Greymatter vs Kuma
Greymatter
greymatter.ioKuma
kuma.ioSide by side
| Figure | Greymatter | Kuma |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 2 |
| Spec score · Service Mesh Platforms | 7.8 (#7) | 8.7 (#2) |
| Observability integrations | The analytics layer integrates with Grafana, Kibana, Prometheus, Splunk, Elasticsearch, SIEMs, and APMs. | The bundled trial observability stack uses Prometheus, Jaeger, Loki and Grafana, but the documentation says this setup is not production-ready. |
| Security | The platform automates workload identity provisioning, applies mTLS, and uses NIST-validated FIPS 140-3 cryptography, CMVP #5191. | Listed security features include multi-mesh, mutual TLS, and mesh traffic permissions. |
| What it does | Greymatter is a Zero Trust Networking platform for controlling, connecting, and securing applications, APIs, and AI workloads. | Kuma is an Envoy-based control plane for securing, observing, routing and connecting services across Kubernetes, virtual machines and bare-metal systems. |
Plans
In their own words
Greymatter
Greymatter is a Zero Trust Networking platform for controlling, connecting, and securing applications, APIs, and AI workloads. Its architecture has analytics, zero trust, service connectivity, orchestration, and enterprise-integration layers. Deployments can run across AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle Cloud, sovereign clouds, Kubernetes distributions, virtual machines, edge environments, and disconnected settings. Greymatter automates workload identity provisioning, applies mutual TLS, and uses NIST-validated FIPS 140-3 cryptography, CMVP #5191. GitOps Playbooks manage traffic policies across clusters with autonomous updates and zero-downtime changes. Deployment options include canary, blue-green, and progressive delivery with health checks, fallback logic, and rollback. Analytics integrates with Grafana, Kibana, Prometheus, Splunk, Elasticsearch, SIEMs, and APMs. Identity integrations support OAuth2, OIDC, and PKI, including Keycloak, Ping Federate, Okta, and Auth0. It offers hybrid deployment, enterprise support, and a 30-day free trial.
Kuma
Kuma is an open-source control plane for managing service meshes and microservices across Kubernetes, virtual machines, and bare-metal environments. It supports single-zone or multi-zone deployments across clouds, regions, and Kubernetes clusters, and one control plane can serve multiple meshes. Its traffic policies cover HTTP and TCP routing, health checks, circuit breaking, retries, timeouts, fault injection, and rate limiting. Security features include mutual TLS and mesh traffic permissions. Observability includes service maps, traces, access logs, metrics, and OpenTelemetry, with documented integrations for Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, and Datadog. Interfaces include Kubernetes CRDs, a GUI, a REST API, and a CLI; Envoy is bundled as the data-plane proxy. Kuma is self-hosted and available under a free open-source plan. Its installation guide provides Linux and macOS downloads, and documents macOS CLI installation through Homebrew. The Kubernetes quickstart describes the GUI as read-only. Production guidance covers secrets management, API access and authentication, proxy membership, certificates, and Kubernetes RBAC.