Cloud · pricing
Cilium pricing
Cilium publishes a single tier. Below is what it costs, what it covers, and how that compares with the cloud tools listed alongside it.
- Entry price
- Free
- Model
- Open source, no licence fee
- Tiers
- 1
- Free tier
- Yes
Cilium plans, side by side
Every published tier in ascending order of price, with the number of features each one lists. An absence here means the record does not itemise it, not that the tier lacks it.
| Plan | Price | Features listed | Step up from the tier below |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cilium | Free | 3 | Entry tier |
Where Cilium stops being free
Cilium, Free
- Full functionality
- No usage limits
- Community support
No paid tier on record
Cilium lists a free tier and no priced tier above it in the record we hold.
What the product covers
The full Cilium feature record, grouped as the catalogue groups it. This is the product as a whole; the record does not map every feature onto a specific tier.
Other
- eBPF datapath
- Identity-based policy
- Hubble observability
- Sidecar-free mesh
People bring Cilium in for kubernetes networking at a scale where iptables-based cni performance degrades, network policy expressed on workload identity rather than fragile ip rules, seeing which services actually talk to each other, and what policy is dropping. If that is not the job you are buying for, the alternatives to Cilium are worth a look before you commit to a tier.
How that compares in Cloud
Too few cloud tools in this directory publish a starting price to quote a meaningful median, so the table below is a like-for-like list rather than a ranking.
| Tool | Entry price | Model | Rated | Head to head |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cilium (this page) | Free | Open source, no licence fee | - | |
| Zipkin | Free | Open source, no licence fee | - | vs Cilium |
| HAProxy | Free | Open source, no licence fee | - | vs Cilium |
| Thanos | Free | Open source, no licence fee | - | vs Cilium |
| Flux | Free | Open source, no licence fee | - | vs Cilium |
| Kustomize | Free | Open source, no licence fee | - | vs Cilium |
| VictoriaMetrics | Free | Open source, no licence fee | - | vs Cilium |
Ratings are aggregated from third-party sources and imported with each catalogue entry, they are not reviews hosted on Softwr. How each figure is used is set out on the Cilium badges page.
Before you pay for Cilium
Three things this page cannot tell you, and all three change the bill. The record carries a price and a billing period but not the unit - per-seat and flat-rate pricing are indistinguishable in this data, so a five-person team may be looking at five times the figure above. It carries no annual rate, so any discount for paying yearly is not something this page can quote. And it carries no trial length.
What it can tell you is the shape of the ladder: a single tier at Free. Because there is a free tier, the cheapest way to answer the rest is to use it before paying anything.
Cilium runs on kubernetes, linux, and is published by Cloud Native Computing Foundation of San Francisco, California, United States. The full record is on the Cilium review, and the rest of the category is under best cloud tools.
Cilium pricing questions
- How much does Cilium cost?
- Cilium publishes a single tier, Cilium, at Free.
- Does Cilium have a free plan?
- Yes. The Cilium tier costs nothing and covers full functionality, no usage limits, community support.
- Which cloud tools can I use without paying?
- 8 of the 8 cloud tools listed alongside Cilium have a free tier: Zipkin, HAProxy, Thanos, Flux, Kustomize.
- What am I actually paying for with Cilium?
- The record lists 4 features across 1 area: other. In practice it is brought in for kubernetes networking at a scale where iptables-based cni performance degrades, network policy expressed on workload identity rather than fragile ip rules, seeing which services actually talk to each other, and what policy is dropping.
- Does Cilium charge per user?
- The record carries a price and a billing period for each of its 1 tiers, but not the unit that price is charged in. Per-seat and flat-rate billing look identical in this data, so check the vendor's page before budgeting for a team.
- Are these Cilium prices current?
- They are what the catalogue entry holds, refreshed when the entry is. Vendors change pricing without notice and nobody at Softwr re-verifies each tier by hand, so treat this as a structured summary and the vendor's own pricing page as the authority.
- What should I compare Cilium against before paying?
- The closest cloud tools in this directory are Zipkin, HAProxy, Thanos, Flux. Each has a side-by-side comparison with Cilium covering price, platforms and features.