Gremlin vs PowerfulSeal
Gremlin
gremlin.comPowerfulSeal
powerfulseal.github.ioSide by side
| Figure | Gremlin | PowerfulSeal |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $3,750/mo | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 8 | 1 |
| Spec score · Chaos Engineering Platforms | 9.0 (#1) | 7.5 (#15) |
| License | Gremlin's commercial reliability platform is not offered as an open-source product; a G2 reviewer specifically notes that no open-source version is available. | PowerfulSeal is distributed under the Apache-2.0 license. |
| Purpose | Gremlin helps engineering teams find failure modes, fix them, and validate reliability before failures become outages. | PowerfulSeal injects failure into Kubernetes clusters to detect problems early. |
| Supported environments | Gremlin supports AWS, Azure, GCP, Linux, Windows, Kubernetes and on-premises deployments through Private Edition. | The tool works with Kubernetes, OpenStack, AWS, Azure, GCP and local machines. |
Plans
Gremlin
- Gremlin 30-day trialFree
- Gremlin Platform trialFree
- Gremlin Reliability Management Platform on AWS Marketplace$45,000 a year
- Fault injection suitePriced on request
- Fault injection suite (stand-alone)Priced on request
- Gremlin Foresight AIPriced on request
- Gremlin PlatformPriced on request
- Professional ServicesPriced on request
In their own words
Gremlin
Gremlin is a chaos engineering platform for engineering teams seeking failure modes and ways to validate reliability before failures become outages. It injects faults into services, hosts, containers, and serverless workloads so teams can examine system responses. Blast radius controls limit experiments, which can halt and roll back automatically if issues arise. Teams can sequence experiments into incident scenarios, schedule them, and use GameDay Manager to prepare, run, analyze, and store results. The platform also includes dependency discovery, standardized test suites and reliability scores, disaster recovery testing, detected risks, and organization-wide benchmarking. Documented integrations include Slack, Datadog, Dynatrace, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Grafana Cloud k6, Jira, and custom webhooks. Supported environments include public clouds, Linux, Windows, Kubernetes, and on-premises deployments through self-hosted Private Edition. Gremlin states that it is SOC 2 Type II certified and encrypts data in transit with TLS and at rest with AES-256. A 30-day trial is available without a credit card and does not auto-convert. Platform pricing is by custom quote per service; agents, targets, and test volume are sized during the pricing conversation.
PowerfulSeal
PowerfulSeal is a free, Apache-2.0 tool that injects failures into Kubernetes clusters to expose problems early. Users describe complete chaos experiments in YAML policies and choose autonomous, interactive, or label operation. It supports Kubernetes, OpenStack, AWS, Azure, GCP, and local machines. Autonomous mode can collect metrics through stdout, Prometheus, or Datadog, while its web interface can show logs and the policy. Policies can schedule one run for a CI pipeline or continuous execution. Label mode controls which pods may be killed, on which days and times, and with what probability. Local installation uses pip and requires Python 3.7 or newer; Docker images are published for each release. PowerfulSeal can run inside Kubernetes and load scenarios from Custom Resources. Cloud configurations cover Azure, AWS, OpenStack, and GCP. It needs SSH, cloud, and Kubernetes API access, but no external database or Spinnaker.