Cilium vs Elisity Microsegmentation

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.

Elisity Microsegmentation applies identity-based least-privilege policies to users, workloads, and devices across IT, IoT, OT, and IoMT networks. Passive telemetry and integrations discover devices and correlate identity, behavior, traffic, and risk in IdentityGraph. Teams can simulate policies against real traffic before activation, while Elisity Intelligence recommends actions for customer approval. A cloud-hosted Cloud Control Center manages Virtual Edge deployments, and Virtual Edge Nodes enforce policies through existing network infrastructure. Elisity describes Virtual Edge as lightweight container software for access-layer switches or virtual environments, without additional hardware. The platform is agentless, supports mixed workloads and hybrid cloud environments, and is available through API, self-hosted, and web platforms. Integrations include Armis, Claroty, CrowdStrike, Microsoft Defender, ServiceNow, Active Directory, Splunk, Cisco, Juniper, Aruba, and Arista. It targets healthcare, manufacturing and industrial organizations, and commercial enterprises. Pricing and subscription terms are set in a Software Order.