groundcover vs Kubeshark
groundcover
groundcover.comKubeshark
kubeshark.comSide by side
| Figure | groundcover | Kubeshark |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $30/mo | $0.40/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 6 |
| Spec score · eBPF Observability Tools | 8.4 (#6) | 9.0 (#2) |
| Deployment | Bring Your Own Cloud deploys the backend in the customer’s cloud while groundcover manages it, and the UI is hosted by groundcover. | Kubeshark can be deployed with Helm in Kubernetes and supports self-hosted air-gapped operation on the Enterprise tier. |
| Support | Standard support offers business-hours availability with stated response targets from under 8 hours for critical issues to under 72 hours for low-priority issues. | The vendor says support is normally delivered through a dedicated Slack channel or by email at [email protected]. |
Plans
Kubeshark
- CommunityFree
- Enterprise$0.40 a month
- Micro$30 a month
- Pro$30 a month
- Dynamic$190 a month
- Small$360 a month
In their own words
groundcover
groundcover is a cloud-native observability platform for monitoring production environments. Its eBPF sensor collects metrics, logs, and traces without code changes or manual instrumentation, processes data at the edge, and the product states that ingestion happens in real time without sampling. Bring Your Own Cloud deployment puts the backend in the customer’s cloud while groundcover manages it and hosts the UI. Fully On-Prem deployment places both backend and UI on customer premises, including cloud or physical servers. Integrations include Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, AWS CloudWatch, Google Cloud Monitoring, Azure, MongoDB Atlas, Redis Cloud, Datadog, and GitHub. Agent Mode can investigate telemetry and create dashboards, monitors, gcQL queries, and OTTL pipelines. The Free plan is free forever and includes 12-hour data retention and Slack Community support; paid plans start at $30 per host per month. Billing is based on average monthly monitored Kubernetes nodes or Linux hosts, not telemetry volume. The platform is available on Linux, self-hosted, and web.
Kubeshark
Kubeshark indexes Kubernetes cluster network traffic at the kernel level using eBPF and makes it searchable with Kubernetes, API, and network context. It can decrypt TLS and service-mesh mTLS traffic without keys, certificates, sidecars, or application changes. Users can capture retrospective traffic snapshots, filter them by time, nodes, workloads, and IPs, then export PCAP files. Its KFL query language combines Kubernetes identity, API context, and network attributes. Kubeshark also provides an identity-aware service map and performance indicators for pods, services, nodes, and namespaces. It supports more than 23 protocols, including HTTP, Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL, gRPC, and DNS. Cluster network data can be exposed through MCP to AI assistants such as Claude Code, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot. Deployment uses Helm in Kubernetes, and self-hosted air-gapped operation is listed for Enterprise. The free Community plan supports up to 3 nodes or 60 pods and requires internet connectivity. Paid plans start at $30/mo.