head to head · open source
traefik vs node-dns
traefik has 65,088 GitHub stars, 6,226 forks, 939 open issues and last shipped yesterday. node-dns has 591 stars, 80 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. traefik leads on adoption by 10,913% (65,088 vs 591 stars). traefik is written in Go under MIT; node-dns is written in JavaScript under MIT. traefik has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, node-dns 14%. 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 | node-dns | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 65K | ★ 591 |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-10-06 | 2026-07-26 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.2K | ⑂ 80 |
| 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 node-dns if
- You want the node-dns feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and node-dns 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 node-dns
node dns is a DNS server and client library in pure JavaScript with no dependencies, published on npm as dns2 , for Node.js developers who need to resolve or serve DNS records programmatically.
read the full node-dns overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is traefik or node-dns more popular?
traefik has 65,088 GitHub stars and node-dns has 591. traefik has the larger community by that measure.
Are traefik and node-dns free?
Both are open source. traefik is licensed under MIT and node-dns under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between traefik and node-dns?
traefik is written in Go and node-dns in JavaScript. 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 node-dns?
Choose traefik if you want the larger community (65,088 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose node-dns if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.