head to head · open source
traefik vs tengine
traefik has 65,481 GitHub stars, 6,309 forks, 939 open issues and last shipped yesterday. tengine has 13,418 stars, 2,509 forks, 502 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. traefik leads on adoption by 388% (65,481 vs 13,418 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 1 topic tag (load-balancer), 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 | 2026-11-05 | 2026-09-07 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.3K | ⑂ 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 a modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer that makes deploying microservices easy. Traefik integrates with your existing infrastructure components (Docker, Swarm mode, Kubernetes, Consul, Etcd, Rancher v2, Amazon ECS, ...) and configures itself automatically and dynamically. Pointing Traefik at your orchestrator should be the only configuration step you need. . Overview . Features . Supported backends . Quickstart . Web UI . Documentation . . Support . Release cycle . Contributing . Maintainers . Credits . :warning: When migrating to a new major version of Traefik, please…
read the full traefik overview →
About tengine
Tengine Visit tengine.taobao.org for the full documentation, examples and guides. Introduction Tengine is a high performance web server and reverse proxy originated by Taobao, the largest e commerce website in Asia. It offers HTTP/3, Kubernetes Ingress support, zero downtime dynamic configuration, active upstream health checks, and NTLS/TLCP (SM2/SM3/SM4), while remaining 100% compatible with nginx. Tengine has proven to be very stable and efficient on some of the top 100 websites in the world, including taobao.com and tmall.com. Tengine has been an open source project since December 2011. It is being actively…
read the full tengine overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is traefik or tengine more popular?
traefik has 65,481 GitHub stars and tengine has 13,418. 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 (65,481 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose tengine if its feature set, stack or BSD-2-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.