KubeSphere vs MicroK8s
KubeSphere
kubesphere.ioMicroK8s
canonical.comSide by side
| Figure | KubeSphere | MicroK8s |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $65/mo | $2.08/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 8 | 7 |
| Spec score · Container Orchestration Software | 8.9 (#1) | 8.3 (#6) |
| Spec score · Container Management Software | 9.0 (#1) | 8.3 (#7) |
| Headquarters | Beijing, China | London, United Kingdom |
| Integrations | Official materials identify integrations or ecosystem collaboration with Jenkins, Grafana, Loki, Higress, KubeKey, OpenELB, KubeEye, Fluent Operator, and OpenFunction. | Built-in examples include Prometheus, Jaeger, Istio, LinkerD, Knative, DNS, registry and dashboard services enabled through addons. |
| Minimum resources | The Enterprise page says its lightweight architecture can run with 2 CPU cores and 4 GB of memory. | The getting-started documentation says MicroK8s can run with as little as 540MB memory, while recommending at least 4GB memory and 20GB disk for workloads. |
| Support | KubeSphere Enterprise offers one-stop professional technical support services. | Canonical advertises a 99.9% uptime SLA and up to 15 years of security maintenance through Ubuntu Pro coverage for MicroK8s and related infrastructure. |
Plans
KubeSphere
- KubeSphere Backup FreeFree
- KubeSphere Community EditionFree
- KubeSphere Community EditionFree
- KubeSphere Backup Basic$65 a month
- KubeSphere Backup Standard$200 a month
- KubeSphere Backup Enterprise$340 a month
- KubeSphere Backup ExclusivePriced on request
- KubeSphere EnterprisePriced on request
MicroK8s
- MicroK8sFree
- Ubuntu Pro PersonalFree
- Ubuntu Pro Workstation$25 a year
- Ubuntu Pro with 24/7 Enterprise support — Workstation$300 a year
- Ubuntu Pro Server with unlimited VMs$500 a year
- Ubuntu Pro with 24/7 Enterprise support — Server$1,775 a year
- Ubuntu Pro with 24/7 Enterprise support — Server full support$3,400 a year
In their own words
KubeSphere
KubeSphere is a Kubernetes-based platform for managing cloud-native applications, with a plug-in architecture for third-party applications and open-source tools. Its Community Edition is an open-source container platform and costs nothing, with free-forever availability for a self-managed Kubernetes platform. The platform supports multi-tenancy and multi-cluster management, with monitoring, event and audit-log queries, tenant log collection, alerting and notifications. Delivery features include Jenkins-based CI/CD and automated Source-to-Image and Binary-to-Image workflows. KubeSphere supports online or offline installation, one-click upgrades and cluster scaling across infrastructure environments. Its REST API backend includes an API server and controller manager. Enterprise adds image security hardening, two-factor authentication, vulnerability fixes and permission controls at platform, cluster and application levels. Enterprise is available by on-demand subscription or private deployment, with extensions available by subscription; pricing is available from sales. Its lightweight architecture can run with 2 CPU cores and 4 GB of memory.
MicroK8s
MicroK8s is a lightweight Kubernetes distribution that can run on a single node or scale to a high-availability production cluster. It is positioned for developer workstations, production, public clouds, edge deployments, IoT and embedded software-vendor platforms. The self-hosted distribution supports Linux, macOS and Windows, and packages upstream Kubernetes services in a minimal CNCF-certified distribution. Three or more nodes enable Dqlite-backed high availability and automatic recovery after a node failure. Strict confinement restricts workloads to explicitly granted files, system resources and hardware. Cluster API can automate cluster creation and lifecycle management through YAML manifests, including rolling HA upgrades. GPU workloads can use the NVIDIA GPU Operator, including NVIDIA Multi-Instance GPU. Official and community addons provide services such as DNS, certificate management, Prometheus, Istio and dashboards. Security updates apply automatically by default, with rollback on failure, and Kubernetes upgrades can be done with one command. MicroK8s has no license fees. Ubuntu Pro subscriptions are also listed, including $25 a year for a workstation subscription and $500 a year for a server subscription with unlimited VMs.