MicroK8s vs Palette
MicroK8s
canonical.com
Palette
spectrocloud.comSide by side
| Figure | MicroK8s | Palette |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $2.08/mo | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 7 | 1 |
| Spec score · Container Orchestration Software | 8.3 (#6) | 8.0 (#9) |
| Spec score · Container Management Software | 8.3 (#7) | 8.1 (#11) |
| Founded | 2004 | 2019 |
| Headquarters | London, United Kingdom | San Jose, California, USA |
| Integrations | Built-in examples include Prometheus, Jaeger, Istio, LinkerD, Knative, DNS, registry and dashboard services enabled through addons. | The maker lists integrations including Argo CD, Kubeflow, Redis, Istio, Datadog, Splunk, Prometheus, Grafana, and Calico. |
| Support | Canonical advertises a 99.9% uptime SLA and up to 15 years of security maintenance through Ubuntu Pro coverage for MicroK8s and related infrastructure. | Technical support is offered in Standard, Pro, and Premium tiers, with response times and coverage varying by tier. |
Plans
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
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.