Cilium vs Consul
No clear leader: Consul (58.6) and Cilium (55.8) 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.
Capabilities
Feature-by-feature on the axes that matter for service mesh. “-” means undocumented, not absent.
What each one is
The product in its own terms, so the numbers below have context.
Cilium
Cilium is an open-source networking layer for Kubernetes that uses eBPF to provide container-to-container communication, load balancing, network policies, multi-cluster connectivity, and deep observability across single or multiple clusters.
Consul
A platform that enables service discovery, configuration management, and secure service-to-service communication with automatic encryption and identity-based access control across distributed infrastructure.
Pricing
List pricing as published by each vendor, with the date we read it. Always verify at the source before you buy.
Platform & deployment
Where each product runs and how it can be hosted. A dash means undocumented, not unsupported.
Integrations
What each product connects to. Counts come from the vendor's own integration directory where one exists.
Cilium
- SPIRE
- Envoy
- Prometheus
Consul
- Kubernetes
Cilium or Consul: which one depends on you
A composite score cannot know your constraints. Describe them and both get re-weighted against what you actually need, with the evidence behind every position.
Free to run, no account needed to start. How the evaluation works
Comparison generated from independently-sourced facts. Every value links to its source and retrieval date. See the method.