Crossplane vs Juju
Crossplane
crossplane.ioJuju
canonical.comSide by side
| Figure | Crossplane | Juju |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Cloud Management Software | 7.6 (#18) | 8.6 (#6) |
| Spec score · IT Configuration Management Software | 7.5 (#19) | 8.6 (#8) |
| Spec score · Orchestration / Provisioning Software | 7.6 (#20) | 8.6 (#6) |
| Integrations | The community extension list includes providers for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, GitHub, GitLab, Argo CD, and other services. | Featured charms include PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Kafka, Kubeflow, Apache Spark, Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Vault, Traefik, and Landscape. |
| Purpose | Crossplane is a control plane framework for platform engineering that lets teams build control planes to manage cloud native software. | Juju is an open source orchestration engine for deploying, integrating, and managing application lifecycles at any scale using charms. |
| Security | Crossplane is built on Kubernetes and uses Kubernetes RBAC; its website describes RBAC as a security feature used to control access. | Canonical says JAAS can protect deployments by providing a smaller attack area. |
| Support | The commercial page lists Upbound as offering security, support, official providers, and a platform for managing infrastructure with Crossplane. | Juju's page links to a Matrix chat, a Discourse forum, and a form to talk to a Canonical expert. |
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.
Juju
Juju is Canonical’s open source orchestration engine for deploying, connecting and managing application lifecycles with charms. A charm packages reusable business logic to automate parts of an application’s life. Juju treats application integrations as part of lifecycle management and can manage software across public clouds, Kubernetes, virtual machines and bare metal. It can apply networking and configuration changes between applications even when they run on different clouds. Charmhub is a curated marketplace with charms for tools such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Kafka, Kubeflow, Apache Spark, Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Vault, Traefik and Landscape. For enterprise use, JAAS provides a central control plane that can manage hundreds of Juju controllers. It adds fine-grained access controls, auditing and support for external identity providers through OIDC and single sign-on in the CLI and web dashboard. JAAS also has a graphical administration and monitoring dashboard. Juju is free and open source; listed platforms include Linux, macOS, Windows, API and self-hosted environments.