Cilium

Cilium is ranked #5 of 27 in microsegmentation software on The Geeks Club. It runs on Linux, Self-hosted. There is a free plan.

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Cilium Free Open source · Linux kernel >= 5.10 or equivalent · AMD64 and AArch64 cilium.io · 3 Oct 2026

Compared on microsegmentation software

Deployment model: hybrid

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Cilium

Purpose: Cilium is an open source, cloud native solution for providing, securing, and observing network connectivity between workloads, powered by eBPF.
Networking: Its listed networking use cases include CNI, Layer 4 load balancing, Cluster Mesh, kube-proxy replacement, BGP, service mesh, Gateway API, IPv6, host firewall, and ingress.
Observability: Cilium lists service maps, metrics and tracing export, identity-aware L3/L4/DNS network flow logs, and advanced network protocol visibility.
Security features: Listed security capabilities include transparent encryption, network policy, and runtime security.
Hubble: Hubble is a distributed networking and security observability platform built on Cilium and eBPF that provides visibility into service communication and behavior.
Policy: Cilium network policies can enforce identity-aware rules at L3–L7, including DNS- and HTTP-aware filtering.
Encryption: Cilium supports transparent encryption of managed host and endpoint traffic using IPsec, WireGuard, or ztunnel; ztunnel support is marked beta.
Integrations: Cilium documentation describes integrations with Prometheus and Grafana for metrics and dashboards.
Kubernetes support: The quick installation guide lists Kubernetes distributions and services including GKE, AKS, EKS, OpenShift, RKE, k3s, and Alibaba ACK.
System requirements: The container image requires AMD64 or AArch64 hosts running Linux kernel 5.10 or later, or an equivalent kernel such as 4.18 on RHEL 8.10.
Scale limitation: The quick installation guide says environments larger than 500 nodes should refer to the Getting Started guide for large environments or specific datapath modes.
Security review: Cilium documentation links to 2022 security and fuzzing audits; the security audit summary reports no critical or high severity vulnerabilities found in that audit.
Community support: Cilium documentation directs users to its FAQ, Slack channels, and GitHub issue tracker for help and bug reports.
Project status: Cilium identifies itself as a CNCF graduated project.
Price from: Free

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Where it ranks on The Geeks Club

Best Microsegmentation Software in 2026#5 of 27
Best Container Networking Software in 2026#6 of 25
Best Software-Defined Networking Software in 2026#2 of 23
Best Cloud Network Management Software in 2026#5 of 20

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Sources

cilium.io· checked 3 Oct 2026
docs.cilium.io/en/stable/overview/intro/· checked 3 Oct 2026
docs.cilium.io/en/latest/security/network/encryption/· checked 3 Oct 2026
docs.cilium.io/en/stable/observability/grafana/· checked 3 Oct 2026
docs.cilium.io/en/stable/gettingstarted/k8s-install-de· checked 3 Oct 2026
docs.cilium.io/en/stable/operations/system_requirement· checked 3 Oct 2026
docs.cilium.io/en/stable/security/· checked 3 Oct 2026
docs.cilium.io/en/latest/gettingstarted/gettinghelp/· checked 3 Oct 2026