Cilium
Depends
Confidence: Medium
Buy if you run serious Kubernetes at scale and have platform engineers . the open-source core is free and battle-tested.
New check
Comparison
Cilium vs Flannel
Flannel
Starting report…
Pick Cilium when
- Large Kubernetes fleets
- Platform teams replacing kube-proxy
- Zero-trust network security
- Telcos and data center operators
When Cilium is not a fit
- Non-Kubernetes shops . nothing here to network
- Small clusters happy with default CNI; complexity outweighs gains
- Teams without eBPF/Linux depth to debug it
- Guess: older kernels . eBPF needs modern Linux
Sources
- Cilium . official sitecilium.ioofficial
- Cilium enterprise distributionscilium.ioofficial
- On-prem Cilium enterprise costs (Reddit)reddit.comreview
- Kakao CNCF case studycncf.ioofficial
- Cilium vs Calico guidetigera.ioreview
- Cilium product security pagecilium.iosecurity
- GHSA-24m5-r6hv-ccgp advisorygithub.comsecurity
- Companies using Cilium (TheirStack)theirstack.comreview
- reddit.comreddit.comreview
- github.comgithub.comreview