Google Kubernetes Engine vs Kubernetes comparison

Read 78 Kubernetes reviews

2,392 Views
2,368 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Google Kubernetes Engine

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 13, 2024

Google Kubernetes Engine and Kubernetes compete in the container orchestration platform category. Google Kubernetes Engine appears to have the upper hand due to its managed services and ease of deployment, though Kubernetes offers notable flexibility and community support.

Features: Google Kubernetes Engine provides extensive managed services to ease deployment, support for autoscaling, and seamless integration with Google's ecosystem. Kubernetes, being open-source, offers flexibility across various platforms, scalability with microservices, and strong community support.

Room for Improvement: Google Kubernetes Engine could improve cost management, integrations for monitoring, and application-level security. Kubernetes could benefit from more built-in tools for security, simpler integration options, and reduced configuration complexity.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Google Kubernetes Engine is predominantly deployed in public cloud environments, noted for easy integration but faces criticism in support services compared to AWS. Kubernetes offers flexible deployment across hybrid, private, and public clouds but requires expertise for effective management, with users often relying on community forums for support.

Pricing and ROI: Google Kubernetes Engine costs are based on cloud usage and machine specifications, offering a competitive pricing model, yet can be high for complex use cases. Kubernetes, being open-source, incurs no licensing costs but can have hidden management and support costs. Both can yield positive ROI, with GKE's managed services offering operational efficiency, while Kubernetes provides cost-effectiveness when managed effectively.

To learn more, read our detailed Google Kubernetes Engine vs. Kubernetes Report (Updated: September 2025).

Google Kubernetes Engine vs. Kubernetes

Download the complete report

Helped 868,759 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Google Kubernetes Engine

Ranking in Container Management

10th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Kubernetes

Ranking in Container Management

4th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Google Kubernetes Engine is 2.1%, down from 2.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Kubernetes is 6.2%, down from 6.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Container Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Kubernetes	6.2%
Google Kubernetes Engine	2.1%
Other	91.7%

Container Management

Featured Reviews

Parthasarathy T

Cloud Associate DevOps at Publicis Sapient

Managed solutions enable efficient handling of web applications and migration projects

Google Kubernetes Engine can be improved by enabling the in-place upgrade of the machine type of an existing node pool since I currently need to destroy and recreate it. There is no feature present where I can upgrade directly, and having more than 1,000 to 2,000 workloads in one node pool makes changing the node pool name difficult for all those workloads. I choose eight out of ten mainly because of the node pool upgrade challenge I mentioned, but also because of the existence of Anthos service mesh, which is the ingress controller available only for the enterprise Kubernetes Engine. It would be beneficial if it could be offered in the normal Kubernetes Engine with any limitations.

Read full review

Venu Boddu

AWS DevOps Engineer at Hexaware Technologies Limited

Manage infrastructure automation and smooth application deployment with robust auto-scaling capabilities

Kubernetes is highly valuable for its node-based setup, which allows for the running of multiple pods. This feature is essential for infrastructure automation and application deployment. Kubernetes also offers rollback control and auto-scaling capabilities, which are crucial for maintaining an application's availability even if nodes or pods go down. Additionally, Kubernetes supports load balancing to distribute traffic efficiently across multiple pods.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) takes care of managing Kubernetes, including the main control plane. It also offers solutions for monitoring resources and handling external traffic, which is essential for us. Being a cloud-native solution, it relieves us from worrying about these operational aspects."

"The features are typical Kubernetes, but Google One offers a better GUI-based deployment. It's more sophisticated and integrates well with other services, providing a better customer experience."

"We used automation for the initial setup. It was okay. So it wasn't too complex."

"I highly recommend it to others due to its comprehensive features and cost-effectiveness for various company sizes."

"The product has valuable security features. It can connect with multiple DevOps tools."

"Stability is perfect for me."

"The solution is available across AWS, GCP and Azure and is seamless."

"The initial setup is very easy. We can create our cluster using the command line, or using our console."

More Google Kubernetes Engine pros

"Kubernetes also offers rollback control and auto-scaling capabilities, which are crucial for maintaining an application's availability even if nodes or pods go down."

"We use this solution for the hosting of micro-services. Kubernetes helps us to orchestrate all the containers hosting these micro-services."

"I rate Kubernetes nine out of ten."

"Kubernetes' integration with AWS Lambda is great. I barely had to write any code to connect from EKS to Lambda, so Kubernetes is programmer friendly."

"The most important feature is container orchestration."

"Kubernetes is a leading container orchestration solution, known for its simplicity and ease of use. Being open-source, it benefits from large community support, including enterprise support. Many companies offer their own version of Kubernetes, making it widely adopted and supported in the industry."

"I like Kubernetes' scalability, built-in redundancy, and ease of deployment."

"Kubernetes' most valuable features are scaling, deployment, and container management."

More Kubernetes pros

Cons

"Our critique is that we have to do too much work to get the cluster production-ready."

"There are some security issues, but it might just be because we are not up to speed yet as much as we should be and so we haven't found it in the documentation yet. That's why I don't want to confuse this. Still, it could be a little bit easier to understand and implement."

"The product’s visible allocation feature needs improvement."

"The management UI could be improved."

"I would rate the scalability a seven out of ten."

"I would like to see the ability to create multiple notebook configurations."

"I think that security is an important point, and there should be additional features for the evaluation of data in containers that will create a more secure environment for usage in multi-parent models."

