Pumba vs Reliably

Pumba is a free, open-source chaos testing and network emulation tool for Docker, containerd, and Podman containers. It can kill, stop, pause, remove, and restart containers, while network experiments can add delay, packet loss, duplication, corruption, or rate limits through netem or iptables. Its stress command exercises CPU, memory, and I/O with stress-ng. Targets can be chosen by container name, regular expression, label, or random selection, and experiments can recur at fixed intervals. Pumba documents deployment with Docker, Kubernetes DaemonSets, and OpenShift, and supports Kubernetes workflows. Released binaries and a GitHub Container Registry image are available; the Docker Hub image is marked deprecated. Linux is the primary platform. macOS binaries drive a remote Linux container VM, while Windows is not supported or planned. Pumba runs self-hosted under the Apache License 2.0 and requires privileged access to container runtimes, so its guidance calls for controlled environments and restricted socket access. Security fixes apply only to the latest released minor version. Community support is directed to GitHub Issues and the project blog.

Reliably helps teams examine operational risks and incidents as part of resilience engineering. Built around an open-source chaos engineering platform based on Chaos Toolkit, it offers an experiment builder with more than 300 actions, including attacks and probes. Teams can import JSON Chaos Toolkit experiments, reuse templates, schedule runs, and review scores, freshness indicators, timelines, and dashboards. Experiments can run as GitHub Actions, through Reliably-managed execution, with the CLI, in Docker, or as Kubernetes jobs or cron jobs. Listed targets include AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Spring. Pre-checks can prevent a run from starting; configured safeguards can interrupt one during execution. Environments store variables and encrypted secrets for the app, CLI, or GitHub workflows. The Free plan is free and limits teams to one member, 180 cloud execution minutes per month, a 10-minute cloud execution cap, and two weeks of data retention. Start costs £40 a month, billed monthly.