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Google Kubernetes Engine vs Rancher Labs comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 13, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.1
Google Kubernetes Engine delivers positive ROI by reducing costs and improving efficiency, despite being costly for some services.
Sentiment score
8.5
Rancher Labs provides efficient open-source solutions like OpenShift with significant cost savings and an eight out of ten rating.
By migrating from AWS to Google Cloud Platform, we have saved a lot of time and money.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
3.7
Google Kubernetes Engine support varies; some users rely on forums, while others suggest improvements in response time and professionalism.
Sentiment score
7.8
Rancher Labs' customer service and technical support are praised for responsiveness, with users valuing community forums for assistance.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.0
Google Kubernetes Engine is praised for its scalability, efficient for microservices, with dynamic auto-scaling adjusting to organizational needs.
Sentiment score
7.7
Rancher Labs offers robust scalability for small to large teams, with effective deployment and minor automation improvements suggested.
The autoscaling capabilities of Google Kubernetes Engine have significantly impacted our operations.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
Google Kubernetes Engine is highly stable, effectively managing demands with regular updates and scalable architecture for reliable operations.
Sentiment score
8.7
Rancher Labs is praised for its stability and reliability, though users note complexity and upgrade challenges.
If I have 100 replicas of containers and the traffic suddenly pushes to 1,000 within a fraction of a second, the selected machine type must be fast.
 

Room For Improvement

Google Kubernetes Engine needs enhancements in security, user interface, scalability, pricing, and third-party integration for optimal performance.
Rancher Labs needs improved stability, integrations, user-friendly features, enhanced security, multicloud support, and better community and development resources.
When looking at the web interface, it feels kind of slow due to the many features involved.
It would be helpful if I could easily find log information in a particular namespace without needing to write certain labels.
Log observability could be made easier so someone from high school can use it without having technological expertise.
 

Setup Cost

Google Kubernetes Engine uses pay-as-you-go pricing, competitive with AWS, considering machine specs, compute resources, and optional GPUs.
Rancher Labs provides a cost-effective open-source container orchestration with optional paid support, seen as competitively mid-range priced.
Instead, we only pay for the hardware we use, which results in cost-cutting.
Google is considered cheaper compared to AWS, making it suitable for smaller to medium companies concerning cost.
The on-demand nodes are quite expensive.
 

Valuable Features

Google Kubernetes Engine offers seamless autoscaling, multi-cloud support, robust security, and easy cluster management for enhanced performance and reliability.
Rancher Labs offers user-friendly Kubernetes management, seamless integrations, and supports GitOps and virtual machine management with promising potential.
The most valuable aspect of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is its managed nature, which significantly reduces the burden on our platform team.
What I find most valuable is the ability to focus solely on my product without worrying about the Kubernetes infrastructure itself.
GKE is easier to understand and use than Elastic Kubernetes Service.
 

Categories and Ranking

Google Kubernetes Engine
Ranking in Container Management
11th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Rancher Labs
Ranking in Container Management
9th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Data Storage for Kubernetes (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Google Kubernetes Engine is 2.3%, down from 2.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Rancher Labs is 7.2%, down from 9.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Container Management
 

Featured Reviews

Parthasarathy T - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
RyanVassallo - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers an open-source version along with a good UI
The product has multiple good features. One of the solution's good features is that it is the GitOps functionality known as Rancher fleet, which is used for continuous delivery. The tool's UI is very convenient enough to help you manage multiple clusters in the cloud or on-premises, making it a product with which you can manage different clusters and locations. The tool also has a feature that is still kind of maturing, but I think it has very good potential. This new feature is named Harvester, which is allows users to have virtual machines managed by Kubernetes engine. This is very new technology in the market. I think that Harvester needs to mature as a product, and I think that in the future, it will be very powerful. You have one tool that does many things for you.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
10%
Retailer
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
40%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google Kubernetes Engine?
Google Kubernetes Engine solution is expensive, as are all cloud solutions in general. On a scale of one to ten for pricing, I would rate it between seven and eight.
What needs improvement with Google Kubernetes Engine?
I have no comment about the learning curve of Google Kubernetes Engine. Regarding AI integration and features in Google Kubernetes Engine, there are currently none available. I would appreciate see...
What do you like most about Rancher Labs?
The tool's UI is very convenient enough to help you manage multiple clusters in the cloud or the company, making it a product with which you can manage different clusters and locations.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Rancher Labs?
The cost is reasonable since it's open-source. Rancher effectively addresses container orchestration trends, especially for those with some Kubernetes knowledge.
What needs improvement with Rancher Labs?
While Rancher Labs provides some level of security, it's not considered very robust. We found it to offer basic security features, which met some of our requirements, but we also relied on other op...
 

Also Known As

GKE
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Philips Lighting, Alpha Vertex, GroupBy, BQ
Albert Heijn, Bell, BMC, Samsung, WindStream, Johnson & Johnson
Find out what your peers are saying about Google Kubernetes Engine vs. Rancher Labs and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.