Karmada vs Portainer
Karmada
karmada.io
Portainer
portainer.ioSide by side
| Figure | Karmada | Portainer |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $12.92/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 7 |
| Spec score · Kubernetes Management Platforms | 7.9 (#10) | 8.7 (#5) |
| Spec score · Container Management Software | 7.9 (#13) | 8.8 (#4) |
| Integrations | The documentation describes cross-cluster networking with Submariner and service governance integration with ErieCanal. | The product pages identify Talos Omni integration for provisioning Kubernetes clusters and support deployment from Helm charts. |
| Purpose | Karmada manages cloud-native applications across multiple Kubernetes clusters and clouds without requiring application changes. | Portainer is a centralized multi-cluster management platform for managing Kubernetes clusters and container environments. |
Plans
Portainer
- Business Edition free tierFree
- Home & Student$155 a year
- Starter$1,045 a year
- Starter$1,045 a year
- Scale$2,095 a year
- Scale$2,095 a year
- EnterprisePriced on request
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.