Istio vs Traefik: What are the differences?

Istio: Open platform to connect, manage, and secure microservices, by Google, IBM, and Lyft. Istio is an open platform for providing a uniform way to integrate microservices, manage traffic flow across microservices, enforce policies and aggregate telemetry data. Istio's control plane provides an abstraction layer over the underlying cluster management platform, such as Kubernetes, Mesos, etc; Traefik: Load Balancer for Microservices. Træfɪk is a modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer made to deploy microservices with ease. It supports several backends (Docker, Swarm, Mesos/Marathon, Kubernetes, Consul, Etcd, Zookeeper, BoltDB, Rest API, file...) to manage its configuration automatically and dynamically.

Istio can be classified as a tool in the "Microservices Tools" category, while Traefik is grouped under "Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy".

"Zero code for logging and monitoring" is the top reason why over 4 developers like Istio, while over 10 developers mention "Kubernetes integration" as the leading cause for choosing Traefik.

Istio and Traefik are both open source tools. It seems that Traefik with 23.2K GitHub stars and 2.4K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Istio with 18.5K GitHub stars and 3.1K GitHub forks.

Docplanner, Viadeo, and Condé Nast are some of the popular companies that use Traefik, whereas Istio is used by Cuemby, Entelo, and AgFlow. Traefik has a broader approval, being mentioned in 47 company stacks & 20 developers stacks; compared to Istio, which is listed in 32 company stacks and 30 developer stacks.