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Kuma

kuma.io

Free plan Open source WebmacOSLinuxAPISelf-hosted
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Spec score 8.7 #2 of 22 in Service Mesh Platforms

What it is

Kuma is an open-source control plane for managing service meshes and microservices across Kubernetes, virtual machines, and bare-metal environments. It supports single-zone or multi-zone deployments across clouds, regions, and Kubernetes clusters, and one control plane can serve multiple meshes. Its traffic policies cover HTTP and TCP routing, health checks, circuit breaking, retries, timeouts, fault injection, and rate limiting. Security features include mutual TLS and mesh traffic permissions. Observability includes service maps, traces, access logs, metrics, and OpenTelemetry, with documented integrations for Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, and Datadog. Interfaces include Kubernetes CRDs, a GUI, a REST API, and a CLI; Envoy is bundled as the data-plane proxy. Kuma is self-hosted and available under a free open-source plan. Its installation guide provides Linux and macOS downloads, and documents macOS CLI installation through Homebrew. The Kubernetes quickstart describes the GUI as read-only. Production guidance covers secrets management, API access and authentication, proxy membership, certificates, and Kubernetes RBAC.

Spec sheet

What it does
Kuma is an Envoy-based control plane for securing, observing, routing and connecting services across Kubernetes, virtual machines and bare-metal systems.Read 15 Oct 2026 · kuma.io
Purpose
Kuma is an open-source control plane for service mesh and microservices management.Read 2 Oct 2026 · kuma.io
Deployment
Kuma supports single-zone and multi-zone deployments across clouds, regions, and Kubernetes clusters.Read 2 Oct 2026 · kuma.io
API
Kuma exposes a RESTful HTTP API for reading configuration and policies, and Universal mode also permits changes through that API.Read 15 Oct 2026 · kuma.io
Integrations
Kuma's observability documentation describes integrations with Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, and Datadog.Read 2 Oct 2026 · kuma.io
Security
Listed security features include multi-mesh, mutual TLS, and mesh traffic permissions.Read 2 Oct 2026 · kuma.io
API specification
The project publishes a complete OpenAPI specification in its GitHub repository.Read 15 Oct 2026 · kuma.io
CLI
The kumactl command-line interface manages Kuma and is included in production deployment guidance.Read 15 Oct 2026 · kuma.io
CNCF health
The CNCF project page reports a health score of 76 and 334 contributors for Kuma.Read 15 Oct 2026 · cncf.io
CNCF status
CNCF accepted Kuma as a Sandbox project on June 25, 2020.Read 15 Oct 2026 · cncf.io
Default exposure limitation
The API server defaults to plain HTTP on 0.0.0.0:5681 without authentication, requiring operators to restrict network access themselves.Read 15 Oct 2026 · kuma.io
Deployment security
Production guidance covers secrets management, API access control, API server and proxy authentication, proxy membership, certificates, and Kubernetes RBAC.Read 2 Oct 2026 · kuma.io
External services
The ExternalService resource applies Kuma observability, security and traffic policies to services outside the mesh.Read 15 Oct 2026 · kuma.io
Funding news
Kong announced a $175 million Series E financing at a $2 billion valuation on November 19, 2024, bringing reported total capital raised to $345 million.Read 15 Oct 2026 · konghq.com
GitHub project description
The public repository describes Kuma as a multi-zone service mesh for containers, Kubernetes and VMs built with Envoy and identifies it as a CNCF Sandbox project.Read 15 Oct 2026 · github.com
GUI limitation
The Kubernetes quickstart describes Kuma's GUI as read-only.Read 2 Oct 2026 · kuma.io
Independent pricing comparison
The buyer guide classifies Kuma as free open source and Kong Mesh as a moderate-to-premium enterprise subscription.Read 15 Oct 2026 · ciopages.com
Ingress feature
Ingress options include delegated gateway, built-in gateway and Kubernetes Gateway API support.Read 15 Oct 2026 · kuma.io
Install
The installation guide provides Linux and macOS downloads and documents installing the CLI on macOS with Homebrew.Read 2 Oct 2026 · kuma.io
Installation
Universal installation can download versioned archives with an installer script, while macOS users can install kumactl through Homebrew.Read 15 Oct 2026 · kuma.io
Interface
Kuma provides native Kubernetes CRDs, a GUI, a REST API, and a CLI.Read 2 Oct 2026 · kuma.io
Kubernetes installation
Kuma provides Helm charts through the kumahq.github.io/charts repository and documents Helm and Argo CD deployment.Read 15 Oct 2026 · kuma.io
Licence
The main Kuma repository and Helm charts are distributed under the Apache-2.0 licence.Read 15 Oct 2026 · github.com
Limit: latency
