Authelia vs Istio
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted reverse proxy & gateways options
— licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one
replaces.
Not the right match-up?
Compare Authelia with
choose an app… Caddy Traefik Pi-hole acme.sh mitmproxy Kong Gateway Keycloak AdGuard Home NPS Nginx Proxy Manager Nginx Envoy Pingora authentik SafeLine Pangolin Anubis Ingress-NGINX Ory Hydra DDNS-Go Apache APISIX Shadowsocks-libev flaresolverr LibreSpeed OAuth2 Proxy ZITADEL CrowdSec Casdoor Apereo CAS Dex Tinyauth Kanidm Pomerium OpenZiti node-oidc-provider Ory Oathkeeper Buzzfeed sso Traefik Forward Auth Caddy Security SimpleSAMLphp WSO2 Identity Server Janssen Project Apache Syncope FusionAuth Shibboleth Identity Provider OpenUnison LemonLDAP::NG Ipsilon Gluu Flex
Compare Istio with
choose an app… Caddy Traefik Pi-hole acme.sh mitmproxy Kong Gateway AdGuard Home NPS Nginx Proxy Manager Nginx Envoy Pingora authentik SafeLine Pangolin Anubis Ingress-NGINX DDNS-Go Apache APISIX Shadowsocks-libev flaresolverr LibreSpeed OAuth2 Proxy CrowdSec CoreDNS cert-manager OpenResty dnscrypt-proxy Tengine MyIP Linkerd FrankenPHP SmartDNS imgproxy Tyk BunkerWeb lego YARP Technitium DNS Server ExternalDNS Tinyauth iodine Fabio Blocky HAProxy dae Tinyproxy NGINX Unit 3proxy Zoraxy WireGuard UI sslh Tor Browser Pomerium go-shadowsocks2 sish Caddy Docker Proxy Emissary-ingress Apache HTTP Server Varnish Cache Kuma Contour relayd go-doxy Coraza WAF Speed Test by OpenSpeedTest™ mosdns Sozu SWAG Skipper Squid Algernon Canary Tokens MySpeed Gateway API Sablier KrakenD Angie Syslog-ng River Static Web Server beelzebub Traefik Mesh gobetween Apache Traffic Server Maza ad blocking frp-panel Adguard Home Sync Træfik Hub Note Caddy-L4 UUSEC WAF OpenResty Manager Pingap Ehco SimpleTorrent g3proxy Unifi-controller ctrld HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Gravitee API Management HAProxy Data Plane API Chromium Duck DNS Traefik Geoblock Cloudflare DDNS Privoxy Wakupator socks5-proxy-server Pound gandi-livedns Urbit Holesail Switchboard Adguard Firefox Lighttpd Remmina Tor Snowflake Proxy Twingate Vinyl Cache
Feature Authelia Istio Category Reverse Proxy & Gateways Reverse Proxy & Gateways License Apache-2.0 Apache-2.0 Language Go Go Setup difficulty Medium Hard Min. RAM 128 MB 1,024 MB Deployment docker, kubernetes, binary kubernetes, helm GitHub stars ★ 28,514 ★ 38,338 First released 2017 2017 Replaces Okta, Cloudflare Access AWS App Mesh
Why pick each one
Choose Authelia if… Released under the Apache-2.0 license First-class Docker support for quick deployment Kubernetes-ready with Helm charts available Mature project with 28.5k GitHub stars Authelia details Choose Istio if… Comprehensive feature set Large ecosystem Istio details
Frequently asked questions Is Authelia or Istio better? Neither is universally better. Istio has the larger community, while Authelia is simpler to set up (medium difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.
Are Authelia and Istio free and open-source? Yes. Authelia is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Istio under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Authelia and Istio with Docker? Authelia: yes. Istio: check the project docs for container support.