head to head · open source
traefik vs tengine
traefik has 64,919 GitHub stars, 6,200 forks, 939 open issues and last shipped yesterday. tengine has 13,371 stars, 2,502 forks, 502 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. traefik leads on adoption by 386% (64,919 vs 13,371 stars). traefik is written in Go under MIT; tengine is written in C under BSD-2-Clause. traefik has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, tengine 19%. traefik was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (load-balancer, 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 | tengine | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 65K | ★ 13K |
| License | MIT | BSD-2-Clause |
| Written in | Go | C |
| Last push | 2026-09-21 | 2026-09-07 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.2K | ⑂ 2.5K |
| 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 tengine if
- You want the tengine feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-2-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and tengine 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 tengine
Tengine is a high performance, BSD 2 Clause licensed web server and reverse proxy that is 100% compatible with nginx, built for operators and platform teams that need HTTP/3, Kubernetes Ingress support, dynamic configuration and Chinese cryptographic standards without abandoning their existing nginx configuration.
read the full tengine overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is traefik or tengine more popular?
traefik has 64,919 GitHub stars and tengine has 13,371. traefik has the larger community by that measure.
Are traefik and tengine free?
Both are open source. traefik is licensed under MIT and tengine under BSD-2-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between traefik and tengine?
traefik is written in Go and tengine 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 tengine?
Choose traefik if you want the larger community (64,919 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose tengine if its feature set, stack or BSD-2-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.