head to head · open source
traefik vs gdnsd
traefik has 65,147 GitHub stars, 6,233 forks, 939 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. gdnsd has 560 stars, 70 forks, 14 open issues and last shipped 5 months ago. traefik leads on adoption by 11,533% (65,147 vs 560 stars). traefik is written in Go under MIT; gdnsd is written in C under GPL-3.0. traefik has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, gdnsd 13%. traefik was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | gdnsd | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 65K | ★ 560 |
| License | MIT | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | C |
| Last push | 2026-10-08 | 2026-05-26 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.2K | ⑂ 70 |
| 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 gdnsd if
- You want the gdnsd feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and gdnsd 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 gdnsd
gdnsd is an authoritative only DNS server written in C, intended for operators who need high performance name service with geographic balancing and failover rather than caching or recursion.
read the full gdnsd overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is traefik or gdnsd more popular?
traefik has 65,147 GitHub stars and gdnsd has 560. traefik has the larger community by that measure.
Are traefik and gdnsd free?
Both are open source. traefik is licensed under MIT and gdnsd under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between traefik and gdnsd?
traefik is written in Go and gdnsd 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 gdnsd?
Choose traefik if you want the larger community (65,147 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose gdnsd if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.