Kamaji vs Mirantis Kubernetes Engine

Kamaji runs Kubernetes control planes as pods inside a management cluster, giving platform teams a way to operate multiple tenant clusters. Each tenant control plane is independent and separated from others. It uses upstream Kubernetes components and kubeadm, with CNCF-conformant tenant clusters. Worker nodes may run on bare metal, virtual machines, or cloud instances across cloud, data-center, edge, and bare-metal environments. Kamaji integrates with Cluster API for infrastructure provisioning and lifecycle management, and supports cluster provisioning, multi-cluster management, policy enforcement, and upgrade management. Datastores include etcd and MySQL- or PostgreSQL-compatible databases through kine; NATS support is experimental. Konnectivity, enabled by default, creates secure tunnels to worker nodes. Prometheus-format metrics cover management and tenant planes. Metrics endpoints use unauthenticated plaintext by default, with documented HTTPS and bearer-token options. Kamaji is free under Apache 2.0; Clastix also sells enterprise support.

Mirantis Kubernetes Engine (MKE 4) is a self-hosted enterprise Kubernetes platform built on the open-source k0s distribution. It supports deployment across public and private clouds, multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments, and bare-metal infrastructure. Teams manage cluster lifecycle with the mkectl command-line tool and a declarative mke4.yaml configuration file; standardized APIs and GitOps-based lifecycle management are also listed. A cluster combines k0s, a container network interface, the MKE control plane, system services, and user services. Calico is installed by default, with other network interface options supported. The web dashboard manages Kubernetes resources in an MKE-managed cluster. Backup and restore are supported, and the CLI upgrade process includes automated backups. Authentication through Dex supports OIDC, SAML, and LDAP, but not MFA. MKE 4 requires x86_64 and Linux manager/control-plane nodes; supported operating systems include specified Ubuntu, RHEL, and Rocky Linux versions, plus Windows Server worker nodes. A valid license is required, and a trial license is available on request. Mirantis offers 24/7 proactive support or managed services.