NPS 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?
Compare NPS with
choose an app… frp Caddy Pi-hole acme.sh mitmproxy Kong Gateway Istio AdGuard Home Nginx Proxy Manager Nginx Envoy Authelia Pingora authentik localtunnel SafeLine Pangolin Anubis Ingress-NGINX DDNS-Go Apache APISIX Chisel Shadowsocks-libev flaresolverr LibreSpeed OAuth2 Proxy CrowdSec CoreDNS cert-manager rathole OpenResty dnscrypt-proxy Tengine MyIP Linkerd bore FrankenPHP SmartDNS imgproxy Tyk BunkerWeb lego YARP Technitium DNS Server ExternalDNS Tinyauth iodine Fabio GOST Blocky HAProxy dae Tinyproxy NGINX Unit 3proxy Zoraxy WireGuard UI sslh Tor Browser Pomerium go-shadowsocks2 sish zrok Caddy Docker Proxy expose Emissary-ingress Apache HTTP Server Varnish Cache Kuma Contour relayd go-doxy Coraza WAF Speed Test by OpenSpeedTest™ mosdns Sozu SWAG pgrok Skipper Squid Algernon Canary Tokens MySpeed Gateway API Sablier KrakenD Angie Syslog-ng River Static Web Server beelzebub Traefik Mesh gobetween Apache Traffic Server tunnelmole Maza ad blocking frp-panel Adguard Home Sync Træfik Hub Note Caddy-L4 UUSEC WAF OpenResty Manager boringproxy Pingap Ehco SimpleTorrent g3proxy Unifi-controller ctrld HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Gravitee API Management HAProxy Data Plane API Chromium Duck DNS Traefik Geoblock gTunnel Cloudflare DDNS Privoxy Wakupator socks5-proxy-server Pound gandi-livedns Urbit RPort Holesail Switchboard Adguard Firefox Lighttpd Remmina Tor Snowflake Proxy Twingate Vinyl Cache
Compare Traefik with
choose an app… Caddy Pi-hole acme.sh mitmproxy Kong Gateway Istio AdGuard Home Nginx Proxy Manager Nginx Envoy Authelia 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 NPS Traefik Category Reverse Proxy & Gateways Reverse Proxy & Gateways License GPL-3.0 MIT Language Go Go Setup difficulty Medium Medium Min. RAM 64 MB 128 MB Deployment docker, binary docker, kubernetes, helm GitHub stars ★ 34,157 ★ 64,330 First released 2019 2015 Replaces ngrok HAProxy, AWS ELB
Why pick each one
Choose NPS if… Released under the GPL-3.0 license First-class Docker support for quick deployment Mature project with 34.2k GitHub stars Written in Go NPS details 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 Traefik details
Frequently asked questions Is NPS 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 NPS and Traefik free and open-source? Yes. NPS is licensed under GPL-3.0 and Traefik under MIT. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run NPS and Traefik with Docker? NPS: yes. Traefik: yes.