Gardener vs Karmada
Gardener
gardener.cloud
Karmada
karmada.ioSide by side
| Figure | Gardener | Karmada |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 0 | 1 |
| Spec score · Kubernetes Management Platforms | 7.6 (#16) | 7.9 (#10) |
| Purpose | Gardener is a managed Kubernetes service framework for delivering fully managed clusters at scale through your own Gardener installation. | Karmada manages cloud-native applications across multiple Kubernetes clusters and clouds without requiring application changes. |
| Security | Gardener mandates the DISA Security Technical Implementation Guide for Kubernetes and provides adopters a compliance checker for demonstrating DISA Kubernetes STIG compliance. | Karmada introduced Cosign image verification starting with the v1.7.0 release, and its security guide documents TLS settings for components. |
Plans
In their own words
Karmada
Karmada manages cloud-native applications across multiple Kubernetes clusters and clouds without requiring changes to the applications. It supports public and private cloud, on-premises, edge, and self-built environments that meet Kubernetes specifications. Cluster connections can use Push mode through a Kubernetes API server or Pull mode through an in-cluster agent. Scheduling policies cover cluster affinity, taints and tolerations, topology spread, and replicated or divided placement. OverridePolicy allows per-cluster changes to images, arguments, commands, and plain-text configuration. Karmada can move replicas after a cluster failure, including migration that avoids service replicas dropping to zero. Through karmada-apiserver, teams can create, update, delete, and query resources across member clusters. Its components export Prometheus metrics; integrations described include Submariner networking and ErieCanal service governance. Installation options include CLI tools, Helm, an operator, binaries, or source. The CLI initialization requires escalated privileges to store shared configuration under /etc/karmada by default. Karmada is open source and free, with customer-managed control plane; it manages clusters but does not provision them.