OpenCost vs Skuber+

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.

Skuber+ is a web-based SaaS platform for optimizing Kubernetes clusters through an agent installed on a customer’s cluster. It identifies over-provisioned resources, adjusts workload sizing, and uses bin-packing and autoscaling to reduce resource waste. Its dashboard reports costs by cluster, namespace, and workload, with 30-day trends and projected savings. Policies can adapt resources to traffic and development environments, including an Auto Balance policy for staging. The AI assistant analyzes CPU and memory use, suggests VPA and autoscaling settings, and answers Kubernetes questions. A single console shows multiple clusters, their status, resource use, and costs; users can revert to the pre-optimization state if performance falls short. AWS EKS and OCI OKE are supported, while Azure AKS and GCP GKE are marked coming soon. The agent supports Kubernetes version 1.33.1 or below and requires at least 600m CPU and 700 MiB memory. The Trial plan is free for 30 days and one cluster; Professional is $5 per vCPU, with no billing period specified.