What is Cilium?
Cilium is an open source, cloud native solution for providing, securing, and observing network connectivity between workloads, fueled by the revolutionary Kernel technology eBPF.
Cilium pricing
We don't have Cilium's full plan breakdown yet (its pricing page resisted automated reading). Here's what we could confirm. Always check live pricing for exact numbers.
What Cilium does
The capabilities that matter for service mesh, normalised so it lines up with every alternative. “-” means we haven't confirmed it, not that it's missing.
- Data plane
- Sidecarless (eBPF)
- Proxy
- eBPF
- Automatic mutual TLS
- -
- SPIFFE / SPIRE identity
- -
- Traffic splitting / canary
- -
- Fault injection / resilience
- -
- Multi-cluster federation
- ✓
- VM support (beyond Kubernetes)
- -
- Built-in observability
- ✓
- Gateway API / GAMMA support
- ✓
- WASM extensibility
- -
- FIPS mode
- -
- CNCF maturity
- Graduated
- Commercial support / enterprise edition
- ✓
Platform & deployment
Independently observed- Self-hosted
Cilium alternatives
Other service mesh we track, ranked by the same independent score.
- IstioService Mesh. Simplified.low · 15%
- LinkerdEnterprise power without enterprise complexitylow · 15%
- Google Cloud Service MeshThe fully managed service mesh based on Envoy and Istiolow · 30%
- ConsulSecure network serviceslow · 28%
- AWS App MeshApplication-level networking for all your serviceslow · 29%
- KumaThe universal Envoy service mesh for distributed service connectivitylow · 13%
The Vioscale score: one lens on the evidence
Not user reviews and not a paid placement: a confidence-weighted blend of the independent signals below (adoption, activity, security posture, and more), which you can sort and re-weight yourself. Vendors can correct their listing but can never move their rank, and stars are weighted low as a vanity metric. It is one way to read the evidence for Cilium, not the verdict.
| Signal | Score | Weight | Contribution | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Github Activity | 63 | 18.00 | 1135.8 | ✓ |
| Release Cadence | 97 | 10.00 | 972.2 | ✓ |
| Capabilities | 67 | 12.00 | 805.4 | ✓ |
| Github Stars | 83 | 5.00 | 414.6 | ✓ |
| Integrations | 0 | 16.00 | 0.0 | - |
| Security Posture | 0 | 22.00 | 0.0 | - |
| Package Downloads | 0 | 26.00 | 0.0 | - |
| Stackoverflow Activity | 0 | 12.00 | 0.0 | - |
Computed . Re-weight it by intent, or see the full method.
All data & sourcesshow ↓
Every value we hold, with its source, retrieval date, and confidence. This is the evidence behind the score: don't trust it, verify it.
Activity
| Attribute | Value | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Commits last 30d | 100 | mediumsource · 2026-08-01 · 65% |
Adoption
| Attribute | Value | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Github stars | 24,837 | highsource · 2026-08-01 · 90% |
Features
| Attribute | Value | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Capabilities | {"proxy":"ebpf","data_plane":"sidecarless_ebpf","multicluster":true,"cncf_maturity":"graduated","commercial_support":true,"gateway_api_support":true,"built_in_observability":true} | mediumsource · 2026-08-01 · 60% |
Language
| Attribute | Value | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Primary | Go | highsource · 2026-08-01 · 90% |
License
| Attribute | Value | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Spdx | Apache-2.0 | highsource · 2026-08-01 · 95% |
Pricing
Release
| Attribute | Value | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Cadence days | 5 | mediumsource · 2026-08-01 · 70% |