Canonical OpenStack vs Crossplane
Canonical OpenStack
canonical.com
Crossplane
crossplane.ioSide by side
| Figure | Canonical OpenStack | Crossplane |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 1 |
| Spec score · Cloud Management Software | 9.4 (#1) | 7.6 (#18) |
| CLI | The OpenStack client command line interface supports bulk operations and administrative automation. | The Crossplane CLI is a standalone binary; most CLI commands work without access to a Crossplane pod, though some require a Docker-compatible container runtime. |
| Integrations | The product includes an expandable Kubernetes layer, an integrated observability stack, Landscape system management and MAAS bare metal automation. | The community extension list includes providers for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, GitHub, GitLab, Argo CD, and other services. |
| Purpose | Canonical OpenStack lets organizations host applications in their own data center with a public cloud-like experience. | Crossplane is a control plane framework for platform engineering that lets teams build control planes to manage cloud native software. |
| Support | Commercial support includes 24/7 phone and ticket coverage, with a stated one-hour response time for Severity 1 issues. | The commercial page lists Upbound as offering security, support, official providers, and a platform for managing infrastructure with Crossplane. |
Plans
Canonical OpenStack
- Canonical OpenStackFree
- Private Cloud Build$75,000, paid once
- Private Cloud Build PlusPrice not published
In their own words
Canonical OpenStack
Canonical OpenStack lets organizations run applications in their own data centers while giving teams self-service access to computing resources on demand. It is based on upstream OpenStack code and described by Canonical as 100% open source. Automation uses MAAS and Juju, spanning bare-metal provisioning through applications. Its architecture uses Kubernetes, OCI images, and snaps; Canonical says this decouples OpenStack from the underlying Ubuntu operating system. Canonical Ceph is included by default and supports up to 128 TB of data per node. The stack also includes an expandable Kubernetes layer, observability, Landscape system management, and MAAS bare-metal automation. Listed workloads include HPC and AI/ML, telco NFVI, sovereign clouds, local or regional public clouds, and edge infrastructure. Organizations can deploy the cloud themselves or have Canonical design, build, test, and validate it. The plan costs nothing, with no license or subscription charge; commercial support and consulting are separate. Support includes 24/7 phone and ticket coverage, with a stated one-hour response for Severity 1 issues. On-demand Kubernetes is currently in beta.
Crossplane
Crossplane is a free, open-source CNCF framework for building control planes that manage cloud-native software. Its Composition feature lets teams define custom APIs with pipelines of functions instead of maintaining controllers. Managed resources are Kubernetes custom resources that can represent external services such as AWS RDS instances. Community providers cover AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, GitHub, GitLab and Argo CD, among others. A package manager installs managed resources and composition functions and can distribute configurations across control planes. Crossplane installs into an existing Kubernetes cluster with a Helm chart; the guide requires an actively supported Kubernetes version and Helm v3.2.0 or later. Operations support one-time, scheduled and resource-change-triggered pipelines, but are marked alpha in Crossplane v2. The framework uses Kubernetes RBAC. Its default crossplane-admin ClusterRole has full access to secrets and namespaces and can bind roles to other entities. The project is Apache 2.0 licensed and identifies as vendor neutral.