Calico Open Source vs Spiderpool

Calico Open Source provides networking, network security, and observability for Kubernetes across multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud, and on-premises environments. It supports container, virtual machine, and bare-metal workloads with a shared security policy framework. The policy engine implements Kubernetes network policy features including AdminNetworkPolicy and BaselineAdminNetworkPolicy. Policies can use tiers, deny and log actions, NetworkSets, and cluster-wide global rules; Staged Policies allow teams to assess behavior before applying enforcement. Listed data planes include eBPF, iptables, nftables, Windows, and VPP. Whisker provides a visual way to view flow logs and analyze network communication. Calico can also manage WireGuard tunnels to encrypt pod traffic between Kubernetes nodes. Calico Ingress Gateway provides traffic control, load balancing, and ingress policy enforcement. The free plan includes unlimited clusters, with in-memory data retention and community-driven support and maintenance. Tigera describes deployments ranging from 10 to 10,000 or more nodes.

Spiderpool is a free, open-source Kubernetes networking solution for underlay networking and RDMA on bare metal, virtual machines, and public clouds. Its CRD-based IPAM handles dual-stack networks, shared or exclusive address pools, and static addresses for stateful applications. The project supports Macvlan, IPvlan, and SR-IOV, while its IPAM can pair with compatible CNIs such as Calico and Weave. Pods may use multiple underlay interfaces or combine underlay and overlay interfaces, with policy routing across them. Documented connectivity includes Pod-to-host access, conflict detection, gateway checks, and service access through kube-proxy or an eBPF replacement. RDMA works with RoCE and InfiniBand in shared or exclusive device modes. Use cases include storage, middleware, observability, AI training, latency-sensitive workloads, and separate bandwidth needs. It supports AMD64 and ARM64 nodes, with SpiderSubnet requiring Kubernetes 1.21 or later. Spiderpool is Apache 2.0 licensed and a CNCF sandbox project.