HashiCorp Nomad vs Kubernetes comparison

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HashiCorp Nomad

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 13, 2024

HashiCorp Nomad and Kubernetes are products competing in the orchestration and scheduling space. Kubernetes often leads due to its widespread adoption and extensive ecosystem.

Features: HashiCorp Nomad supports multiple workloads in a single cluster, manages non-containerized applications, and offers a simplistic architecture. Kubernetes provides advanced networking, strong persistent storage, and extensive community support, making it suitable for complex orchestrations.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: HashiCorp Nomad features straightforward deployment and integrates flexibly with existing tools, minimizing overhead. Kubernetes, though complex to deploy, is supported by comprehensive documentation and resources, enhancing the deployment process. Its customer support ecosystem is more extensive, offering numerous community-driven solutions.

Pricing and ROI: HashiCorp Nomad generally involves lower initial setup costs due to its simple architecture, offering quicker ROI for small-scale environments. Kubernetes may incur higher setup costs but provides significant ROI for complex and scalable applications, making it suitable for enterprises that need extensive scalability.

To learn more, read our detailed HashiCorp Nomad vs. Kubernetes Report (Updated: December 2025).

HashiCorp Nomad vs. Kubernetes

December 2025

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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

HashiCorp Nomad

Ranking in Container Management

14th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Kubernetes

Ranking in Container Management

3rd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of HashiCorp Nomad is 4.0%, up from 2.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Kubernetes is 6.9%, up from 4.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Container Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Kubernetes	6.9%
HashiCorp Nomad	4.0%
Other	89.1%

Container Management

Featured Reviews

Zeeshan Akhtar

Full stack developer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Has out of the box features , which is good for companies that don't want to spend too much time on research

I've noticed a few UI issues. For example, when monitoring services and tasks, sometimes the tasks keep disconnecting. If you open the shell in HashiCorp Nomad using the exit button, it often disconnects, and you have to log in again. Sometimes, when I check the logs in the UI for microservices tasks, I encounter an issue where the logs are not visible. However, if I log in again after some time, refresh the page, or check a different container, the logs usually appear. These logs are being generated, as I can see them being shipped to my LogView. I'm not sure if this is a product issue or something related to our deployment, but I've noticed it.

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RohitVerma2

DevOps Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Automated deployments and self-healing have transformed how I run reliable chat services

For improvements, I would definitely suggest some enhancements to Kubernetes. While Kubernetes is very powerful, there are still a few areas where it could be improved. Our challenge is the learning curve and operational complexity. For new team members, concepts such as networking, RBAC, Ingress, and troubleshooting distributed systems can take time to understand. Better built-in onboarding tools or simplified abstractions would help. Another pain point is debugging and observability. While kubectl provides good basic visibility, deep debugging across multiple services, pods, and nodes often requires external tooling such as Prometheus, Grafana, or centralized logging. Stronger native observability features would be very helpful. Networking and Ingress configuration can also be complex, especially when dealing with certificates, routing rules, and cloud-specific integrations. A more standardized experience across environments could reduce operational overhead. From a cost perspective, managing and optimizing resource usage at scale still requires careful monitoring and tuning. Better built-in cost visibility would be very helpful. For the needed improvements, I think that covers most of my main concerns. The biggest areas for improvement are still around simplifying operations, better native observability, and easier cost visibility. If I had to add one more point, it would be around standardization and developer experience. Sometimes different clusters, cloud providers, or tooling setups behave slightly differently, which increases maintenance efforts. More consistent defaults and opinionated best practices could help teams adopt Kubernetes faster and with fewer surprises. Overall, despite these challenges, Kubernetes is a very mature and reliable platform, and the benefits clearly outweigh the limitations for most production use cases. An additional area that could be improved is upgrade and version management. While managed services help coordinate Kubernetes version upgrades, API deprecations and compatibility with add-ons can still be time-consuming and risky for production environments. Better tooling and clearer migration automation would make upgrades safer and easier. Another improvement could be around documentation, consistency, and discoverability. Kubernetes documentation is very comprehensive, but for beginners, it can sometimes be overwhelming to navigate and identify best practice paths.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"If you face an issue with an image during deployment, the solution will automatically revert to the last stable image."

"You could get most of HashiCorp Nomad's features from other microservice orchestrators like Kubernetes. The tool's advantage is its ease of use and integration with services like Envoy. With Kubernetes, you must think about many things, like UI integration, which vault to use, and how to discover the service. With the tool, many things come out of the box, making it easy to start. For example, using the Ingress proxy with the tool is quite easy, while it's trickier with Kubernetes."

"I found it to be an excellent solution for application deployment. It's great for containerization."

"If you're switching from VMs to Kubernetes, you will see a return because you can pack more into the Kubernetes architecture using containers rather than VMs. You'll see some more savings on your infrastructure, as well."

"The most valuable aspect of the solution is the scalability."

"The solution is easy to use."

"There are features that come out of the box with Kubernetes, with respect to scaling, reliability, etc. It's the leading container management platform. There are other competing ones, but this is the leading one. It has multiple instances of the application running. If one of them goes down, the other one automatically spins up."

"The deployment is one of the most valuable feature."

"The cloud-managed Kubernetes allow us to take care of a big system and deployment and container management without having a big operational team."

"The best feature is autoscaling. It's effortless to use for scaling deployment parts, CI/CD, etc."

