head to head · open source
Uptime Kuma vs cilium
Uptime Kuma has 91,477 GitHub stars, 8,426 forks, 805 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cilium has 25,232 stars, 4,071 forks, 1,085 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Uptime Kuma leads on adoption by 263% (91,477 vs 25,232 stars). Uptime Kuma is written in JavaScript under MIT; cilium is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Uptime Kuma has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, cilium 16%. Uptime Kuma was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (monitoring), 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.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Uptime Kuma | cilium | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 91K | ★ 25K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | JavaScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.4K | ⑂ 4.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Uptime Kuma if
- You weight community size — 91K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick cilium if
- You want the cilium 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 cilium fits your workflow better
About Uptime Kuma
Uptime Kuma is a free, MIT licensed, self hosted monitoring tool with a reactive web dashboard, built for operators and teams that want to watch their own HTTP, TCP, and DNS endpoints and keep the resulting data on their own infrastructure.
read the full Uptime Kuma overview →
About cilium
Cilium is a networking, observability, and security solution built on an eBPF based dataplane, written in Go and licensed under Apache 2.0. It lives in the Kubernetes ecosystem as a CNI implementation, and it is a CNCF project. At its foundation is eBPF, a Linux kernel technology that allows dynamic insertion of bytecode at integration points such as network IO, application sockets, and tracepoints, which is where Cilium implements its networking, security, and visibility logic. The project provides a flat Layer 3 network that can span multiple clusters in either native routing or overlay mode, and it is L7 proto…
read the full cilium overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Monitoring & Observability projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Monitoring & Observability field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Uptime Kuma or cilium more popular?
Uptime Kuma has 91,477 GitHub stars and cilium has 25,232. Uptime Kuma has the larger community by that measure.
Are Uptime Kuma and cilium free?
Both are open source. Uptime Kuma is licensed under MIT and cilium under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Uptime Kuma and cilium?
Uptime Kuma is written in JavaScript and cilium 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, Uptime Kuma or cilium?
Choose Uptime Kuma if you want the larger community (91,477 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose cilium if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.