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k3s vs Rancher: What are the differences?
k3s: Lightweight Kubernetes. 5 less than k8s (by Rancher Labs). Certified Kubernetes distribution designed for production workloads in unattended, resource-constrained, remote locations or inside IoT appliances. Supports something as small as a Raspberry Pi or as large as an AWS a1.4xlarge 32GiB server; Rancher: Open Source Platform for Running a Private Container Service. Rancher is an open source container management platform that includes full distributions of Kubernetes, Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm, and makes it simple to operate container clusters on any cloud or infrastructure platform.
k3s and Rancher can be primarily classified as "Container" tools.
Some of the features offered by k3s are:
- ARM64 and ARMv7 support
- Simplified installation
- SQLite3 support
On the other hand, Rancher provides the following key features:
- Manage Hosts, Deploy Containers, Monitor Resources
- User Management & Collaboration
- Native Docker APIs & Tools
k3s and Rancher are both open source tools. It seems that Rancher with 11.9K GitHub stars and 1.34K forks on GitHub has more adoption than k3s with 7.81K GitHub stars and 483 GitHub forks.
Pros of k3s
- Lightweight5
- Easy3
- Replication Controller2
- Scale Services2
- Open Source2
Pros of Rancher
- Easy to use103
- Open source and totally free79
- Multi-host docker-compose support63
- Load balancing and health check included58
- Simple58
- Rolling upgrades, green/blue upgrades feature44
- Dns and service discovery out-of-the-box42
- Only requires docker37
- Multitenant and permission management34
- Easy to use and feature rich29
- Cross cloud compatible11
- Does everything needed for a docker infrastructure11
- Simple and powerful8
- Next-gen platform8
- Very Docker-friendly7
- Support Kubernetes and Swarm6
- Application catalogs with stack templates (wizards)6
- Supports Apache Mesos, Docker Swarm, and Kubernetes6
- Rolling and blue/green upgrades deployments6
- High Availability service: keeps your app up 24/76
- Easy to use service catalog5
- Very intuitive UI4
- IaaS-vendor independent, supports hybrid/multi-cloud4
- Awesome support4
- Scalable3
- Requires less infrastructure requirements2
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Cons of k3s
Cons of Rancher
- Hosting Rancher can be complicated10
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