Pi-hole 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 Pi-hole with
choose an app… Caddy acme.sh mitmproxy Kong Gateway Istio AdGuard Home NPS 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
Compare Traefik with
choose an app… Caddy acme.sh mitmproxy Kong Gateway Istio AdGuard Home NPS 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 Pi-hole Traefik Category Reverse Proxy & Gateways Reverse Proxy & Gateways License EUPL-1.2 MIT Language Shell Go Setup difficulty Medium Medium Min. RAM 512 MB 128 MB Deployment docker docker, kubernetes, helm GitHub stars ★ 60,247 ★ 64,330 First released 2026 2015 Replaces — HAProxy, AWS ELB
Why pick each one
Choose Pi-hole if… Released under the EUPL-1.2 license First-class Docker support for quick deployment Mature project with 60.2k GitHub stars Written in Shell Pi-hole 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 Pi-hole 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 Pi-hole and Traefik free and open-source? Yes. Pi-hole is licensed under EUPL-1.2 and Traefik under MIT. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Pi-hole and Traefik with Docker? Pi-hole: yes. Traefik: yes.