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Amazon EKS vs Rancher Labs comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 13, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
4.3
Amazon EKS offers cost-effectiveness, scalability, and ease of management, driving user satisfaction despite potential OpEx increases with scale.
Sentiment score
8.5
Rancher Labs provides efficient open-source solutions like OpenShift with significant cost savings and an eight out of ten rating.
We have cost explorer available, and a bill forecast based on usage allows us to determine whether resources are underutilized or overutilized.
It's a fast deployment, with very good documentation, and it's really helpful.
I can recommend using it to save costs and for faster deployment, better performance, security, and easy clustering.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.7
Amazon EKS customer service is praised for responsiveness, with faster assistance through paid support and mostly reliable service.
Sentiment score
7.8
Rancher Labs' customer service and technical support are praised for responsiveness, with users valuing community forums for assistance.
We didn't need to manage etcd and those control management tools; it's totally handled from the AWS side, making it very beneficial.
We have a paid subscription that provides priority support.
Amazon's technical support is quite good, especially for those who purchase support services.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
5.8
Amazon EKS is preferred for its robust scalability, efficiently managing large clusters and workloads, ensuring operational stability and performance.
Sentiment score
7.7
Rancher Labs offers robust scalability for small to large teams, with effective deployment and minor automation improvements suggested.
The ability to scale based on requirements by deploying additional containers is a strong point for Kubernetes.
This allows us to scale our applications or APIs as needed, offering reliability through the automation of scaling processes.
It can scale very well according to needs, and it doesn't have any issues with scalability.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
6.8
Amazon EKS is highly rated for stability, reliability, and minimal issues, with improvements seen in recent versions.
Sentiment score
8.7
Rancher Labs is praised for its stability and reliability, though users note complexity and upgrade challenges.
There are multiple availability zones in the regions, meaning no single point of failure.
Amazon EKS is very stable, and when properly configured, I rate it ten out of ten.
Amazon EKS is stable.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon EKS users desire better stability, UI, documentation, security, cost efficiency, flexibility, and a more user-friendly dashboard.
Rancher Labs needs improved stability, integrations, user-friendly features, enhanced security, multicloud support, and better community and development resources.
Simplifying these will enable more people, not just those with strong foundational knowledge, to work effectively with these services.
Amazon EKS can be improved by having the maintenance of Kubernetes versions managed better, as everything is handled by the Kubernetes team and possibly a separate team at AWS.
Adding logging would be a valuable improvement.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon EKS, known for scalability, offers pay-per-use pricing but concerns arise over high costs for smaller businesses.
Rancher Labs provides a cost-effective open-source container orchestration with optional paid support, seen as competitively mid-range priced.
The EKS service itself is free, but you will incur costs for the VMs used as nodes in that cluster.
The pricing structure is beneficial for large companies who pay for what they use, but it is not affordable for startups.
Now, it stands at six or seven due to optimizing our workload.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon EKS simplifies microservices deployment with scalability, Fargate integration, Kubernetes compatibility, and efficient resource management across multi-cloud environments.
Rancher Labs offers user-friendly Kubernetes management, seamless integrations, and supports GitOps and virtual machine management with promising potential.
The most beneficial aspect of Amazon EKS is that it helps manage the Kubernetes master node, so I don't need to maintain the master node, including tasks like upgrading.
The main benefits that I received from using Amazon EKS are that it is a managed cluster and offers simplicity.
By default, if you just install Amazon EKS, you can deploy your application, but to have it enterprise-ready, you have to configure a number of other things that will boost productivity.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EKS
Ranking in Container Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
67
Ranking in other categories
Container Security (15th)
Rancher Labs
Ranking in Container Management
9th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Data Storage for Kubernetes (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Amazon EKS is 11.8%, down from 14.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Rancher Labs is 6.9%, down from 9.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Container Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Amazon EKS11.8%
Rancher Labs6.9%
Other81.3%
Container Management
 

Featured Reviews

Sameer Mirza - PeerSpot reviewer
Managed service ensures efficient monitoring and security with outstanding scalability
Amazon EKS's self-healing nodes help minimize administrative burdens in my organization by automating through all of Amazon EKS. We have used multiple types of automation tools which we directly integrate for the deployment purpose of the Amazon EKS cluster. We have integrated them with the Docker side of Amazon EKS, allowing the container service to run over there, so it is directly deployed for the administrative level of the Amazon EKS cluster. The benefits I have seen from Amazon EKS include a fully managed Kubernetes service for the control plane, the API server level, etcd scheduler, and controller. There's no need to worry about patching, scaling, and maintaining the master node. There is high availability over multiple availability zone control panels, and security compliance is guaranteed for IAM; AWS IAM users authenticate and access the control from the support VPC isolation and security group network policy. The integration with IAM helps enhance our authentication process because IAM basically helps with access. Nobody can enter with any kind of access, and any kind of vulnerability will be showing in my application. If I set an IAM user to that Amazon EKS cluster, that user will have limited access, and that application will run through that IAM user only. It is very beneficial, and for security purposes, it's also important because vulnerabilities will be found and block all the vulnerability and security issues if you set an IAM user to the Amazon EKS cluster with limited access.
RyanVassallo - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers an open-source version along with a good UI
The product has multiple good features. One of the solution's good features is that it is the GitOps functionality known as Rancher fleet, which is used for continuous delivery. The tool's UI is very convenient enough to help you manage multiple clusters in the cloud or on-premises, making it a product with which you can manage different clusters and locations. The tool also has a feature that is still kind of maturing, but I think it has very good potential. This new feature is named Harvester, which is allows users to have virtual machines managed by Kubernetes engine. This is very new technology in the market. I think that Harvester needs to mature as a product, and I think that in the future, it will be very powerful. You have one tool that does many things for you.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
11%
Insurance Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
41%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise31
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise6
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon EKS?
The product's most valuable features are scalability, observability, and performance.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EKS?
Regarding the cost of Amazon EKS, I would say it's relative to the organization based on release management processes; for big organizations where customer experience matters, such as in the retail...
What needs improvement with Amazon EKS?
One area I observed during setup was that while managing it through CLI and Terraform, there are many possibilities for setup and infrastructure updates. However, I believe the console experience c...
What do you like most about Rancher Labs?
The tool's UI is very convenient enough to help you manage multiple clusters in the cloud or the company, making it a product with which you can manage different clusters and locations.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Rancher Labs?
The cost is reasonable since it's open-source. Rancher effectively addresses container orchestration trends, especially for those with some Kubernetes knowledge.
What needs improvement with Rancher Labs?
While Rancher Labs provides some level of security, it's not considered very robust. We found it to offer basic security features, which met some of our requirements, but we also relied on other op...
 

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

GoDaddy, Pearson, FICO, Intuit, Verizon, Honeywell, Logicworks, RetailMeNot, LogMeIn, Conde Nast, mercari, Trainline, Axway
Albert Heijn, Bell, BMC, Samsung, WindStream, Johnson & Johnson
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EKS vs. Rancher Labs and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
866,324 professionals have used our research since 2012.