Calico Enterprise vs CNI Plugins

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.

CNI Plugins is a collection of reference and example network plugins for configuring connectivity in Linux and Windows containers. CNI supplies a specification and libraries, plus a command-line tool for executing plugins and a Go library for application integration. Interface options include bridge, ipvlan, loopback, macvlan, point-to-point, VLAN, host-device, and dummy; Windows-specific plugins include win-bridge and win-overlay. IP address management choices cover DHCP, host-local allocation tracking, and static IPv4 or IPv6 allocation. Meta plugins handle interface tuning, port mapping, bandwidth limits, source-based routing, and firewall rules, and a sample plugin illustrates custom plugin development. CNI focuses on connecting containers and removing allocated resources when a container is deleted. The project is distributed under Apache License 2.0 and is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project. It is free, with a plan listed at free. Linux and Windows are supported; the latest release page lists Linux archives for amd64, arm, and arm64.