Calico Enterprise vs Faucet

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.

Faucet is a free, open-source OpenFlow controller for network operators managing production networks and OpenFlow hardware. It moves routing, neighbour discovery and switching algorithms into vendor-independent server software with a centralised control plane. Faucet controls OpenFlow 1.3.x switches with multiple tables and group tables, supporting VLANs, IPv4 and IPv6, static and BGP routing, access control lists, port mirroring and switch stacking. Policy-based forwarding can offload processing to external systems, including 802.1X through hostapd. YAML provides network configuration, with a documented command for checking configuration before loading it. Installation options include pip3, apt-get and Docker; the guide places Faucet with Gauge, Prometheus and Grafana, while InfluxDB supplies time-series statistics. TLS can protect the switch control channel, and fail-secure or fail-standalone modes are available. High availability uses redundant controllers with matching configuration but no shared state. Faucet runs on Linux and self-hosted deployments and is licensed under Apache-2.0.