iodine vs Traefik
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?
iodine
IPv4 over DNS tunnel solution, enabling you to start up a socks5 proxy
VS
Traefik
Cloud-native reverse proxy and load balancer
| Feature | iodine | Traefik |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Reverse Proxy & Gateways | Reverse Proxy & Gateways |
| License | ISC | MIT |
| Language | C | Go |
| Setup difficulty | Medium | Medium |
| Min. RAM | 512 MB | 128 MB |
| Deployment | bare-metal | docker, kubernetes, helm |
| GitHub stars | ★ 7,943 | ★ 64,330 |
| First released | 2020 | 2015 |
| Replaces | — | HAProxy, AWS ELB |
Why pick each one
Choose iodine if…
- Released under the ISC license
- Mature project with 7.9k GitHub stars
- Written in C
- Lightweight — runs in 512 MB RAM
Choose Traefik if…
- Released under the MIT license
- First-class Docker support for quick deployment
- Kubernetes-ready with Helm charts available
- Mature project with 64.3k GitHub stars
Frequently asked questions
Is iodine or Traefik better?
Neither is universally better. Traefik has the larger community; both share a medium setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.
Are iodine and Traefik free and open-source?
Yes. iodine is licensed under ISC and Traefik under MIT. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run iodine and Traefik with Docker?
iodine: check the project docs for container support. Traefik: yes.