head to head · open source
traefik vs piko
traefik has 65,052 GitHub stars, 6,221 forks, 939 open issues and last shipped yesterday. piko has 2,194 stars, 89 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. traefik leads on adoption by 2,865% (65,052 vs 2,194 stars). traefik is written in Go under MIT; piko is written in Go under MIT. traefik has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, piko 4%. traefik was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (golang, 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 | piko | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 65K | ★ 2.2K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-02 | 2026-09-22 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.2K | ⑂ 89 |
| 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 piko if
- You want the piko feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and piko 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 piko
Piko is an open source reverse proxy and tunneling server in Go that lets you reach services with no public route by having them open outbound connections, and it is aimed at teams that need to serve production traffic or expose internal services from Kubernetes.
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Frequently asked questions
Is traefik or piko more popular?
traefik has 65,052 GitHub stars and piko has 2,194. traefik has the larger community by that measure.
Are traefik and piko free?
Both are open source. traefik is licensed under MIT and piko under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between traefik and piko?
traefik is written in Go and piko 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 piko?
Choose traefik if you want the larger community (65,052 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose piko if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.