Argo vs Skaffold: What are the differences?

Argo: Container-native workflows for Kubernetes. Argo is an open source container-native workflow engine for getting work done on Kubernetes. Argo is implemented as a Kubernetes CRD (Custom Resource Definition); Skaffold: Easy and Repeatable Kubernetes Development. Skaffold is a command line tool that facilitates continuous development for Kubernetes applications. You can iterate on your application source code locally then deploy to local or remote Kubernetes clusters. Skaffold handles the workflow for building, pushing and deploying your application. It can also be used in an automated context such as a CI/CD pipeline to leverage the same workflow and tooling when moving applications to production.

Argo and Skaffold can be categorized as "Container" tools.

Some of the features offered by Argo are:

• DAG or Steps based declaration of workflows
• Artifact support (S3, Artifactory, HTTP, Git, raw)
• Step level input & outputs (artifacts/parameters)

On the other hand, Skaffold provides the following key features:

• No server-side component. No overhead to your cluster.
• Detect changes in your source code and automatically build/push/deploy.
• Image tag management. Stop worrying about updating the image tags in Kubernetes manifests to push out changes during development.

Argo and Skaffold are both open source tools. It seems that Skaffold with 7.16K GitHub stars and 589 forks on GitHub has more adoption than Argo with 3.25K GitHub stars and 455 GitHub forks.