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Istio vs Traefik Enterprise comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Istio
Ranking in Service Mesh
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Traefik Enterprise
Ranking in Service Mesh
7th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
API Management (18th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Service Mesh category, the mindshare of Istio is 22.8%, up from 22.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Traefik Enterprise is 8.0%, up from 6.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Service Mesh
 

Featured Reviews

JETTI DINESH REDDY - PeerSpot reviewer
Enhanced microservice security and advanced traffic management and good authentification
When our developers are building the microservices, instead of imposing additional burdens or additional thinking on them, especially as part of network features such as traffic management, security, or observability, we deploy something from the infrastructure side, so developers need only focus…
Anurag Bandyopadhyay - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers a good dashboard that provides a great overview to users
I would say that maybe along the same path that Traefik Enterprise is currently on, you have most of the things straight up in the UI that you can check even with minimal training. You can just use, understand, and debug things from the UI. There is still work to be done in the tool, which can ensure that anyone with just minimal know-how of the product doesn't have to really go into the terminal and see the status of routes, concierge routes, or whether certain things are up or not. One should be able to just check things straight up from the UI and get to know what kind of issues are there in the solution, and even though such a feature is already there in the tool, there is more work to be done in it. I would not particularly recommend any improvements when it comes to the security of traffic. I think the tool is pretty pluggable in terms of whatever security we want to put in our routes, even though it is just as a middleware or just as a supporting product for whatever we have in our services.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The security feature with mutual TLS authentication, which is identity-based, and the traffic management using cloud load balancers are very valuable."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"Istio provides tremendous value, particularly in offering TLS and authentication over microservice-to-microservice communication."
"We can implement load balancing to distribute traffic across multiple service instances. Istio also offers traffic routing capabilities and circuit-breaking functionality. For security, it handles authentication using mutual TLS (mTLS) between services. It can authorize services using JWT tokens. Istio also allows defining policies for rate limiting to control traffic within services."
"We use Istio for Service Discovery and routing traffic."
"The most valuable features of Istio are the traffic management and the Sidecar they inject, which greatly helps secure the application."
"The tool's mutual TLS stands out. It provides secure communication between services within the cluster. Additionally, Istio offers built-in telemetry and tracing with tools like Jaeger, which aids monitoring and troubleshooting."
"Istio can save you time in terms of network troubleshooting."
"The tool handles scalability pretty easily. Adding more instances of services and all are pretty intuitive to do using Traefik Enterprise."
 

Cons

"Handling large-scale environments with proxies can strain resources, but horizontal scaling can improve fault tolerance."
"If you're a beginner in infrastructure management and networking, learning Istio might pose some challenges. However, if you have some knowledge of networking or service meshes, you should find it manageable. Istio's website offers documentation to guide you through learning."
"Based on my experience, the solution could be improved. They could simplify the learning process so that users can understand how its features work together, especially with components like Kibana. Learning about the different components is necessary. For instance, you need to understand the traffic flow, potential bottlenecks, and the architecture within Istio."
"It would be good if the solution had more community forums."
"If someone doesn't understand Kubernetes, they'll have issues working with Istio."
"For our use case that we applied it to, there were graph queues and the calls that were coming in. There were the things that we couldn't apply at the time, but it kind of worked."
"Istio needs to be more mature and user-friendly."
"I've seen applications where they had such strict time constraints, they couldn't use Istio because it was too much overhead."
"One should be able to just check things straight up from the UI and get to know what kind of issues are there in the solution, and even though such a feature is already there in the tool, there is more work to be done in it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We use the tool's open-source version, so there are no hidden fees or additional costs associated with it."
"It is on the less expensive side. It provides a significant saving for us in terms of cost and other things. It is open-source. We just download it from the open-source framework and use it."
"You can deploy Istio free of cost and don't need to pay for it."
"I would say that Traefik Enterprise is cheaper than the other alternatives in the market."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Retailer
6%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Istio?
Istio provides a significant saving for us in terms of costs since it is open source. However, Istio can still come at a price. It has a steep learning curve and might require more manpower hours ...
What do you like most about Istio?
We use Istio for Service Discovery and routing traffic.
What needs improvement with Istio?
At the moment, there are no immediate improvements needed. Reducing the latency between the control plane and the data plane would be beneficial.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Traefik Enterprise?
One of the reasons why my company moved from Envoy, as well as the other in-house options, to Traefik Enterprise was because doing many things in-house was overkill. Traefik Enterprise was a relati...
What needs improvement with Traefik Enterprise?
I would say that maybe along the same path that Traefik Enterprise is currently on, you have most of the things straight up in the UI that you can check even with minimal training. You can just use...
What is your primary use case for Traefik Enterprise?
At Razorpay, the tool is used as a reverse proxy, ingress controller, and CRD management. A year and a half ago, my company started to move from Traefik Enterprise v1.0 to Traefik Enterprise v2.0. ...
 

Comparisons

 

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Overview

Find out what your peers are saying about Isito, Envoy, VMware and others in Service Mesh. Updated: December 2024.
824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.