Krossboard vs OpenCost

Krossboard tracks Kubernetes cluster usage to help teams allocate costs and plan capacity. It can analyze multiple clusters configured through one or more KUBECONFIG files, with analytics for namespaces, nodes, and clusters. Views can be consolidated across minutes, hours, days, and months, and backing analytics data can be exported as CSV. Cost forecasting is available, with allocation at namespace granularity. The Kubernetes Operator deploys and manages Krossboard instances as pods; each deployed instance provides a UI and REST API. Krossboard is offered for web, API, and self-hosted use. Its free plan costs nothing and includes unlimited clusters, core analytics, and CSV export. It does not include discovery of managed AKS, EKS, or GKE clusters or support. Enterprise plans add managed-cluster discovery; Enterprise includes one year of access to maintained versions for bug and security fixes, while Enterprise Advanced offers up to three years and specific onboarding support. The maker is 2Alchemists SAS, based in Toulouse, France.

OpenCost is a vendor-neutral open source project for measuring and allocating Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure costs. It breaks down costs in real time to Kubernetes concepts and containers for showback, chargeback, and reporting. Allocation covers CPU, GPU, memory, load balancers, and persistent volumes, and it can monitor cloud resources outside Kubernetes. The included web UI visualizes Kubernetes allocations and related cloud costs. Its API provides real-time and historical Kubernetes cost reports using on-demand list prices and cloud provider cost and usage reports. Listed cloud providers include Alibaba, AWS, GCP, Microsoft Azure, Open Telekom Cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, OVHcloud, Scaleway, and STACKIT. Metrics and visualization integrations include Prometheus, Cortex, Thanos, Victoria Metrics, Grafana, and Grafana Cloud. OpenCost requires a Kubernetes cluster and Prometheus; Helm is recommended for full functionality. Cloud costs appear when provider billing data becomes available, usually several hours to 24 hours later, and on-demand pricing is not reconciled against billed actual costs. Cloud costs are not supported for on-premises clusters. OpenCost is free under Apache 2.0.