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K9s vs Rancher: What are the differences?
Key Differences between K9s and Rancher
- Installation and Deployment: K9s is a command-line tool that can be easily installed and deployed on any Kubernetes cluster, while Rancher is a comprehensive container management platform that requires a dedicated setup process and infrastructure.
- User Interface: K9s provides a terminal-based UI with a command prompt-style interface, making it suitable for advanced users who prefer working with command lines. In contrast, Rancher offers a web-based GUI that is more user-friendly and suitable for both beginners and advanced users.
- Feature Set: K9s focuses more on monitoring and managing Kubernetes clusters, providing features such as resource viewing, pod management, and log streaming. Rancher, on the other hand, offers a complete container orchestration platform with additional features like multi-cluster management, application catalog, and built-in CI/CD pipelines.
- Scalability and Flexibility: K9s is lightweight and can be used on any Kubernetes cluster, making it suitable for small to medium-sized deployments. Rancher, being a full-fledged container management platform, is designed for larger and more complex deployments, offering scalability and flexibility features like multi-cloud support and managed Kubernetes services.
- Community Support: K9s is an open-source project with an active community that provides support and frequent updates. Rancher, although it has a large community, is a commercial product backed by a company (Rancher Labs) that offers official support and enterprise-grade features.
- Integration and Extensibility: K9s integrates well with other command-line tools and can be customized using plugins and extensions. Rancher, being a standalone platform, offers native integrations with various cloud providers, monitoring tools, and Kubernetes ecosystem components, allowing for seamless integration and extensibility.
In Summary, K9s is a lightweight, command-line tool for monitoring and managing Kubernetes clusters, while Rancher is a comprehensive container management platform with a web-based GUI and additional features for larger deployments.
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Learn MorePros of K9s
Pros of Rancher
Pros of K9s
- Nice UI and fast way to manage my kubernetes clusters2
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 K9s
Cons of Rancher
Cons of K9s
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Cons of Rancher
- Hosting Rancher can be complicated10
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- No public GitHub repository available -
What is K9s?
K9s provides a curses based terminal UI to interact with your Kubernetes clusters. The aim of this project is to make it easier to navigate, observe and manage your applications in the wild. K9s continually watches Kubernetes for changes and offers subsequent commands to interact with observed resources.
What is 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.
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What are some alternatives to K9s and Rancher?
Octant
A tool for developers to understand how applications run on a Kubernetes cluster. It aims to be part of the developer's toolkit for gaining insight and approaching complexity found in 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.
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
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.
Argo
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).