Calico Enterprise vs Cilium

Calico Enterprise is a self-managed platform for network security and observability in Kubernetes clusters. It provides pod-to-pod networking within single clusters and across multiple clusters, with data-plane options including eBPF, nftables, iptables, Windows, and VPP. Cluster mesh connects clusters for pod communication and service discovery, while supporting policy enforcement and traffic visibility. Security controls include network- and application-layer policies, DNS policies, egress controls, and workload microsegmentation. It also provides workload-level IDS/IPS, a workload-focused WAF, and DDoS detection and prevention. For observability, Calico combines flow logs with Kubernetes context and offers network topology views, dashboards, alerts, and workload packet capture. Tigera lists support for PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2, NIST, CCPA, and custom compliance frameworks, along with continuous monitoring and audit-ready reports. Policy deployment can integrate with CI/CD tools such as ArgoCD and Jenkins. The product supports hybrid deployment and centralized control, with BGP, IP-in-IP, VXLAN, WireGuard, TCP, UDP, SCTP, ICMP, ICMPv6, and HTTP listed as supported protocols.

Cilium is an open-source, cloud-native system for providing, securing, and observing network connectivity between workloads using eBPF. Its networking capabilities include CNI, Layer 4 load balancing, Cluster Mesh, kube-proxy replacement, BGP, service mesh, Gateway API, IPv6, host firewall, and ingress. Network policies can enforce identity-aware rules from L3 through L7, including DNS- and HTTP-aware filtering. Security features include runtime protection and transparent encryption of managed host and endpoint traffic using IPsec, WireGuard, or ztunnel; ztunnel support is marked beta. For visibility, Cilium lists service maps, metrics and tracing export, network flow logs, and protocol visibility. Hubble, built on Cilium and eBPF, provides visibility into service communication and behavior. Documentation describes Prometheus and Grafana integrations and Kubernetes support for services including GKE, AKS, EKS, OpenShift, RKE, k3s, and Alibaba ACK. Its container image requires AMD64 or AArch64 hosts running Linux kernel 5.10 or later, or an equivalent kernel such as 4.18 on RHEL 8.10. For environments above 500 nodes, the quick installation guide directs readers to large-environment guidance or specific datapath modes.