What is Consul used for?

Consul is a service networking solution that enables teams to manage secure network connectivity between services across on-prem, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud environments. It is a good fit for managing secure network connectivity between services across on-prem, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud environments.

Is Consul open source?

Yes. Consul is open source under a custom licence. Its source code is on GitHub at hashicorp/consul and is written mainly in Go.

Yes. Consul is open source, so the software itself is free to use under the terms of its own licence.

Can I self-host Consul?

Yes. Consul can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.

What is Consul an alternative to?

Consul is an open-source alternative to Azure App Configuration, AWS AppConfig and Illumio. Other open-source alternatives to Azure App Configuration include Kubernetes, Ansible and etcd.

Is Consul actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Consul was on 13 October 2026, and the latest release is v2.0.4, published on 10 September 2026. The project has 30k stars on GitHub.

Consul: open-source alternative to Azure App Configuration

About Consul

Consul is a service networking solution that enables teams to manage secure network connectivity between services, across on-prem, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud environments and runtimes. It offers service discovery, service mesh, identity-based authorization, L7 traffic management, and secure service-to-service encryption.

Key features

Service discovery
Service mesh
Identity-based authorization
L7 traffic management
Secure service-to-service encryption

Good fit for

Managing secure network connectivity between services across on-prem, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud environments

Built with: Go tools; Kubernetes tools
Tags: service networking; service discovery; service mesh; authorization; traffic management; encryption

Consul: questions and answers

What is Consul used for?: Consul is a service networking solution that enables teams to manage secure network connectivity between services across on-prem, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud environments. It is a good fit for managing secure network connectivity between services across on-prem, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud environments.
Is Consul open source?: Yes. Consul is open source under a custom licence. Its source code is on GitHub at hashicorp/consul and is written mainly in Go.
Is Consul free?: Yes. Consul is open source, so the software itself is free to use under the terms of its own licence.
Can I self-host Consul?: Yes. Consul can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
What is Consul an alternative to?: Consul is an open-source alternative to Azure App Configuration, AWS AppConfig and Illumio. Other open-source alternatives to Azure App Configuration include Kubernetes, Ansible and etcd.
Is Consul actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Consul was on 13 October 2026, and the latest release is v2.0.4, published on 10 September 2026. The project has 30k stars on GitHub.