
Choose traefik if you want the larger community (65,105 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose FastTunnel if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.