# Cloudflare Load Balancing vs MetalLB

| Attribute | Cloudflare Load Balancing | MetalLB |
|---|---|---|
| **Vioscale score** | 63.2 (20% (low)) | 45 (15% (low)) |
| activity.commits_last_30d | - | 12 |
| adoption.dependent_repos | - | 142 |
| adoption.github_stars | - | 8,333 |
| deployment.options | `{"cloud":true}` | `{"on_prem":true,"self_hosted":true}` |
| description.long | A traffic distribution service that intelligently directs user requests to the healthiest and fastest servers across different cloud providers and data centers, enabling continuous uptime and zero-downtime deployments. | Provides network load balancing functionality for bare metal Kubernetes deployments that lack built-in cloud provider integrations, addressing the limitation that standard Kubernetes load balancers only work with cloud platforms. |
| integrations.count | 3 | - |
| integrations.list | `[{"name":"AWS"},{"name":"GCP"},{"name":"Azure"}]` | - |
| language.primary | - | Go |
| license.spdx | - | Apache-2.0 |
| market.availability | `{"hqCountry":"US","primaryMarkets":[],"availabilityScope":"global","availableCountries":[],"notAvailableCountries":[]}` | - |
| pricing | `{"type":"subscription","plans":[{"free":false,"name":"Load Balancing","summary":"Starting at $5/month","features":["Active/Passive failover between data centers and cloud regions","Multi-cloud support (AWS, GCP, Azure, on-premise)","Geographic routing","Health checks from global network","Near-instantaneous global failover"],"components":[{"kind":"fixed","amount":5,"period":"month","currency":"USD"}],"contactSales":false}],"summary":"Starting at $5/month","currency":"USD","freeTier":false,"sourceUrl":"https://www.cloudflare.com/plans","retrievedAt":"2026-08-19T13:44:09.368Z","startingPrice":{"amount":5,"period":"month","currency":"USD"},"billingPeriods":["month"]}` | `{"type":"open_source","summary":"Open source, free","freeTier":true,"sourceUrl":"https://metallb.universe.tf","retrievedAt":"2026-08-20T12:16:50.423Z"}` |
| pricing.free_tier | no | yes |
| pricing.model | commercial | open_source |
| pricing.price_level | low | free |
| pricing.starting_price | `{"amount":5,"currency":"USD"}` | - |
| pricing.transparent | yes | - |
| release.history | - | `[{"url":"https://github.com/metallb/metallb/releases/tag/metallb-chart-0.16.1","date":"2026-05-27T21:12:45Z","type":"stable","version":"metallb-chart-0.16.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/metallb/metallb/releases/tag/v0.16.0","date":"2026-05-20T16:32:24Z","type":"stable","version":"v0.16.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/metallb/metallb/releases/tag/metallb-chart-0.16.0","date":"2026-05-20T15:12:13Z","type":"stable","version":"metallb-chart-0.16.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/metallb/metallb/releases/tag/v0.15.3","date":"2025-12-04T15:48:02Z","type":"stable","version":"v0.15.3"},{"url":"https://github.com/metallb/metallb/releases/tag/metallb-chart-0.15.3","date":"2025-12-04T15:20:55Z","type":"stable","version":"metallb-chart-0.15.3"},{"url":"https://github.com/metallb/metallb/releases/tag/v0.15.2","date":"2025-06-04T11:19:42Z","type":"stable","version":"v0.15.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/metallb/metallb/releases/tag/metallb-chart-0.15.2","date":"2025-06-04T10:50:26Z","type":"stable","version":"metallb-chart-0.15.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/metallb/metallb/releases/tag/metallb-chart-0.15.1","date":"2025-06-04T09:03:36Z","type":"stable","version":"metallb-chart-0.15.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/metallb/metallb/releases/tag/v0.15.0","date":"2025-06-03T13:33:11Z","type":"stable","version":"v0.15.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/metallb/metallb/releases/tag/metallb-chart-0.15.0","date":"2025-06-03T12:43:28Z","type":"stable","version":"metallb-chart-0.15.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/metallb/metallb/releases/tag/v0.14.9","date":"2024-12-17T15:55:10Z","type":"stable","version":"v0.14.9"},{"url":"https://github.com/metallb/metallb/releases/tag/metallb-chart-0.14.9","date":"2024-12-17T14:58:18Z","type":"stable","version":"metallb-chart-0.14.9"},{"url":"https://github.com/metallb/metallb/releases/tag/v0.14.8","date":"2024-07-23T12:51:06Z","type":"stable","version":"v0.14.8"},{"url":"https://github.com/metallb/metallb/releases/tag/metallb-chart-0.14.8","date":"2024-07-23T12:42:10Z","type":"stable","version":"metallb-chart-0.14.8"},{"url":"https://github.com/metallb/metallb/releases/tag/v0.14.7","date":"2024-07-16T20:09:24Z","type":"stable","version":"v0.14.7"},{"url":"https://github.com/metallb/metallb/releases/tag/v0.14.6","date":"2024-07-16T12:07:06Z","type":"stable","version":"v0.14.6"},{"url":"https://github.com/metallb/metallb/releases/tag/metallb-chart-0.14.7","date":"2024-07-16T20:07:58Z","type":"stable","version":"metallb-chart-0.14.7"},{"url":"https://github.com/metallb/metallb/releases/tag/metallb-chart-0.14.6","date":"2024-07-16T11:19:16Z","type":"stable","version":"metallb-chart-0.14.6"},{"url":"https://github.com/metallb/metallb/releases/tag/v0.14.5","date":"2024-04-19T20:07:56Z","type":"stable","version":"v0.14.5"},{"url":"https://github.com/metallb/metallb/releases/tag/metallb-chart-0.14.5","date":"2024-04-19T14:44:26Z","type":"stable","version":"metallb-chart-0.14.5"}]` |
| security.scorecard | - | 6.3 |
| security.vulnerabilities | - | `{"count":0,"source":"https://advisories.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/advisories?ecosystem=go&package_name=go.universe.tf%2Fmetallb&per_page=100","last_12m":0,"max_severity":null}` |

## Capabilities (Load Balancers)

| Capability | Cloudflare Load Balancing | MetalLB |
|---|:--:|:--:|
| **Capabilities** |  |  |
| Layer | - | - |
| Deployment form | - | - |
| Tls termination | - | - |
| Http2 http3 support | - | - |
| Gslb multi region | - | - |
| K8s ingress or gateway API | - | - |
| WAF bundled | - | - |
| Autoscaling integration | - | - |
| Health check depth | - | - |
| Session persistence | - | - |
| Fips 140 validated | - | - |
| Open source | - | - |
| Pricing model | - | - |

*Source: Vioscale. Generated 2026-09-01T12:47:30.892Z. "-" = undocumented, not absent.*