Clusternet vs openCenter
Clusternet
clusternet.ioopenCenter
opencenter.cloudSide by side
| Figure | Clusternet | openCenter |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 4 |
| Spec score · Kubernetes Management Platforms | 8.8 (#4) | 7.2 (#21) |
| Purpose | Clusternet is an open-source add-on for managing Kubernetes clusters across public, private, hybrid, and edge environments. | openCenter provides upstream Kubernetes with GitOps automation, security hardening, observability, backup, and lifecycle management. |
| Security controls | Clusternet supports access to managed clusters with RBAC, and its AppPusher feature gate can be disabled on an agent when there are child-cluster security concerns. | The features page lists 17 Kyverno ClusterPolicies, Pod Security Admission, NetworkPolicies, and Keycloak OIDC group-based RBAC. |
| Support | The contribution guide says users can ask for help through the project mailing list, CNCF Slack channel, Google Group, or a GitHub issue. | Community support is self-service with no guaranteed response time; Standard, Premium, and Mission Critical list initial response targets of 4 hours, 1 hour, and 15 minutes for covered issues. |
Plans
openCenter
- CommunityFree
- EssentialsPriced on request
- EnterprisePriced on request
- RegulatedPriced on request
In their own words
Clusternet
Clusternet is a free, open-source add-on for managing Kubernetes clusters across public and private cloud, hybrid, on-premises, and edge environments. It lets operators manage member clusters from a parent cluster and access them as though they were local. It deploys Kubernetes resources, custom resource definitions, and Helm charts, with configuration tailored to individual clusters. Application scheduling can replicate workloads or distribute them by cluster weight or available capacity. Clusternet supports clusters from AWS, Google Cloud, Tencent Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud, along with on-premises systems, k3s, and edge clusters. It can discover and register clusters created by Cluster API and configure network tunnels for clusters in VPC networks, at the edge, or behind a firewall. Dynamic RBAC rules control access to managed clusters, and Submariner integration can connect workloads across clusters. Installation options include Helm and manual setup. A kubectl plugin is available through Krew or as a binary. Linux builds are listed for several architectures. Clusternet is a CNCF Sandbox project.
openCenter
openCenter provides upstream Kubernetes with GitOps automation, security hardening, observability, backup and lifecycle management. It runs on OpenStack, VMware vSphere, AWS, bare metal and air-gapped sites. Its CLI uses declarative YAML to define infrastructure, Kubernetes, services and secrets, applying schema validation and business-rule checks before generating infrastructure-as-code, Kubespray inventory and FluxCD manifests with Kustomize overlays. Listed pre-hardened services include cert-manager, Kyverno, Keycloak, Harbor, Velero, MetalLB, Longhorn, Calico, PostgreSQL Operator and OpenStack CSI. Observability components include Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager, Loki, Tempo and OpenTelemetry. Security controls include Kyverno ClusterPolicies, Pod Security Admission, NetworkPolicies and group-based Keycloak OIDC access controls. Secrets can use SOPS Age encryption in Git, Kubernetes encryption at rest and key rotation. Air-gap packaging uses a Zarf artifact for images, charts and binaries, with signing and SBOM generation. Community is free; paid plans start at $125/mo. Rackspace Technology develops and maintains openCenter.