Calico Enterprise vs Illumio Segmentation
Calico Enterprise
tigera.ioIllumio Segmentation
illumio.comSide by side
| Figure | Calico Enterprise | Illumio Segmentation |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | — |
| Free plan | — | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Microsegmentation Software | 7.6 (#12) | 8.0 (#6) |
| Purpose | Calico Enterprise is a self-managed platform for unified network security and observability in Kubernetes clusters. | Illumio Segmentation uses one policy engine to stop lateral movement across cloud workloads, endpoints, and data centers. |
| Support | The pricing page lists enterprise support for Calico Enterprise, and the comparison page identifies its support and maintenance as Standard/Business. | Illumio offers customer success advisors as a main non-technical point of contact and publishes regional support phone numbers. |
Plans
In their own words
Calico Enterprise
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.
Illumio Segmentation
Illumio Segmentation has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.