KubeSphere vs Omni
KubeSphere
kubesphere.io
Omni
siderolabs.comSide by side
| Figure | KubeSphere | Omni |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $65/mo | $10/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 8 | 5 |
| Spec score · Kubernetes Management Platforms | 8.9 (#1) | 8.9 (#2) |
| API | KubeSphere's architecture includes a REST API backend with an API server and controller manager. | Omni exposes a gRPC API for cluster management, machine state and authentication. |
| Company headquarters | QingCloud's KubeSphere about page lists Beijing, China as headquarters, while LinkedIn lists KubeSphere headquarters as Hong Kong. | LinkedIn lists headquarters in Santa Barbara, California. |
| Company size | LinkedIn lists KubeSphere as a privately held IT-services company with 51–200 employees. | LinkedIn lists the company size as 11–50 employees. |
| Deployment | The platform supports deployment on any infrastructure environment, online or offline installation, one-click upgrades and cluster scaling. | Omni is available as SaaS or self-hosted, including disconnected and air-gapped environments. |
| Documentation depth | The documentation includes quick starts, installation and upgrade procedures, air-gapped deployment, high availability, extensions, role management, DevOps pipelines, App Store, service mesh, federation, observability, FAQs, API reference, and release notes. | The documentation covers installation, self-hosting, infrastructure providers, cluster templates, Terraform, security, authentication, backups, audit logs, monitoring and troubleshooting. |
| Extensibility | KubeSphere 4.x decouples DevOps, service mesh, observability, App Store, edge, networking, and storage functions into independently maintained extensions. | Custom infrastructure providers can be written, and the documentation links provider code and build guidance. |
| Headquarters | Beijing, China | Goleta, California, United States |
| License | KubeSphere 4.x and later use Apache License 2.0 with extra conditions requiring producer permission or a commercial licence for third-party commercial offerings, SaaS, or removing the product identity. | Omni is distributed under the Business Source License; production use requires a commercial license while non-production use does not. |
| Purpose | KubeSphere is a Kubernetes-based distributed operating system for cloud-native application management with a plug-and-play architecture for third-party applications. | Omni manages provisioning, upgrades, configuration, and backups for Talos clusters across bare metal, edge, or cloud. |
| Rating on G2 | 4.3 out of 5 from 12 reviews. | Sidero Omni has 0 out of 5 stars from 0 reviews on the Sidero Labs G2 profile. |
| Self-hosting | KubeSphere can be installed on public cloud, private cloud, bare metal, or existing Kubernetes clusters, including air-gapped environments. | Omni can run as hosted SaaS, a single-VM Docker Compose deployment, on Kubernetes, with external etcd or in a highly available arrangement. |
| Support | KubeSphere Enterprise offers one-stop professional technical support services. | The official documentation directs users to a community Slack channel, status page, GitHub release notes and security-advisory email. |
| What it does | KubeSphere is a Kubernetes-based distributed operating system and multi-tenant container platform for managing cloud-native applications. | Omni is a Kubernetes management platform for creating, operating and upgrading Talos Linux clusters across cloud, on-premises and edge environments. |
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
Omni
- Omni · HobbyFree
- Omni · Hobby$10 a month
- Omni · Startup$25 a month
- Omni · EdgePriced on request
- Omni · EnterprisePrice not published
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.
Omni
Omni is a fleet management service for provisioning, configuring, upgrading, and backing up Talos clusters across bare metal, edge, and cloud. Platform teams can use it as SaaS or self-host it, including in disconnected and air-gapped environments. It supports infrastructure such as KubeVirt, libvirt, vSphere, and Proxmox, as well as providers built by the team. Declarative templates keep clusters aligned with specified configurations. Fleet-wide Talos and Kubernetes upgrades include health checks, atomic updates per node, and automatic rollback on failure. Omni connects to nodes through WireGuard; KubeSpan can extend encryption across clusters and sites. Workload Proxy routes HTTP service traffic to a cluster through that tunnel using an identity-provider-gated URL. SAML or OIDC authentication, per-cluster roles, and change auditing are available through the UI or API. Hobby costs $10 per month for up to 10 nodes and 2 users; Startup costs $25 per node per month for up to 50 nodes and unlimited clusters. A 14-day trial requires no credit card.