Crossplane vs Pulumi
Crossplane
crossplane.io
Pulumi
pulumi.comSide by side
| Figure | Crossplane | Pulumi |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $40/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 4 |
| Spec score · Cloud Management Software | 7.6 (#18) | 8.1 (#12) |
| Spec score · Infrastructure as Code Tools | 7.6 (#16) | 8.1 (#6) |
| Spec score · Cloud Orchestration Software | 7.6 (#15) | 8.2 (#6) |
| Spec score · GitOps Tools | 7.7 (#21) | 8.1 (#14) |
| Spec score · Platform Engineering Software | 7.7 (#19) | 8.3 (#10) |
| Spec score · Infrastructure Automation | 7.5 (#16) | 8.2 (#9) |
| Spec score · IT Configuration Management Software | 7.5 (#19) | 8.1 (#13) |
| Spec score · Orchestration / Provisioning Software | 7.6 (#20) | 8.2 (#10) |
| Purpose | Crossplane is a control plane framework for platform engineering that lets teams build control planes to manage cloud native software. | Pulumi helps engineers ship infrastructure faster with Infrastructure as Code in general-purpose languages. |
| Security | Crossplane is built on Kubernetes and uses Kubernetes RBAC; its website describes RBAC as a security feature used to control access. | Pulumi states that its platform is SOC 2 Type II certified. |
| Support | The commercial page lists Upbound as offering security, support, official providers, and a platform for managing infrastructure with Crossplane. | Every edition includes access to the support agent and ticket submission; Standard support is included with Enterprise contracts of at least one year. |
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.
Pulumi
Pulumi helps engineers define and manage infrastructure as code using general-purpose languages. Supported languages include TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Go,.NET, Java, YAML, and HCL, with providers such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Cloudflare, Datadog, and GitHub. Pulumi ESC centralizes secrets and configuration from major vaults and cloud providers and supports short-lived credentials through OIDC. Pulumi Neo can plan and execute infrastructure tasks, debug deployments, generate code, and provide cloud insights. Pulumi Deployments integrates with CI/CD services including Azure DevOps, Bitbucket, CircleCI, GitHub, GitLab, Google Cloud Build, and Jenkins. The CLI runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux and can use self-managed state backends such as S3, Azure Blob, GCS, or local storage. Listed capabilities include policy as code, drift detection, resource import, and self-hosted execution. The free plan includes one user and up to 500 workflow minutes. Essentials costs $40 a month, Pro $400 a month, and Enterprise $2,000 a month. Pulumi states that its platform is SOC 2 Type II certified.