Comparison

AWS App Mesh vs Cilium

No clear leader: AWS App Mesh (64.7) and Cilium (62.8) are within the 5-point margin; treat as a tie. The attribute-by-attribute breakdown below, with a source and date on every value, is the honest way to compare them.

Machine formatsJSONMarkdownGraphQLor send Accept: application/json
AWS App Mesh65
Cilium63
Score
Vioscale score
AWS App Mesh65 / 100medium · 63%
Cilium63 / 100low · 42%
Pricing
Free tier
AWS App Mesh
Cilium
Model
AWS App Meshfreemium
Price level
AWS App Meshlow
Ciliumfree
Transparent
AWS App Mesh
Cilium
Security
Disclosure policy
AWS App Mesh
Cilium
Fedramp
AWS App Mesh
Cilium
Gdpr
AWS App Mesh
Cilium
Hipaa
AWS App Mesh
Cilium
Iso27001
AWS App Mesh
Cilium
Pci
AWS App Mesh
Cilium
Scorecard
AWS App Mesh
Cilium5.8
Soc2
AWS App Mesh
Cilium
Reliability
Status page
AWS App Mesh
Cilium
Adoption
Dependent repos
AWS App Mesh
Cilium103
Github stars
AWS App Mesh
Cilium25,013
Activity
Commits last 30d
AWS App Mesh
Cilium100
Release
Cadence days
AWS App Mesh
Cilium5
History
AWS App Mesh
Cilium20 items
License
Spdx
AWS App Mesh
Language
Primary
AWS App Mesh
CiliumGo
Market
Availability

Capabilities

Feature-by-feature on the axes that matter for service mesh. “-” means undocumented, not absent.

Architecture
Data plane
AWS App MeshSidecar
CiliumSidecarless (eBPF)
Proxy
AWS App Mesh-
CiliumEnvoy
Security
Automatic mutual TLS
AWS App Mesh
Cilium-
SPIFFE / SPIRE identity
AWS App Mesh-
Cilium-
Traffic
Traffic splitting / canary
AWS App Mesh
Cilium-
Fault injection / resilience
AWS App Mesh-
Cilium-
Scale
Multi-cluster federation
AWS App Mesh-
Cilium
Portability
VM support (beyond Kubernetes)
AWS App Mesh-
Cilium-
Observability
Built-in observability
AWS App Mesh
Cilium
Standards
Gateway API / GAMMA support
AWS App Mesh-
Cilium
Extensibility
WASM extensibility
AWS App Mesh-
Cilium-
Compliance
FIPS mode
AWS App Mesh-
Cilium-
Ecosystem
CNCF maturity
AWS App MeshNone
Cilium-
Ops
Commercial support / enterprise edition
AWS App Mesh
Cilium-

What each one is

The product in its own terms, so the numbers below have context.

AWS App Mesh

AWS App Mesh is an application networking service that provides consistent visibility and network traffic controls for microservices. It uses sidecar proxies to manage service communication, observability, and security without requiring application code changes.

Independently observed

Cilium

A cloud-native networking and security platform that uses eBPF to provide networking, observability, and security capabilities. Built for Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure with integrated observability via Hubble.

Independently observed

Pricing

List pricing as published by each vendor, with the date we read it. Always verify at the source before you buy.

AWS App Mesh

Usage-basedFree tier

Pay-as-you-go usage-based pricing; specific pricing rates not disclosed on provided pages

as of verify ↗

Cilium

Open sourceFree tier
as of verify ↗

Platform & deployment

Where each product runs and how it can be hosted. A dash means undocumented, not unsupported.

Platforms
Linux
AWS App Mesh
Cilium
CLI
AWS App Mesh
Cilium
Deployment
Cloud / SaaS
AWS App Mesh
Cilium
Self-hosted
AWS App Mesh
Cilium

Comparison generated from independently-sourced facts. Every value links to its source and retrieval date. See the method.