Argo Rollouts vs Kargo

Argo Rollouts is a self-hosted Kubernetes controller for managing how application updates reach users. It supports BlueGreen, Canary and Rolling Update strategies, with weighted traffic shifting through ingress controllers or service meshes. Without a traffic-routing provider, it can adjust ReplicaSet counts instead. Metric integrations let it assess KPIs and automate promotion or rollback, while leaving room for manual judgment. Supported providers include NGINX, AWS ALB, Istio and Traefik for traffic, and Prometheus, Datadog, New Relic, Graphite and InfluxDB for metrics. It can operate independently of Argo CD and respond to Kubernetes manifest changes whether they come from GitOps or traditional CI/CD. Each cluster running Rollout workloads needs its own controller and CRD; a Rollout specification covers one application, not dependencies among applications. Shared-resource or worker-queue applications may be a poor fit, and infrastructure applications are not recommended. Argo Rollouts is free and open source. It runs on Linux, macOS, Windows or self-hosted environments.

Kargo is an open-source continuous promotion orchestration layer for moving applications through deployment stages in Kubernetes environments. It complements Argo CD, with customizable pipelines for advancing changes from one environment to another and a view of changes across environments. Kargo tracks updates from Git artifacts, container images, Helm charts, and other artifacts. Verification checks can run at stages before an artifact advances downstream. Documented promotion steps include Git operations, Helm, Kustomize, Argo CD, and HTTP requests to external services. Kargo Enterprise additionally lists Jira, ServiceNow, JFrog Evidence, GitHub Actions, and Slack or email notifications, and can automatically return a stage to its last stable artifact when verification fails. The open-source distribution uses the Apache 2.0 license. A basic installation requires a Kubernetes cluster, and the documentation says Kargo works best paired with Argo CD. Its default configuration is suitable only for trying it in a local cluster that is not internet-facing. The open-source distribution has no time- or severity-bound backport guarantee for security fixes. Akuity Pro, including one Kargo instance, is listed at $495 a month; Enterprise pricing is available by contacting sales.