Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Traefik VS OpenELB

Compare Traefik VS OpenELB and see what are their differences

Traefik logo Traefik

Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy

OpenELB logo OpenELB

Bare-Metal Load-balancer for Kubernetes
  • Traefik Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-13
  • OpenELB Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-04-30

Traefik features and specs

  • Dynamic Configuration
    Traefik allows for dynamic configuration changes without needing restarts, making it easy to manage in rapidly evolving environments.
  • Kubernetes Integration
    Traefik has native support for Kubernetes, simplifying the process of managing ingress controllers and load balancing in containerized environments.
  • Service Discovery
    It supports automatic service discovery via various backends, including Docker, Consul, and Kubernetes, making it easy to integrate into many architectures.
  • HTTPS Support
    Traefik can automatically obtain and renew SSL/TLS certificates using Let's Encrypt, ensuring secure communications.
  • Middleware
    It supports middleware for handling tasks such as authentication, rate limiting, and retries, offering more control over traffic management.
  • Dashboard
    Traefik includes a built-in dashboard for monitoring and visualizing the routing configuration and health of services.

Possible disadvantages of Traefik

  • Complexity
    The flexibility and range of features can make Traefik complex to configure and understand for beginners.
  • Performance Overhead
    The additional abstraction layer can introduce some performance overhead, which might be a concern in high-performance environments.
  • Limited Advanced Features
    Although Traefik covers many standard use cases, it may lack some advanced features that are found in more specialized load balancers.
  • Documentation
    While improving, the documentation can sometimes be lacking in depth or clarity, which can lead to difficulties in configuration and troubleshooting.
  • Community Support
    Although there is an active community, it may not be as vast or responsive as that of some other more established software like NGINX or HAProxy.
  • Proprietary Features
    Some advanced features are only available in the enterprise edition, which might be a constraint for users looking for a completely open-source solution.

OpenELB features and specs

No features have been listed yet.

Traefik videos

Traefik: A Scalable and Highly Available Edge Router by Damien Duportalt

More videos:

  • Review - Playing around with Traefik
  • Review - Rocket.Chat on Amazon EKS with Traefik. By Aaron Ogle, Lead Cloud Architect

OpenELB videos

No OpenELB videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Add video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Traefik and OpenELB)
Web Servers
94 94%
6% 6
Web And Application Servers
Network & Admin
80 80%
20% 20
Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Traefik and OpenELB

Traefik Reviews

Top 5 Open Source Load Balancers in 2024
Traefik's prowess extends beyond the conventional, equipped with a robust set of middlewares that elevate its capabilities. Going beyond load balancing and reverse proxy roles, Traefik serves as a comprehensive solution for modern cloud-native applications, including API gateway, orchestrator ingress, east-west service communication, and more.
10 Awesome Open Source Load Balancers
Traefik is a reverse proxy and L7 load balancer. Written in Go, it’s designed to support microservices and container-powered services in a distributed system. It has native support for Docker Swarm and Kubernetes orchestration, as well as service registries such as etcd or Consul. It also offers extensive support for WebSocket, HTTP/2, and gRPC services. Traefik integrates...
Top 5 Open-Source Load Balancers 2021
The modern and efficient, Traefik is an open-source reverse proxy and load balancer that provides a simple routing platform without engaging any complexities. Most popular among the Github Fanclub, Traefik owns approximately 27.7k Github stars.
Source: linuxways.net
The 5 Best Open Source Load Balancers
Traefik bills itself as the “cloud native edge router.” It’s a modern microservices-focused application load balancer and reverse proxy written in Golang. With its emphasis on support for several modern container orchestration platforms, batteries-included logging, and several popular metric formats, Traefik is a top choice for container-based microservices architectures.
Source: logz.io

OpenELB Reviews

10 Awesome Open Source Load Balancers
OpenELB, formerly known as Porter, is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) incubated project designed for exposing LoadBalancer type Kubernetes resources in bare-metal, edge, and virtualized environments. Services in Kubernetes are exposed via LoadBalancer resources. Usually, a load balancer in a cloud vendor Kubernetes deployment would be one of the vendor-operated...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Traefik seems to be a lot more popular than OpenELB. While we know about 38 links to Traefik, we've tracked only 2 mentions of OpenELB. 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.

Traefik mentions (38)

  • Adventures in Homelabbing: From Cloud Obsession to Self-Hosted Shenanigans
    I began to self-host a Minecraft server using Crafty Controller, an Excalidraw instance, Docmost to replace Notion, Plane to replace Jira, and Penpot to replace Figma. To be able to access them from the internet, I used Nginx Proxy Manager to set up reverse proxies with SSL. You can use Traefik or Caddy instead, but I enjoyed the ease-of-use of NPM. For a dashboard solution, I started with Homarr, but later... - Source: dev.to / 25 days ago
  • Nginx vs Traefik: Which Reverse Proxy is Right for You?
    Before diving into the specifics of Nginx and Traefik, let’s quickly define what a reverse proxy is. A reverse proxy sits between the client (browser or other services) and your backend services (web servers or applications). It handles incoming requests, routes them to the appropriate backend service, and forwards the response to the client. Reverse proxies are typically used for:. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • Opening Pandora's Container - How Exposing the Docker Socket Paves the Way to Host Control (Part 1)
    You may wonder why one would even want to expose the Docker socket when there are clearly risks involved. A popular usecase besides accessing remote Docker daemons (which you can actually expose over a TCP socket) are applications that either need control of the daemon to manage other containers, like for example Portainer, or tools that need information about containers for auto discovery purposes, like Traefik.... - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • The Home Server Journey - 3: An Actually Global "Hello"
    I emphasize usually because K3s is different and comes with a Traefik-based ingress controller by default. Taking that into account, as much as I like NGINX outside the container's world, I'd rather keep things simple and use what's already in place. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • Running Docker based web applications in Hashicorp Nomad with Traefik Load balancing
    In previous post, we discussed creating a basic Nomad cluster in the Vultr cloud. Here, we will use the cluster created to deploy a load-balanced sample web app using the service discovery capability of Nomad and its native integration with the Traefik load balancer. The source code is available here for the reference. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
View more

OpenELB mentions (2)

  • My LFX Mentorship experience with OpenELB
    My project was "CNCF - OpenELB: Provide the OpenELB Web UI for managing EIP and IP pool". I had to develop a web console for creating and managing the OpenELB resources. Now you might be wondering what is OpenELB. Well, OpenELB is an open-source load balancer implementation designed for exposing the LoadBalancer type of Kubernetes services in bare metal, edge, and virtualization environments. You can learn more... - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Is ingress-nginx and MetalLB still widely used for on-prem kubeadm clusters?
    I'm using metallb + bgp + nginx without problems. Another alternative: https://openelb.io/. Source: over 2 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Traefik and OpenELB, you can also consider the following products

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

Haproxy - Reliable, High Performance TCP/HTTP Load Balancer

AWS Elastic Load Balancing - Amazon ELB automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances in the cloud.

Mosn.io - The Cloud Native Proxy for Edge or Service Mesh

gobetween - Modern & minimalistic load balancer and router for the Cloud era

Google Cloud Load Balancing - Google Cloud Load Balancer enables users to scale their applications on Google Compute Engine.