head to head · open source
traefik vs pomerium
traefik has 64,984 GitHub stars, 6,207 forks, 939 open issues and last shipped today. pomerium has 5,020 stars, 357 forks, 159 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. traefik leads on adoption by 1,195% (64,984 vs 5,020 stars). traefik is written in Go under MIT; pomerium is written in Go under Apache-2.0. traefik has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, pomerium 7%. traefik was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (go, 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 | pomerium | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 65K | ★ 5.0K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-28 | 2026-09-26 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.2K | ⑂ 357 |
| 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 pomerium if
- You want the pomerium feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and pomerium 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 pomerium
Pomerium is an identity and context aware access proxy, written in Go and released under the Apache 2.0 licence, that builds secure, clientless connections to internal web applications and other services without a corporate VPN.
read the full pomerium overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is traefik or pomerium more popular?
traefik has 64,984 GitHub stars and pomerium has 5,020. traefik has the larger community by that measure.
Are traefik and pomerium free?
Both are open source. traefik is licensed under MIT and pomerium under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between traefik and pomerium?
traefik is written in Go and pomerium 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 pomerium?
Choose traefik if you want the larger community (64,984 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose pomerium if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.