Consul is a service networking solution. It provides service discovery, a service mesh, identity-based authorisation, L7 traffic management and encrypted service-to-service communication across on-premises, hybrid and multi-cloud environments, on virtual machines and Kubernetes. Platform and DevOps teams use Consul to manage how application services find each other and connect securely. You run the software yourself; the vendor also offers cloud products under the HashiCorp Cloud Platform.
Consul is developed by HashiCorp, which has been part of IBM since February 2025; both companies are American. From version 1.17 the code is published under the Business Source License, with IBM as licensor. The source code is public, but this is not an open-source licence in the OSI sense: offering Consul to third parties as a hosted or embedded service that competes with IBM's paid versions falls outside the permitted production use. If you run it yourself, your data stays on your own infrastructure. Development continues: the changelog lists a release candidate of version 2.1.0 in September 2026.