Container Orchestration Tools

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) vs Portainer

Compare Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Portainer side-by-side. See feature differences and pricing in the Container Orchestration Tools category.

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

by Microsoft

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Pricing: Free tier with no control plane fee; Standard $73 and Premium $438 per cluster a month; AKS Automatic $116.80 per cluster a month plus per-vCPU fees. Nodes billed separately.

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is Microsoft's managed Kubernetes service for teams on Azure, run in Automatic or Standard mode and priced per cluster.

15 /17 features Full profile

Portainer

by Portainer

No reviews yet

Pricing: Free for 3 nodes; Starter from $1,045 a year and Scale from $2,095 a year, billed annually; Enterprise by quote; edge fleets priced by core count.

Portainer is a container management console for ops teams running Kubernetes, Docker, Swarm and Podman, sold per node with an open source edition.

10 /17 features Full profile

Feature Comparison

Container Orchestration Tools features side-by-side

Feature	Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) 15/17 features	Portainer 10/17 features
Declarative scheduling with resource requests Workloads declare CPU and memory needs and the scheduler places them on nodes with capacity.	Yes	Yes
Self-healing restart and rescheduling Failed containers are restarted and workloads on dead nodes are moved automatically.	Yes	No
Rolling updates with rollback New versions roll out gradually and can be rolled back to the previous revision on failure.	No	No
Workload autoscaling on metrics Replica counts scale up and down on CPU, memory or custom application metrics.	Yes	Yes
Cluster node autoscaling Nodes are added or removed from the cluster as pending workload demand changes.	Yes	No
Built-in service discovery and load balancing Services get a stable name and address, with traffic spread across healthy replicas.	Yes	No
Ingress and external load balancer integration HTTP routing rules and cloud load balancers expose services outside the cluster.	Yes	Yes
Dynamic persistent volume provisioning Storage volumes are created on demand from a storage class and attached to workloads.	Yes	Yes
Config and secret injection into workloads Configuration values and secrets are mounted or set as environment variables at start-up.	Yes	Yes
Namespace isolation with RBAC and quotas Teams get separate namespaces with role-based permissions and resource quotas.	Yes	Yes
Network policies between workloads Rules control which workloads may talk to each other on the cluster network.	Yes	Yes
Managed control plane offering The vendor runs and patches the control plane so teams only manage worker nodes.	Yes	No
Multi-cluster management console One console provisions, upgrades and monitors many clusters across clouds and data centres.	No	Yes
Automated cluster version upgrades Control plane and node versions can be upgraded in place through the platform.	Yes	No
Helm chart application catalog Applications can be installed from a catalog of Helm charts or packaged templates.	Yes	Yes
GitOps reconciliation from a repository Cluster state is continuously reconciled with manifests held in a Git repository.	Yes	Yes
CNCF-certified Kubernetes conformance The distribution passes the CNCF conformance tests for the Kubernetes API.	Yes	No
Overall Rating	No reviews yet	No reviews yet

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) 15/17 features

Declarative scheduling with resource requests: Yes
Self-healing restart and rescheduling: Yes
Rolling updates with rollback: No
Workload autoscaling on metrics: Yes
Cluster node autoscaling: Yes
Built-in service discovery and load balancing: Yes
Ingress and external load balancer integration: Yes
Dynamic persistent volume provisioning: Yes
Config and secret injection into workloads: Yes
Namespace isolation with RBAC and quotas: Yes
Network policies between workloads: Yes
Managed control plane offering: Yes
Multi-cluster management console: No
Automated cluster version upgrades: Yes
Helm chart application catalog: Yes
GitOps reconciliation from a repository: Yes
CNCF-certified Kubernetes conformance: Yes

No reviews yet

Portainer 10/17 features

Declarative scheduling with resource requests: Yes
Self-healing restart and rescheduling: No
Rolling updates with rollback: No
Workload autoscaling on metrics: Yes
Cluster node autoscaling: No
Built-in service discovery and load balancing: No
Ingress and external load balancer integration: Yes
Dynamic persistent volume provisioning: Yes
Config and secret injection into workloads: Yes
Namespace isolation with RBAC and quotas: Yes
Network policies between workloads: Yes
Managed control plane offering: No
Multi-cluster management console: Yes
Automated cluster version upgrades: No
Helm chart application catalog: Yes
GitOps reconciliation from a repository: Yes
CNCF-certified Kubernetes conformance: No

No reviews yet

Pricing

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

Free tier with no control plane fee; Standard $73 and Premium $438 per cluster a month; AKS Automatic $116.80 per cluster a month plus per-vCPU fees. Nodes billed separately.

See all plans

Portainer

Free for 3 nodes; Starter from $1,045 a year and Scale from $2,095 a year, billed annually; Enterprise by quote; edge fleets priced by core count.

See all plans

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