Exoscale Scalable Kubernetes Service vs Kubermatic Kubernetes Platform

Exoscale Scalable Kubernetes Service (SKS) is a managed Kubernetes service for deploying, scaling and hosting containerized applications in Europe. It is available through web and APIs, with a free Starter Cluster and a Pro Cluster billed hourly; the Pro price is not shown as a numeric amount. Exoscale operates the control plane and provides upgrades, and says fully managed clusters can start in less than one minute. Starter includes a managed control plane, CLI, API, Terraform integration and automatic control-plane patch upgrades. Pro adds a highly available control plane, etcd backups, a 99.95% SLA and Karpenter autoscaling. Network Load Balancers handle ingress, while the CSI driver attaches block or object storage for stateful workloads. Authentication, network policies, role-based access and Kubernetes Audit provide control and visibility. Every release passes CNCF conformance tests. SKS is vanilla Kubernetes, so monitoring, GitOps and security tools are not installed by default. Customers receive ticket support, with paid plans offering faster responses and additional coverage.

Kubermatic Kubernetes Platform (KKP) automates Kubernetes cluster deployment, scaling, and lifecycle management across hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, on-premises, and edge environments. Its customer-managed control plane can manage thousands of clusters across more than 20 public cloud providers and on-premises environments. Development teams can provision and deploy environments through a self-service portal. KKP supports cluster upgrades and rollbacks, plus an add-on controller for software, configuration, and policy. KubeVirt support brings virtual machines and containerized workloads into one interface. Security controls include multi-tenancy, role-based access, cluster authentication and authorization, and policy blueprints and presets. Prometheus, Grafana, and Loki have native support; teams can also connect CI/CD systems, Terraform providers, or Ansible playbooks. KKP is self-hosted and installed with the Kubermatic Installer, and requires a Kubernetes master cluster. Community Edition costs nothing under Apache License 2.0. Enterprise Edition has no listed price and bills worker-node vCPU and memory on a consumption basis; master cluster nodes are excluded.