dstack vs GPUStack

dstack is an open-source orchestration layer for AI workloads across GPU clouds, Kubernetes, virtual machines, and bare-metal clusters. YAML configurations define fleets, development environments, tasks, services, presets, and volumes, while dstack handles provisioning and job scheduling, including auto-scaling, port forwarding, and ingress. Supported accelerators include NVIDIA, AMD, TPU, and Tenstorrent. Documented backends include AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, GPU cloud providers, remote SSH hosts, and experimental Slurm. Tasks can use frameworks such as accelerate, torchrun, Ray, and Spark. Users manage resources through the CLI or HTTP API, and the server can run on a laptop or another environment that can access the clusters in use. Services can publish inference endpoints through gateways with HTTPS, custom domains, auto-scaling, and rate limits. The self-hosted open-source stack is free. Server data and project secrets are stored in plaintext by default unless administrators configure AES-256-GCM encryption. TPU support is limited to single-host instances with up to eight cores. GPU Marketplace usage is prepaid, with prices that vary by GPU and provider and appear in the console before provisioning.

GPUStack is an open-source GPU cluster manager for deploying, governing, and scaling AI models across on-premise, cloud, or hybrid infrastructure. It provides OpenAI-compatible and Anthropic-compatible inference endpoints, with support for engines such as vLLM, SGLang, llama.cpp, TensorRT-LLM, and MindIE. Users can browse models from Hugging Face and ModelScope or supply local files, with automated compatibility checks. GPUStack can provision GPU instances with lifecycle controls, partitioning, SSH key injection, Jupyter access, and persistent S3 or NFS storage. Deployment options include on-premise, Kubernetes, and multi-cloud, including air-gapped deployments. The maker lists support for accelerators from NVIDIA, AMD, Ascend, T-head, Hygon, MetaX, Moore Threads, Cambricon, and Iluvatar. Security controls include RBAC, multi-tenancy, SSO, scoped API keys, IP allowlisting, token quotas, and usage analytics. GPUStack Community Edition is free. Worker nodes support Linux only; Windows users are directed to consider WSL2, and macOS worker nodes are not supported.