Software Alternatives & Reviews

Istio VS linkerd

Compare Istio VS linkerd and see what are their differences

Istio logo Istio

Open platform to connect, manage, and secure microservices

linkerd logo linkerd

Linkerd is an ultralight service mesh for Kubernetes. It gives you observability, reliability, and security without requiring any code changes.
  • Istio Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-01
  • linkerd Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-18

Istio videos

Istio Service Mesh Explained

More videos:

  • Review - What is Istio?
  • Review - Module 1: Istio - Kubernetes - Getting Started - Installation and Sample Application Review

linkerd videos

Introduction to Linkerd for beginners | a Service Mesh

More videos:

  • Review - Deep Dive: Linkerd - Oliver Gould, Buoyant
  • Review - 60 seconds to a Linkerd service mesh on AKS | Azure Friday

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Istio and linkerd)
Developer Tools
80 80%
20% 20
Web Servers
57 57%
43% 43
API Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Web And Application Servers

User comments

Share your experience with using Istio and linkerd. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Istio should be more popular than linkerd. It has been mentiond 45 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Istio mentions (45)

View more

linkerd mentions (15)

  • Optimal JMX Exposure Strategy for Kubernetes Multi-Node Architecture
    Leverage a service mesh like Istio or Linkerd to manage communication between microservices within the Kubernetes cluster. These service meshes can be configured to intercept JMX traffic and enforce access control policies. Benefits:. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Ultimate EKS Baseline Cluster: Part 1 - Provision EKS
    From here, we can explore other developments and tutorials on Kubernetes, such as o11y or observability (PLG, ELK, ELF, TICK, Jaeger, Pyroscope), service mesh (Linkerd, Istio, NSM, Consul Connect, Cillium), and progressive delivery (ArgoCD, FluxCD, Spinnaker). - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • Istio moved to CNCF Graduation stage
    Https://linkerd.io/ is a much lighter-weight alternative but you do still get some of the fancy things like mtls without needing any manual configuration. Install it, label your namespaces, and let it do it's thing! - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
  • API release strategies with API Gateway
    Open source API Gateway (Apache APISIX and Traefik), Service Mesh (Istio and Linkerd) solutions are capable of doing traffic splitting and implementing functionalities like Canary Release and Blue-Green deployment. With canary testing, you can make a critical examination of a new release of an API by selecting only a small portion of your user base. We will cover the canary release next section. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • GKE with Consul Service Mesh
    I have experimented with other service meshes and I was able to get up to speed quickly: Linkerd = 1 day, Istio = 3 days, NGINX Service Mesh = 5 days, but Consul Connect service mesh took at least 11 days to get off the ground. This is by far the most complex solution available. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Istio and linkerd, you can also consider the following products

nginx - A high performance free open source web server powering busiest sites on the Internet.

Eureka - Eureka is a contact center and enterprise performance through speech analytics that immediately reveals insights from automated analysis of communications including calls, chat, email, texts, social media, surveys and more.

Zuul - Zuul is a program that drives continuous integration, delivery, and deployment systems with a focus...

Docker Hub - Docker Hub is a cloud-based registry service

Kubernetes - Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers

Apache Thrift - An interface definition language and communication protocol for creating cross-language services.