head to head · open source
traefik vs mosdns
traefik has 64,942 GitHub stars, 6,201 forks, 939 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. mosdns has 3,749 stars, 486 forks, 118 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. traefik leads on adoption by 1,632% (64,942 vs 3,749 stars). traefik is written in Go under MIT; mosdns is written in Go under GPL-3.0. traefik has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, mosdns 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 | mosdns | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 65K | ★ 3.7K |
| License | MIT | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-23 | 2026-02-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.2K | ⑂ 486 |
| 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 mosdns if
- You want the mosdns feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and mosdns 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 mosdns
mosdns is a DNS forwarder written in Go, licensed under GPL 3.0, and aimed at people who want to run their own DNS forwarding and resolution path instead of relying on the resolver handed to them by a router, an ISP, or a third party service.
read the full mosdns overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is traefik or mosdns more popular?
traefik has 64,942 GitHub stars and mosdns has 3,749. traefik has the larger community by that measure.
Are traefik and mosdns free?
Both are open source. traefik is licensed under MIT and mosdns under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between traefik and mosdns?
traefik is written in Go and mosdns 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 mosdns?
Choose traefik if you want the larger community (64,942 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose mosdns if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.