More Kubernetes pros

Cons

"It would be good to have a UI interface so that developers could receive notifications for jobs in a bad state."

"I've noticed a few UI issues. For example, when monitoring services and tasks, sometimes the tasks keep disconnecting. If you open the shell in HashiCorp Nomad using the exit button, it often disconnects, and you have to log in again. Sometimes, when I check the logs in the UI for microservices tasks, I encounter an issue where the logs are not visible. However, if I log in again after some time, refresh the page, or check a different container, the logs usually appear. These logs are being generated, as I can see them being shipped to my LogView. I'm not sure if this is a product issue or something related to our deployment, but I've noticed it."

"Kubernetes' VM functionality and security could be improved."

"We would like to see more validation tools added to this solution, this would provide pre-deployment analysis that developers could use before publishing their infrastructure."

"Kubernetes is a complex solution. The product needs to be more manageable and user-friendly."

"The network policies and RBAC management across multi-clusters could be improved. This is an issue we're trying to solve in the market."

"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 preparation."

"The Kubernetes dashboard can be improved. It is currently a mess. We were using Rancher earlier, and everyone was happy with the dashboard. Right now, we are using Kubernetes, and it's not working with Microsoft workstations. We still have problems with the dashboard. It's terrible."

"Having a thread dump and memory dump, and seeing how many objects were created would be useful."

"One area where Kubernetes could improve is troubleshooting. The current process for troubleshooting and installation can be challenging, especially with a large ecosystem. Better tools and artificial intelligence capabilities developed to assist with troubleshooting, configuration, and support would be helpful. This improvement would be particularly beneficial for large enterprise customers."

More Kubernetes cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"This is an open-source solution, so there are no licensing costs associated with its use."

"If you're using a public cloud, the cost depends on the number of nodes you are planning to deploy Kubernetes on."

"In addition to Kubernetes, you have to pay for support."

"The management layer is free, which is perfect. You don't need to pay money for the management layer, but in AWS develop service, you need to pay. I think it is €75 per month for the management layer. It is free here, so you can have as many Kubernetes clusters as you need. You are paying just for the workload, that is, for the machine, CPU, memory, and everything."

"There is no licensing fee."

"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."

"Pricing isn't a major concern for us. Since we resell Kubernetes services and focus on providing support, integration, and education, we don't usually have pricing issues. Our customers are more concerned with getting the right support and services than the cost. So, the value we provide is more important than the actual pricing. Pricing might change in the future, but it’s not a big issue for us right now."

"Microsoft provides reasonable costs for Kubernetes."

More Kubernetes pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	26
Midsize Enterprise	10
Large Enterprise	47

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with HashiCorp Nomad?

Sometimes, the job is in a bad state, and we don't get any notifications. It would be good to have a UI interface so that developers could receive notifications for jobs in a bad state.

What is your primary use case for HashiCorp Nomad?

We use HashiCorp Nomad mainly to deploy our images in the form of jobs. It is also used for load balancing, containerization, and instance deployment.

What advice do you have for others considering HashiCorp Nomad?

I would recommend HashiCorp Nomad to other users because it is the best tool for deployment. It is easy for a beginner to learn to use HashiCorp Nomad for the first time. Any developer with a decen...

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?

I have had a good experience with pricing, but the setup costs are high.

What needs improvement with Kubernetes?

Kubernetes can be improved, though I cannot specify exactly how at this time.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform vs HashiCorp Nomad

Comparisons

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Red Hat OpenShift vs HashiCorp Nomad

Compared 18% of the time

Docker vs HashiCorp Nomad

Compared 10% of the time

Portainer vs HashiCorp Nomad

Compared 8% of the time

Rancher Labs vs HashiCorp Nomad

Compared 5% of the time

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VMware Tanzu Platform vs Kubernetes

Compared 17% of the time

Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) vs Kubernetes

Compared 12% of the time

Portainer vs Kubernetes

Compared 9% of the time

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform vs Kubernetes

Compared 7% of the time

HPE Ezmeral Container Platform vs Kubernetes

Compared 6% of the time

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Product Reports

Download HashiCorp Nomad product report

Container Management

January 2026

Download Kubernetes product report

January 2026

Also Known As

No data available

Overview

HashiCorp was founded by Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar in 2012 with the goal of revolutionizing datacenter management: application development, delivery, and maintenance.

The datacenter of today is very different than the datacenter of yesterday, and we think the datacenter of tomorrow is just around the corner. We're writing software to take you all the way from yesterday to today, and then safely to tomorrow and beyond.

Physical, virtual, containers. Private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS. Windows, Linux, Mac. These are just some of the choices faced when architecting a datacenter of today. And the choice is not one or the other; instead, it is often a combination of many of these.

HashiCorp builds tools to ease these decisions by presenting solutions that span the gaps. Our tools manage both physical machines and virtual machines, Windows, and Linux, SaaS and IaaS, etc. And we're committed to supporting next-generation technologies, as well.

HashiCorp was founded and continues to be run by the primary authors of all our core technologies powering thousands of companies worldwide. We speak at conferences and write books related to application and infrastructure management.

All our foundational technologies are open source and developed openly, and have been since 2010.

The Tao of HashiCorp is the foundation that guides our vision, roadmap, and product design. As you evaluate using or contributing to HashiCorp's products, it may be valuable to understand the motivations and intentions for our work.

HashiCorp

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

Information Not Available

China unicom, NetEase Cloud, Nav, AppDirect