head to head · open source
traefik vs pdns
traefik has 64,931 GitHub stars, 6,201 forks, 939 open issues and last shipped today. pdns has 4,473 stars, 1,026 forks, 932 open issues and last shipped yesterday. traefik leads on adoption by 1,352% (64,931 vs 4,473 stars). traefik is written in Go under MIT; pdns is written in C++ under GPL-2.0. traefik has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, pdns 23%. 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 | pdns | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 65K | ★ 4.5K |
| License | MIT | GPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-09-23 | 2026-09-22 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.2K | ⑂ 1.0K |
| 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 pdns if
- You want the pdns 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 pdns 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 pdns
PowerDNS (pdns) is a single C++ source repository containing three distinct DNS products — the PowerDNS Authoritative Server, the PowerDNS Recursor, and dnsdist, a DNS load balancer — and it is aimed at network and infrastructure operators who run DNS themselves.
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Frequently asked questions
Is traefik or pdns more popular?
traefik has 64,931 GitHub stars and pdns has 4,473. traefik has the larger community by that measure.
Are traefik and pdns free?
Both are open source. traefik is licensed under MIT and pdns under GPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between traefik and pdns?
traefik is written in Go and pdns 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 pdns?
Choose traefik if you want the larger community (64,931 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose pdns if its feature set, stack or GPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.