The same comparative study found Kuma nearly doubled latency in its tested scenario and performed worse than Linkerd and Traefik Mesh at the tested limits.Read 15 Oct 2026 · libstore.ugent.be
Limit: operating cost
An independent service-mesh buyer guide says free Kuma still carries operational costs for platform staff, control plane, data plane and certificate authority.Read 15 Oct 2026 · ciopages.com
Maintainer
The documentation identifies Kong as Kuma's core maintainer.Read 2 Oct 2026 · kuma.io
Maker headquarters
Kong's LinkedIn company page lists San Francisco, California as headquarters and 1,001–5,000 employees.Read 15 Oct 2026 · linkedin.com
Maker ownership
LinkedIn identifies Kong as privately held and Crunchbase lists San Francisco as its headquarters.Read 15 Oct 2026 · linkedin.com
Multi-mesh
One control plane can host multiple isolated meshes for teams, environments or security boundaries.Read 15 Oct 2026 · kuma.io
Multi-zone operation
Kuma supports single-zone and multi-zone deployments spanning regions, clouds and data centers.Read 15 Oct 2026 · kuma.io
Notable news
Kuma 3.0.0 was released on October 15, 2026; the release notes include dropping Linux capabilities and disallowing privilege escalation in control-plane and hook containers.Read 15 Oct 2026 · kuma.io
Observability
Listed observability features include service maps, traces, access logs, metrics, and OpenTelemetry.Read 2 Oct 2026 · kuma.io
Observability feature
Kuma provides service maps, traces, access logs, metrics and OpenTelemetry integration.Read 15 Oct 2026 · kuma.io
Observability integrations
The bundled trial observability stack uses Prometheus, Jaeger, Loki and Grafana, but the documentation says this setup is not production-ready.Read 15 Oct 2026 · kuma.io
Praise: documentation
A university evaluation rated Kuma's documentation high quality, while describing its community as smaller than Linkerd's.Read 15 Oct 2026 · libstore.ugent.be
Project launch
Kong announced Kuma as an open-source project on September 10, 2019, based on the Envoy proxy.Read 15 Oct 2026 · konghq.com
Rating on G2
G2's service-mesh category reports 4.49 out of 5 across submitted product ratings; the page does not show a Kuma product rating.Read 15 Oct 2026 · g2.com
Rating on TrustRadius
TrustRadius's service-mesh category page does not show a Kuma rating; its listed products include OpenShift at 9.1 out of 10 from 625 reviews.Read 15 Oct 2026 · trustradius.com
Runtime
Kuma bundles Envoy as its data plane proxy.Read 2 Oct 2026 · kuma.io
Security feature
The feature set includes mutual TLS, mesh traffic permissions and multi-mesh tenancy.Read 15 Oct 2026 · kuma.io
Security limitation
Kuma's API authentication documentation states that the control plane has no RBAC or per-resource authorization, so an allowed writer can modify every field of a resource.Read 15 Oct 2026 · kuma.io
Sizing
Kuma states that a 4-vCPU, 2-GB control plane can accommodate more than 1,000 data planes and suggests roughly 1 MB memory per data plane.Read 15 Oct 2026 · kuma.io
System requirements
Supported machine architectures are x86_64 and arm64; the documentation recommends load testing before production.Read 15 Oct 2026 · kuma.io
Traffic feature
Traffic policies cover HTTP and TCP routing, health checks, circuit breaking, fault injection, retries, timeouts, rate limits and failover.Read 15 Oct 2026 · kuma.io
Traffic policies
Its listed policies include HTTP and TCP routing, health checks, circuit breaking, retries, timeouts, fault injection, and rate limiting.Read 2 Oct 2026 · kuma.io
Workloads
It supports Kubernetes, virtual machines, and bare-metal environments.Read 2 Oct 2026 · kuma.io

Plans and prices

Kuma open-source Free self-hosted control plane · Kubernetes, VMs and bare metal · Envoy data plane Read 15 Oct 2026 · ciopages.com
Open source Free Open-source control plane; supports Kubernetes, VMs, and bare metal Read 2 Oct 2026 · kuma.io

Every Kuma plan and price →

Strong points and limits

Strong points

  • Supports Kubernetes, VMs, and bare-metal environments.
  • One control plane can support multiple meshes.
  • Traffic policies include retries, timeouts, and rate limiting.
  • Provides CRDs, GUI, REST API, and CLI.

Limits

  • Self-hosted deployment requires operating the control plane.
  • The Kubernetes quickstart describes the GUI as read-only.
  • Production setup includes security configuration for APIs and certificates.

Who it suits

Kuma suits teams managing service meshes across Kubernetes, VMs, or bare metal, including multi-zone or multi-mesh deployments. It is for organizations prepared to self-host and configure production security.

Verdict

Kuma offers a broad set of traffic, security, and observability capabilities across varied deployment environments. Plan for self-hosting, and note that the GUI is read-only in the Kubernetes quickstart context.

Where Specifiction places it

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