ISC Stork vs Open DHCP Server

ISC Stork is a free, open-source web interface for monitoring, troubleshooting, and maintaining Kea DHCP server configuration. It reports host and daemon health, including memory, CPU utilization, software versions, and uptime, and monitors DHCPv4 and DHCPv6 pool use and high-availability status. With the required Kea hooks installed, administrators can manage reservations, subnets, and pools through its interface. Stork can display BIND configuration and DNS zone information, but DNS support is in early stages and it does not change BIND settings. Traffic activity can be exported to Prometheus for Grafana charts, and LDAP can be used for administrator authentication and authorization. A deployment uses a Stork server and agents installed on application servers; the server requires PostgreSQL. The server and agents communicate through TLS-encrypted gRPC channels. Stork expects the running Kea configuration to be authoritative, and the Kea Configuration Backend hook is incompatible with Stork management. It runs on most Linux and Unix platforms and macOS under the MPL 2.0 license. ISC offers free community help and paid professional support.

Open DHCP Server is free, open-source software that provides Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol service on Linux and self-hosted, on-premises deployments. It assigns addresses through static hosts and dynamic DHCP ranges, supporting up to 125 ranges on one server. Multiple zones can run on a single server, with BOOTP and relay-agent support. DHCP options may be set globally, for a range, or for an individual client, using string, IP, hexadecimal-string, or byte-array values without defining option types. Ranges can be filtered by MAC ranges, vendor options, and user options. Replicated fail-safe operation supports continuity, while lease status appears on an auto-refreshing HTML page. The project describes low CPU use, small executable size, and very low memory requirements. It is released under the GNU General Public License, with a GPL-2.0 repository license. The project says it suits experts and small or home deployments, including people without DHCP protocol knowledge.