| Price from | — | $12.92/mo |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 7 |
| Spec score · Kubernetes Management Platforms | 8.0 (#8) | 8.7 (#5) |
| Spec score · GitOps Tools | 8.2 (#13) | 8.8 (#3) |
| Spec score · Container Management Software | 8.1 (#11) | 8.8 (#4) |
| API | The product page says all Palette functionality is exposed through an API for integration with systems and workflows. | Portainer exposes an HTTP REST API that automates UI operations and can proxy requests to underlying Docker and Kubernetes APIs. |
| API authentication | API access supports short-lived authorization tokens and API keys; documented authorization tokens last 240 minutes. | API access uses per-user access tokens sent in the X-API-Key header, with permissions matching the user account. |
| Company facts | LinkedIn lists Spectro Cloud as privately held, founded in 2019, headquartered in San Jose, California, with 201–500 employees. | LinkedIn lists Portainer.io as privately held, founded in 2017, headquartered in Auckland and employing 51-200 people. |
| Company legal name | Crunchbase identifies the company as Spectro Cloud, Inc. | The Business Edition agreement identifies the maker as Portainer.io Limited, an Auckland, New Zealand company. |
| Headquarters | San Jose, California, USA | Auckland, New Zealand |
| Integrations | The maker lists integrations including Argo CD, Kubeflow, Redis, Istio, Datadog, Splunk, Prometheus, Grafana, and Calico. | The product pages identify Talos Omni integration for provisioning Kubernetes clusters and support deployment from Helm charts. |
| Purpose | Palette manages Kubernetes clusters and their lifecycle across cloud, data center, and edge environments. | Portainer is a centralized multi-cluster management platform for managing Kubernetes clusters and container environments. |
| Rating on G2 | 4.5 out of 5 from 13 reviews | 4.8 out of 5 from 298 reviews |
| Rating on Gartner Peer Insights | 4.7 out of 5 from 19 ratings | 4.6 out of 5 from 44 reviews |
| Rating on TrustRadius | 9 out of 10 from 1 review | 9.8 out of 10 from 233 reviews and ratings |
| Support | Technical support is offered in Standard, Pro, and Premium tiers, with response times and coverage varying by tier. | The Scale plan includes 9x5 next business day support, while Enterprise offers prioritized 9x5 support with a 24/7 option. |
| Supported environments | Supported targets include AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, EKS, AKS, GKE, VMware vSphere, Nutanix, Apache CloudStack, Canonical MAAS, bare metal and edge. | Portainer lists Kubernetes, Docker, Docker Swarm, Podman, and Azure ACI as supported container environments. |
| What it does | Palette manages the lifecycle of Kubernetes environments across cloud, data center and edge locations. | Portainer is a self-hosted control plane that manages Docker, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, Podman and Azure ACI environments through a web interface. |
