head to head · open source
traefik vs gost
traefik has 64,931 GitHub stars, 6,201 forks, 939 open issues and last shipped today. gost has 7,522 stars, 830 forks, 101 open issues and last shipped yesterday. traefik leads on adoption by 763% (64,931 vs 7,522 stars). traefik is written in Go under MIT; gost is written in Go under MIT. traefik has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, gost 11%. traefik was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (golang, 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 | gost | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 65K | ★ 7.5K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-23 | 2026-09-22 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.2K | ⑂ 830 |
| 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 gost if
- You want the gost feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and gost 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 gost
gost, short for GO Simple Tunnel, is an MIT licensed tunnelling tool written in Go that unifies forward proxying, TCP/UDP port forwarding and reverse proxy tunnelling in a single binary, intended for network and infrastructure engineers who need to connect segmented networks, expose internal services, or route traffic through intermediaries without assembling several single purpose programs.
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Frequently asked questions
Is traefik or gost more popular?
traefik has 64,931 GitHub stars and gost has 7,522. traefik has the larger community by that measure.
Are traefik and gost free?
Both are open source. traefik is licensed under MIT and gost under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between traefik and gost?
traefik is written in Go and gost 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 gost?
Choose traefik if you want the larger community (64,931 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose gost if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.