head to head · open source
traefik vs lightway-core
traefik has 64,976 GitHub stars, 6,206 forks, 939 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. lightway-core has 626 stars, 72 forks, 6 open issues and last shipped 5 months ago. traefik leads on adoption by 10,280% (64,976 vs 626 stars). traefik is written in Go under MIT; lightway-core is written in C under GPL-2.0. traefik has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, lightway-core 12%. 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 | lightway-core | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 65K | ★ 626 |
| License | MIT | GPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | C |
| Last push | 2026-09-25 | 2026-04-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.2K | ⑂ 72 |
| 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 lightway-core if
- You want the lightway-core feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and lightway-core 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 lightway-core
Lightway Core is a small, multi platform C library published by ExpressVPN that provides the foundational components of a virtual private network protocol, written for developers, researchers, and VPN operators who want to build on or study the protocol behind ExpressVPN's Lightway.
read the full lightway-core overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is traefik or lightway-core more popular?
traefik has 64,976 GitHub stars and lightway-core has 626. traefik has the larger community by that measure.
Are traefik and lightway-core free?
Both are open source. traefik is licensed under MIT and lightway-core under GPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between traefik and lightway-core?
traefik is written in Go and lightway-core 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 lightway-core?
Choose traefik if you want the larger community (64,976 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose lightway-core if its feature set, stack or GPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.