Kubernetes vs Rancher Labs comparison

Kubernetes and Rancher Labs are both solutions in the Container Management category. Kubernetes is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.4, while Rancher Labs is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.9. Kubernetes holds a 5.1% mindshare in CM, compared to Rancher Labs’s 8.5% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of Kubernetes users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Rancher Labs users who would recommend it.

Kubernetes

Read 78 Kubernetes reviews

3,433 Views
2,270 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Rancher Labs

Read 14 Rancher Labs reviews

3,654 Views
2,779 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Kubernetes

Rancher Labs

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 13, 2024

Rancher Labs and Kubernetes are key players in container management. Rancher Labs leads in pricing and support, while Kubernetes shines with its robust features and capabilities.

Features: Rancher Labs offers simplicity with easy deployment, storage integration, and a user-friendly interface. It ensures stability with an open-source platform and regular updates. Kubernetes provides powerful container orchestration, scalability, built-in redundancy, and diverse integrations for complex environments.

Room for Improvement: Rancher Labs should enhance product integration, streamline upgrades, add federation capabilities, and bolster security. Kubernetes needs to reduce complexity, simplify setup, enhance security, and improve troubleshooting and the user interface.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Rancher Labs is flexible, supporting private and public clouds, with strong technical support responsive to user needs. Kubernetes requires more management with a steeper learning curve but benefits from broad community support, ensuring access to shared resources and expertise.

Pricing and ROI: Rancher Labs’ open-source approach provides an affordable entry, although premium support incurs costs, delivering high ROI with its toolset. Kubernetes, while open-source, may result in higher operational costs depending on deployment and cloud provider, offering high value for large-scale operations seeking extensive orchestration capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed Kubernetes vs. Rancher Labs Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Kubernetes vs. Rancher Labs

April 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

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

Rancher Labs

Ranking in Container Management

6th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Storage for Kubernetes (3rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Kubernetes is 5.1%, down from 9.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Rancher Labs is 8.5%, down from 9.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Container Management

Featured Reviews

Nouman Kaiser

Operations Engineer at DNB

Offers a crucial feedback process and support for nonproduction environment but lacks a built-in API development feature

The downside scaling and rendering with Kubernetes in our company is handled by a third-party client; we only raise tickets with them. I would rate the scalability of Kubernetes as seven out of ten. I am satisfied with the scalability of the product offered to our organization. There are around 1500 to 2000 Kubernetes users in our company. Our organization's entire IT blueprint team uses the solution extensively for the nonproduction environment. The usage of Kubernetes may increase in our organization depending upon requirements, as we have no plans to scale down the use, and the upscaling license is already available to us.

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RyanVassallo

Head of Systems and Infrastructure at Booming Games

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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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The best thing about Kubernetes is that most of the containerized applications are centralized."

"I like that it has really boosted cloud-native development and stood the test of time. The underlying architecture allows one to scale as per the business KPIs much faster."

"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."

"It's scalable."

"It is a stable and scalable product."

"Kubernetes has everything. Its design structure is quite advanced, and its offerings are extensive. The practical feature was the seamless failover."

"Kubernetes allows us to update without downtime and to easily deploy new software, which is very beneficial for our operations."

"The most valuable feature of Kubernetes is the integration with other solutions, such as Formative and Grafana."

More Kubernetes pros

"The most valuable feature of Rancher Labs is its user interface, which makes it easier to work with containers and deployment."

"The most valuable feature is its comprehensive support, easy resource scaling, compatibility with various OEMs, and seamless service integration."

"A great UI with very good integrations."

"The solution is stable."

"The initial setup is simple and straightforward."

"The scalability potential is very good."

"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."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is an open-source solution that is easy to deploy."

More Rancher Labs pros

Cons

"The configuration is a bit complicated."

"The platform could be more convenient to use."

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

"I'm a beginner, and I recently started working with Kubernetes. As of now, I don't see any bugs. However, it would be better if it could be deployed without coding."

"There is room for improvement in this area, as Kubernetes could benefit from having more integrations, such as for scanning vulnerabilities."

"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."

"The solution could be more stable."

"The price is something they need to improve."

More Kubernetes cons

"They should improve application visibility along with code visibility."

"I can't migrate to the newer version."

"Could be more intuitive."

"The solution could improve by adding more features in the dashboard, such as monitoring, scanning, and security. This would be a great benefit."

"We'd like their monitoring tool to be integrated by default."

"The biggest room for improvement in Rancher Labs would be to have a proper upgrading plan."

"We're looking for something that is even easier to use. It's a bit complicated."

"If you have poor infrastructure, you will have issues with the tool."

More Rancher Labs cons

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."

"Kubernetes is open-source."

"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."

"Kubernetes is free; it's open-source software."

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

"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."

"The price of Kubernetes could be lower. However, it is less expensive than VMware Tanzu. Additionally, technical support is expensive. The overall cost of the solution is approximately $1,000 annually."

More Kubernetes pricing and cost advice

"The cost is reasonable since it's open source. Rancher effectively addresses container orchestration trends, especially for those with some Kubernetes knowledge."

"The solution is free and open source but there is a fee for support."

"The pricing of the solution sits in the mid range, not high and not low. It has a fixed price that you pay every month."

"There are no hidden charges attached to the product unless a user opts for the premium support offered by the solution."

"Although Rancher Labs is an open-source solution, they also offer a paid version, where you buy the support when needed."

"There is an annual subscription. The price of the solution should be cheaper and have better pricing flexibility."

"This is an open-source solution, so there are no licensing costs involved."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Government

Manufacturing Company

33%

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Kubernetes

Compared 44% of the time

Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE vs Kubernetes

Compared 18% of the time

Portainer vs Kubernetes

Compared 11% of the time

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform vs Kubernetes

Compared 6% of the time

Komodor vs Kubernetes

Compared 2% of the time

More Kubernetes Competitors

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Rancher Labs

Compared 35% of the time

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform vs Rancher Labs

Compared 9% of the time

Komodor vs Rancher Labs

Compared 8% of the time

HashiCorp Nomad vs Rancher Labs

Compared 7% of the time

More Rancher Labs Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Kubernetes

May 2025

Download Kubernetes product report

Buyer's Guide

Rancher Labs

May 2025

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Also Known As

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Overview

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.

Kubernetes

Rancher Labs build innovative, open source software that makes it easy to deploy and manage containers in production on any infrastructure. We enable organizations to accelerate all aspects of their software development pipeline, from writing and testing code to running complex microservices-based applications.

Rancher, our flagship container management platform, allows users to easily manage all aspects of running containers in development and production environments, on any infrastructure. With well over four million downloads, Rancher has quickly become the tools of choice for teams serious about running containers in production. This includes large enterprises such as Sony, IBM, Tyco, Align Technologies and more.

Rancher Labs

Sample Customers

China unicom, NetEase Cloud, Nav, AppDirect

Albert Heijn, Bell, BMC, Samsung, WindStream, Johnson & Johnson

Buyer's Guide

Kubernetes vs. Rancher Labs

April 2025

Free Report: Kubernetes vs. Rancher Labs

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