Crossplane vs Cycle
Crossplane
crossplane.io
Cycle
cycle.ioSide by side
| Figure | Crossplane | Cycle |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $500/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 3 |
| Spec score · Multi-Cloud Management Software | 7.7 (#13) | 8.2 (#6) |
| Spec score · Orchestration / Provisioning Software | 7.6 (#20) | 8.1 (#11) |
| Integrations | The community extension list includes providers for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, GitHub, GitLab, Argo CD, and other services. | Listed integrations include AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Cherry Servers, Vultr, Backblaze B2, Let's Encrypt, Depot, and GitHub Actions. |
| Security | Crossplane is built on Kubernetes and uses Kubernetes RBAC; its website describes RBAC as a security feature used to control access. | Cycle says sensitive data is encrypted at rest and credentials are injected at runtime, and its site states a SOC 2 Type 1 report is available. |
| Support | The commercial page lists Upbound as offering security, support, official providers, and a platform for managing infrastructure with Crossplane. | Support is included on every plan, and Cycle describes direct access to its engineering team. |
Plans
In their own words
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.