head to head · open source
traefik vs hestiacp
traefik has 64,919 GitHub stars, 6,200 forks, 939 open issues and last shipped yesterday. hestiacp has 4,503 stars, 945 forks, 146 open issues and last shipped yesterday. traefik leads on adoption by 1,342% (64,919 vs 4,503 stars). traefik is written in Go under MIT; hestiacp is written in Shell under GPL-3.0. traefik has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, hestiacp 21%. 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 | hestiacp | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 65K | ★ 4.5K |
| License | MIT | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Shell |
| Last push | 2026-09-21 | 2026-09-21 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.2K | ⑂ 945 |
| 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 hestiacp if
- You want the hestiacp feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Shell
- You evaluated both and hestiacp 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 hestiacp
Hestia Control Panel is a GPL 3.0, shell based control panel that gives Linux server administrators a web and command line interface for deploying and managing web domains, mail accounts, DNS zones, and databases on Debian and Ubuntu servers.
read the full hestiacp overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is traefik or hestiacp more popular?
traefik has 64,919 GitHub stars and hestiacp has 4,503. traefik has the larger community by that measure.
Are traefik and hestiacp free?
Both are open source. traefik is licensed under MIT and hestiacp under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between traefik and hestiacp?
traefik is written in Go and hestiacp in Shell. 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 hestiacp?
Choose traefik if you want the larger community (64,919 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose hestiacp if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.