head to head · open source
traefik vs sdns
traefik has 65,020 GitHub stars, 6,215 forks, 939 open issues and last shipped yesterday. sdns has 1,086 stars, 72 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped yesterday. traefik leads on adoption by 5,887% (65,020 vs 1,086 stars). traefik is written in Go under MIT; sdns is written in Go under MIT. traefik has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, sdns 7%. sdns 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 | sdns | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 65K | ★ 1.1K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-30 | 2026-09-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.2K | ⑂ 72 |
| 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 sdns if
- You want the sdns feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and sdns 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 sdns
sdns is a high performance recursive DNS resolver written in Go that resolves from the root, validates answers against DNSSEC trust anchors and serves DNS over UDP, TCP, TLS, HTTPS and QUIC, intended for operators and privacy focused self hosters who want to run their own resolving name server instead of relying on a third party resolver.
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Frequently asked questions
Is traefik or sdns more popular?
traefik has 65,020 GitHub stars and sdns has 1,086. traefik has the larger community by that measure.
Are traefik and sdns free?
Both are open source. traefik is licensed under MIT and sdns under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between traefik and sdns?
traefik is written in Go and sdns 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 sdns?
Choose traefik if you want the larger community (65,020 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose sdns if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.