head to head · open source
traefik vs OpenVPN
traefik has 65,442 GitHub stars, 6,318 forks, 939 open issues and last shipped yesterday. OpenVPN has 14,763 stars, 3,424 forks, 226 open issues and last shipped yesterday. traefik leads on adoption by 343% (65,442 vs 14,763 stars). traefik is written in Go under MIT; OpenVPN is written in C under a custom or non-standard licence. traefik has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, OpenVPN 23%. OpenVPN 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 | OpenVPN | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 65K | ★ 15K |
| License | MIT | Custom / other |
| Written in | Go | C |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.3K | ⑂ 3.4K |
| 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 OpenVPN if
- You want the OpenVPN feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and OpenVPN fits your workflow better
About traefik
Traefik (pronounced traffic ) is a modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer that makes deploying microservices easy. Traefik integrates with your existing infrastructure components (Docker, Swarm mode, Kubernetes, Consul, Etcd, Rancher v2, Amazon ECS, ...) and configures itself automatically and dynamically. Pointing Traefik at your orchestrator should be the only configuration step you need. . Overview . Features . Supported backends . Quickstart . Web UI . Documentation . . Support . Release cycle . Contributing . Maintainers . Credits . :warning: When migrating to a new major version of Traefik, please…
read the full traefik overview →
About OpenVPN
OpenVPN A Secure tunneling daemon Copyright (C) 2002 2026 OpenVPN Inc. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation. To get the latest release of OpenVPN, go to: To Build and Install, tar zxf openvpn .tar.gz cd openvpn ./configure make make install or see the file INSTALL for more info. For information on how to build OpenVPN on/for Windows with MinGW or MSVC see README.cmake.md. For detailed information on OpenVPN, including examples, see the man page For a sample VPN…
read the full OpenVPN overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is traefik or OpenVPN more popular?
traefik has 65,442 GitHub stars and OpenVPN has 14,763. traefik has the larger community by that measure.
Are traefik and OpenVPN free?
Both are open source. traefik is licensed under MIT, and OpenVPN has no licence declared in this registry. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between traefik and OpenVPN?
traefik is written in Go and OpenVPN 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 OpenVPN?
Choose traefik if you want the larger community (65,442 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose OpenVPN if its feature set, stack or Custom / other licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.