KubeAdapt vs OpenCost

KubeAdapt monitors Kubernetes costs across clusters, namespaces, workloads, pods and teams, and provides cost forecasting, budget alerts and rightsizing recommendations. It works with AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, OpenShift and bare-metal Kubernetes. The agent is installed with one Helm chart; the site estimates installation takes about five minutes. Rightsizing guidance gives per-container CPU and memory recommendations as YAML for GitOps workflows, with OOM-aware, bursty-CPU and replica-aware guardrails. KubeAdapt does not apply recommended changes. Its agent has read-only Kubernetes permissions, limited to list and watch, and the company says it does not collect Secrets, ConfigMaps, environment variables, container logs or network traffic. Aggregated payloads are signed in-cluster and sent using TLS 1.3 with mutual TLS. Alerts for budgets, cost spikes and new workloads can go to Slack, email or webhooks. A read-only REST API exposes cost, capacity and resource data. The free plan covers the first 100 vCPU across an account. Paid rates range from $0.60 a month to $1.99 a month per billable vCPU, depending on tier; qualifying startups have a $0.60 a month rate.

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.