Antrea
7.2#1 in microsegmentation softwareFree planFree planAPILinuxSelf-hostedWindows
VisitAntrea vs Cilium
What both publish
| Fact | Antrea | Cilium |
|---|---|---|
| Encryption | Inter-node pod traffic can be encrypted with IPsec or WireGuard tunnels. | Cilium supports transparent encryption of managed host and endpoint traffic using IPsec, WireGuard, or ztunnel; ztunnel support is marked beta. |
| Integrations | The documentation lists integrations and guides for Prometheus, Octant, Multus, and Fluentd. | Cilium documentation describes integrations with Prometheus and Grafana for metrics and dashboards. |
| Observability | The project includes packet tracing, policy analysis, flow inspection, Prometheus metrics and flow export tools. | Cilium lists service maps, metrics and tracing export, identity-aware L3/L4/DNS network flow logs, and advanced network protocol visibility. |
| Project status | Antrea identifies itself as a Cloud Native Computing Foundation sandbox project. | Cilium identifies itself as a CNCF graduated project. |
| Purpose | Antrea implements the Container Network Interface and Kubernetes NetworkPolicy to provide pod networking and security for Kubernetes workloads. | Cilium is an open source, cloud native solution for providing, securing, and observing network connectivity between workloads, powered by eBPF. |
Antrea plans
- AntreaFree
Cilium plans
- CiliumFree
Pick Antrea if…
Antrea suits Kubernetes operators who need pod networking, network policy controls or multi-cluster capabilities. It requires Open vSwitch on every node, and its traffic encryption feature applies to Linux nodes rather than Windows nodes.
Pick Cilium if…
Cilium suits teams managing workload networking on Linux and Kubernetes who need network policy, security controls, and service-communication visibility.