head to head · open source
traefik vs nginx-proxy
traefik has 64,898 GitHub stars, 6,201 forks, 939 open issues and last shipped yesterday. nginx-proxy has 19,914 stars, 3,044 forks, 327 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. traefik leads on adoption by 226% (64,898 vs 19,914 stars). traefik is written in Go under MIT; nginx-proxy is written in Python under MIT. traefik has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, nginx-proxy 15%. traefik was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (docker, 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 | nginx-proxy | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 65K | ★ 20K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.2K | ⑂ 3.0K |
| 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 nginx-proxy if
- You want the nginx-proxy feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and nginx-proxy 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 nginx-proxy
nginx proxy is an automated Nginx reverse proxy for Docker that watches containers start and stop and rewrites its own proxy configuration in response, and it is for anyone running containerised services who needs hostname based routing without hand editing nginx configuration files.
read the full nginx-proxy overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is traefik or nginx-proxy more popular?
traefik has 64,898 GitHub stars and nginx-proxy has 19,914. traefik has the larger community by that measure.
Are traefik and nginx-proxy free?
Both are open source. traefik is licensed under MIT and nginx-proxy under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between traefik and nginx-proxy?
traefik is written in Go and nginx-proxy in Python. 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 nginx-proxy?
Choose traefik if you want the larger community (64,898 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose nginx-proxy if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.