kOps vs Portainer
kOps
kops.sigs.k8s.io
Portainer
portainer.ioSide by side
| Figure | kOps | Portainer |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $12.92/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 7 |
| Spec score · Kubernetes Management Platforms | 7.8 (#12) | 8.7 (#5) |
| Purpose | kOps creates, destroys, upgrades, and maintains production grade, highly available Kubernetes clusters and provisions the required cloud infrastructure. | Portainer is a centralized multi-cluster management platform for managing Kubernetes clusters and container environments. |
| Support | kOps maintainers hold public office hours for developers and users, and the project points users to Kubernetes Slack channels for help. | The Scale plan includes 9x5 next business day support, while Enterprise offers prioritized 9x5 support with a 24/7 option. |
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
kOps
kOps is a free, open-source tool for creating, upgrading, maintaining, and destroying production-grade, highly available Kubernetes clusters. It also provisions the cloud infrastructure those clusters require, with the control plane managed by the customer. AWS and Google Cloud are officially supported; DigitalOcean, Hetzner, and OpenStack are in beta, while Azure is in alpha.
Configuration uses a YAML manifest-based API with templating and dry-run modes. State synchronization supports dry runs and automatic idempotency, and kOps can generate Terraform. It offers popular CNI networking providers out of the box and supports ARM64 architectures. kOps runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows; kubectl is required to install and use it. SSH access to masters and nodes is allowed from any address by default, although no public key is installed by default. SSH sources can be restricted in cluster configuration or with a command option. The security documentation says Pods can access the underlying instance IAM role and describes its permission scope as broad. The project points users to public office hours and Kubernetes Slack channels for support.