Chaos Mesh vs Reliably

Chaos Mesh is a free, open-source platform for running fault simulations in development, testing, and production environments. It runs on Kubernetes and manages experiments through Kubernetes CustomResourceDefinitions and the Kubernetes API. Fault simulations cover areas including Pods, networks, DNS, HTTP, I/O, time, stress, kernels, block devices, JVMs, physical machines, and AWS, Azure, and GCP. Schedule, Workflow, and StatusCheck resources support recurring experiments, serial or parallel workflows, and application health checks. Selectors and namespace controls help scope experiments to chosen targets. Chaos Dashboard offers a web interface and HTTP API for creating, managing, and observing experiments, with role-based access control enabled by default. Chaos Mesh is licensed under Apache License 2.0 and can be installed from its Helm repository using Helm 3. Compatibility varies by release: version 2.8 supports Kubernetes 1.30 through 1.35, while version 2.7 supports 1.26 through 1.28. Its privileged Chaos Daemon runs as a Kubernetes DaemonSet by default, though that permission can be disabled. Community support is available through CNCF Slack and GitHub Discussions.

Reliably helps teams examine operational risks and incidents as part of resilience engineering. Built around an open-source chaos engineering platform based on Chaos Toolkit, it offers an experiment builder with more than 300 actions, including attacks and probes. Teams can import JSON Chaos Toolkit experiments, reuse templates, schedule runs, and review scores, freshness indicators, timelines, and dashboards. Experiments can run as GitHub Actions, through Reliably-managed execution, with the CLI, in Docker, or as Kubernetes jobs or cron jobs. Listed targets include AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Spring. Pre-checks can prevent a run from starting; configured safeguards can interrupt one during execution. Environments store variables and encrypted secrets for the app, CLI, or GitHub workflows. The Free plan is free and limits teams to one member, 180 cloud execution minutes per month, a 10-minute cloud execution cap, and two weeks of data retention. Start costs £40 a month, billed monthly.