Kueue vs Volcano
Kueue
kueue.sigs.k8s.io
Volcano
volcano.shSide by side
| Figure | Kueue | Volcano |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 0 |
| Spec score · GPU Cluster Management Software | 8.0 (#7) | 6.5 (#19) |
| Community support | The project directs users to Kubernetes Slack, GitHub for bugs and contributions, and a mailing list for announcements. | The project directs users to the CNCF #volcano Slack channel, a mailing list, and GitHub issues and repositories. |
| Monitoring | Kueue exposes Prometheus metrics for system health and ClusterQueue and LocalQueue status, with Grafana query guidance in its docs. | The introduction describes logging, monitoring metrics, and a dashboard for graphical operations. |
| Multi-cluster | MultiKueue can search for capacity and dispatch workloads across multiple clusters. | The Volcano Global sub-project supports cross-cluster task distribution, resource management, and priority control. |
| Purpose | Kueue manages quotas and job resource consumption in Kubernetes, deciding when jobs wait, start, or are preempted. | Volcano is a cloud native system for high-performance workloads and a container batch scheduling project. |
| What it does | Kueue manages quotas and job resource consumption, deciding when jobs wait, start, or are preempted. | Volcano is a cloud-native system for scheduling high-performance workloads on Kubernetes. |
Plans
In their own words
Kueue
Kueue is a free Kubernetes project that manages quotas and job resource consumption, deciding when workloads wait, start, or are preempted. It installs on a standard Kubernetes cluster without replacing existing components. Its scheduling tools include priority-based queues, fair sharing, quota borrowing between teams, resource flavor fungibility, preemption policies, and all-or-nothing scheduling. Built-in integrations cover Kubernetes Jobs and Pods, Kubeflow training jobs, Ray jobs and clusters, JobSet, AppWrapper, Deployments, StatefulSets, and LeaderWorkerSet. MultiKueue can find capacity and dispatch workloads across clusters, while topology-aware scheduling accounts for data center layout to improve communication throughput between pods. Kueue provides Prometheus metrics and an endpoint for viewing pending workloads. Installation instructions cover kubectl, Helm, and source builds. The guide recommends Kubernetes 1.34 or newer and officially supports and tests only those versions. Kueue also provides administrator and user ClusterRoles, with resource-specific roles that can be composed into custom roles. Its webhook server includes internal certificate management, and the installation guide links to cert-manager instructions.