head to head · open source
traefik vs sliver
traefik has 64,895 GitHub stars, 6,201 forks, 939 open issues and last shipped yesterday. sliver has 11,852 stars, 1,587 forks, 222 open issues and last shipped yesterday. traefik leads on adoption by 448% (64,895 vs 11,852 stars). traefik is written in Go under MIT; sliver is written in Go under GPL-3.0. traefik has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, sliver 13%. traefik was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (golang), 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 | sliver | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 65K | ★ 12K |
| License | MIT | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.2K | ⑂ 1.6K |
| 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 sliver if
- You want the sliver feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and sliver 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 sliver
Sliver is an open source, cross platform adversary emulation and red team framework written in Go, used by security teams of all sizes to perform authorized security testing with implants that support command and control over Mutual TLS (mTLS), WireGuard, HTTP(S), and DNS.
read the full sliver overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is traefik or sliver more popular?
traefik has 64,895 GitHub stars and sliver has 11,852. traefik has the larger community by that measure.
Are traefik and sliver free?
Both are open source. traefik is licensed under MIT and sliver under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between traefik and sliver?
traefik is written in Go and sliver 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 sliver?
Choose traefik if you want the larger community (64,895 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose sliver if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.