"The pricing could be more competitive. It should be cheaper."

More Google Kubernetes Engine cons

"It would be great if Kubernetes could handle a level of data backup."

"I'm expecting more improvement on the UI development side, which can be reflected in each object that is part of Kubernetes, like the Pod, deployment set, ReplicaSet, ConfigMap, Secrets, and PersistentVolume."

"There are several areas where Kubernetes could improve."

"There are features in Google Cloud or AWS that aren't in Azure. They need to implement a couple more tools in Azure."

"Kubernetes is incredibly complicated, so one area of improvement is the ease of administration. I would like a user interface that you can run to help you debug and diagnose problems and suggest how to configure things."

"This solution is not very easy to use."

"There is a feature called Terraform and, based on the reviews I have read, it could be improved."

"Kubernetes is a bit complex, and there's a steep learning curve. At the same time, I cannot imagine how it could be easier. You need many add-ons to it, and the commercial releases of Kubernetes should address that."

More Kubernetes cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Initially, Google Kubernetes Engine was a little bit cheaper, but now its prices have been increased compared to the pricing model and the features that are made available by its competitors."

"I would rate Kubernetes' pricing four out of five."

"The tool's licensing costs are yearly."

"This is an open source solution, so there is no pricing or licensing."

"It is competitive, and it is not expensive. It is almost competitive with AWS and the rest of the cloud solutions. We are spending around 3K USD per month. There are four projects that are currently running, and each one is incurring a cost of around 3K USD."

"We are planning to use external support, and hire a commercial partner for it."

"I rate the product's price a six on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price. The product is competitively priced."

"I would rate the solution's pricing a nine out of ten. The tool costs around 3000 dollars per month. There are no additional costs apart from these."

More Google Kubernetes Engine pricing and cost advice

"You need to pay for a license if you buy branded products. For example, if you take the services from Azure, AWS, or Google, the price of the Kubernetes cluster is inclusive of the service that's being offered to us on a pay-and-use model."

"The solution is affordable."

"Kubernetes is open source. But we have to manage Kubernetes as a team, and the overhead is a bit high. Compared with the platforms like Cloud Foundry, which has a much less operational overhead. Kubernetes, I have to manage the code, and I have to hire the developers. If someone has a product, a developer should know exactly what he's writing or high availability, and all those things may differ the costs."

"Kubernetes is open-source. Kubernetes is free, but we're charged for AWS utilization."

"If you have a solid AKS and a solid DevOps process, you'll automatically get an ROI, not just in terms of cost but also in how quickly you can see your business application progress."

"Kubernetes is an open-source solution that can be free. We have some distribution with licenses, such OpenShift and Tucows in Amazon. They are billing services."

"The solution itself is open-source, so there is no cost attached to it. However, it requires a virtual machine to operate, which does come at a cost; a choice of a pay as you go model, or a monthly charge via an enterprise agreement. There is a pricing calculator available, where organizations can determine the level and number of virtual machines required, and how much that will cost."

"I would say the solution is worth the money, but it depends on the required workloads, the type of workload, and the scaling requirements etc."

More Kubernetes pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Container Management solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

868,759 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

25%

Computer Software Company

Retailer

Educational Organization

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	20
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	15

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	25
Midsize Enterprise	9
Large Enterprise	47

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Google Kubernetes Engine?

The product has no downtime.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google Kubernetes Engine?

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Google Kubernetes Engine is straightforward, as I previously indicated. The need for humans is reduced with GCP since there is no need for ...

What needs improvement with Google Kubernetes Engine?

What do you like most about Kubernetes?

There are many good features. I feel that the scale-out features, like replica sets, are very good. The number of running containers can be autoscaled.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Kubernetes?

Since we use Kubernetes on-premises, the costs are related to our expertise and the personnel we hire.

What needs improvement with Kubernetes?

Although we face issues when migrating to new versions of Kubernetes, such as misunderstandings on using new features or integration with proxy services, these issues can be addressed with proper p...

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform vs Google Kubernetes Engine

Comparisons

Compared 26% of the time

Docker vs Google Kubernetes Engine

Compared 18% of the time

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Google Kubernetes Engine

Compared 18% of the time

Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode) vs Google Kubernetes Engine

Compared 14% of the time

Rancher Labs vs Google Kubernetes Engine

Compared 11% of the time

More Google Kubernetes Engine Competitors

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Kubernetes

Compared 33% of the time

Portainer vs Kubernetes

Compared 13% of the time

Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) vs Kubernetes

Compared 8% of the time

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform vs Kubernetes

Compared 8% of the time

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs Kubernetes

Compared 4% of the time

More Kubernetes Competitors

Product Reports

Google Kubernetes Engine

Download Google Kubernetes Engine product report

Download Kubernetes product report

Also Known As

GKE

Overview

Kubernetes Engine is a managed, production-ready environment for deploying containerized applications. It brings our latest innovations in developer productivity, resource efficiency, automated operations, and open source flexibility to accelerate your time to market.

Google

Kubernetes (K8s) is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery. Kubernetes builds upon 15 years of experience of running production workloads at Google, combined with best-of-breed ideas and practices from the community.

Sample Customers

Philips Lighting, Alpha Vertex, GroupBy, BQ

China unicom, NetEase Cloud, Nav, AppDirect

Google Kubernetes Engine vs. Kubernetes