StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Container Registry
  4. Container Tools
  5. Kind vs Skaffold

Kind vs Skaffold

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Skaffold
Skaffold
Stacks86
Followers186
Votes0
Kind
Kind
Stacks26
Followers59
Votes0
GitHub Stars14.7K
Forks1.7K

Kind vs Skaffold: What are the differences?

  1. Key Difference 1: Application Deployment Approach
    Kind is a tool that enables running Kubernetes clusters using Docker container nodes, allowing developers to create and manage local Kubernetes clusters. On the other hand, Skaffold is a developer-centric tool that automates the development workflow for deploying applications to Kubernetes. While Kind focuses on managing local Kubernetes clusters, Skaffold provides a streamlined process for development and deployment of applications on Kubernetes clusters, whether local or remote.

  2. Key Difference 2: Continuous Development and Deployment
    Skaffold provides functionalities for continuous development and deployment as it watches for changes in the source code and automatically rebuilds and deploys the application to the target Kubernetes environment. In contrast, Kind does not have built-in continuous development and deployment capabilities and is primarily used for locally managing Kubernetes clusters.

  3. Key Difference 3: Resource Tracking and Management
    Skaffold offers advanced capabilities for tracking and managing Kubernetes resources. It provides features like resource tagging, dependency management, and configuration customization, which simplify the process of deploying and updating resources in a Kubernetes cluster. Kind, on the other hand, focuses on providing an environment to run Kubernetes clusters and does not have specialized features for resource tracking and management.

  4. Key Difference 4: Development Environment Replication
    With Skaffold, developers can easily replicate the production-like environment locally to test and validate their application before actual deployment. Skaffold supports replicating complex environments by providing configuration options for matching the production environment closely. Kind, on the other hand, is specifically designed to create lightweight, single-node clusters mainly for local development purposes and does not focus on replicating complex production environments.

  5. Key Difference 5: Ecosystem Integration
    Skaffold is designed to integrate seamlessly with other development tools and frameworks, providing compatibility and out-of-the-box integration with popular build systems, container registries, and Git repositories. It supports various languages and frameworks, making it easier for developers to incorporate Skaffold into their existing development workflows. Kind, however, is more focused on providing a standalone Kubernetes cluster environment and does not emphasize extensive integration with other development tools or frameworks.

  6. Key Difference 6: Developer Experience
    Skaffold offers a developer-centric experience by automating various steps in the development and deployment process, such as building, testing, and deploying applications to a Kubernetes cluster. It provides real-time feedback, error checking, and automatic synchronization, enhancing the development experience. On the other hand, Kind primarily provides a simple and lightweight Kubernetes cluster environment without the additional developer-centric features offered by Skaffold.

In summary, while Kind focuses on managing local Kubernetes clusters, Skaffold provides a streamlined development workflow with continuous deployment capabilities, advanced resource tracking, environment replication, ecosystem integration, and improved developer experience.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Detailed Comparison

Skaffold
Skaffold
Kind
Kind

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.

It is a tool for running local Kubernetes clusters using Docker container “nodes”. It was primarily designed for testing Kubernetes itself, but may be used for local development or CI.

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.;Supports existing tooling and workflows. Build and deploy APIs make each implementation composable to support many different workflows.;Support for multiple application components. Build and deploy only the pieces of your stack that have changed.;Deploy regularly when saving files or run one off deployments using the same configuration
Supports multi-node (including HA) clusters; Supports building Kubernetes release builds from source; Support for make / bash / docker, or bazel, in addition to pre-published builds; Supports Linux, macOS and Windows; It is a CNCF certified conformant Kubernetes installer
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
14.7K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
1.7K
Stacks
86
Stacks
26
Followers
186
Followers
59
Votes
0
Votes
0
Integrations
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
Google Kubernetes Engine
Google Kubernetes Engine
Docker
Docker
Docker
Docker
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
Bazel
Bazel

What are some alternatives to Skaffold, Kind?

Kubernetes

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.

Rancher

Rancher

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.

Docker Compose

Docker Compose

With Compose, you define a multi-container application in a single file, then spin your application up in a single command which does everything that needs to be done to get it running.

Docker Swarm

Docker Swarm

Swarm serves the standard Docker API, so any tool which already communicates with a Docker daemon can use Swarm to transparently scale to multiple hosts: Dokku, Compose, Krane, Deis, DockerUI, Shipyard, Drone, Jenkins... and, of course, the Docker client itself.

Tutum

Tutum

Tutum lets developers easily manage and run lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers from any application. AWS-like control, Heroku-like ease. The same container that a developer builds and tests on a laptop can run at scale in Tutum.

Portainer

Portainer

It is a universal container management tool. It works with Kubernetes, Docker, Docker Swarm and Azure ACI. It allows you to manage containers without needing to know platform-specific code.

Codefresh

Codefresh

Automate and parallelize testing. Codefresh allows teams to spin up on-demand compositions to run unit and integration tests as part of the continuous integration process. Jenkins integration allows more complex pipelines.

CAST.AI

CAST.AI

It is an AI-driven cloud optimization platform for Kubernetes. Instantly cut your cloud bill, prevent downtime, and 10X the power of DevOps.

k3s

k3s

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.

Flocker

Flocker

Flocker is a data volume manager and multi-host Docker cluster management tool. With it you can control your data using the same tools you use for your stateless applications. This means that you can run your databases, queues and key-value stores in Docker and move them around as easily as the rest of your app.

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

GitHub
Bitbucket

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Kubernetes
Rancher

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

gulp
Grunt

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp

Graphite
Kibana

Grafana vs Graphite vs Kibana