Aviatrix Zero Trust for Workloads vs Cilium: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
Aviatrix Zero Trust for Workloads is a commercial microsegmentation tool by Aviatrix. Cilium is a free microsegmentation tool. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best microsegmentation fit for your security stack.
CST VerdictBased on our analysis of NIST CSF 2.0 coverage, core features, company size fit, deployment model, here is our conclusion:
Aviatrix Zero Trust for Workloads
Enterprise security teams managing multicloud infrastructure will get the most from Aviatrix Zero Trust for Workloads because it enforces microsegmentation without requiring network redesign, letting you implement zero trust at scale without the operational chaos that typically follows. The product covers PR.AA and PR.IR across AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI simultaneously, with inline encryption and SmartGroups that actually adapt to workload changes instead of forcing manual policy rewrites. Skip this if your organization runs a single cloud or prioritizes detection over access control; Aviatrix tilts heavily toward preventing lateral movement and assumes you have the infrastructure complexity to justify the investment.
Platform teams running Kubernetes on-premises or in hybrid clouds will get the most from Cilium because its eBPF kernel-level enforcement eliminates the latency and blind spots of traditional overlay networking. With 23,959 GitHub stars and active deployments at scale across financial services and public sector organizations, Cilium's approach to policy enforcement at the dataplane level is proven; it also handles observability without requiring sidecar injection, which keeps resource overhead predictable. Not the right fit for teams needing a managed SaaS experience or those prioritizing CSPM and infrastructure compliance scanning over network microsegmentation.
