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Google Cloud Run vs Google Kubernetes Engine comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Google Cloud Run
Ranking in Container Management
14th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
2.2
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Containers as a Service (CaaS) (5th)
Google Kubernetes Engine
Ranking in Container Management
11th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

Vyas Shubham - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Quality Analyst at a consultancy with 51-200 employees
Serverless containers have transformed how we deploy microservices and event-driven workloads
There are a few areas that could be improved. We have experienced cold start latency because when scaling from zero, the first request is slow. It also impacts user experience for real-time applications. The improvement we require is faster cold starts or smarter pre-warming options. There are also limitations with long-running workloads. It is not ideal for very long or always-running processes, and request timeouts are somewhat restrictive. The improvement we want is better support for persistent workloads without workarounds. We have also identified improvements needed in debugging and observability complexity because logs and monitoring are available, but they feel scattered at times, and debugging distributed microservices is harder. The improvement we require is more unified and developer-friendly debugging tools.
Parthasarathy T - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Associate Dev Ops at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
Managed solutions enable efficient handling of web applications and migration projects
Google Kubernetes Engine can be improved by enabling the in-place upgrade of the machine type of an existing node pool since I currently need to destroy and recreate it. There is no feature present where I can upgrade directly, and having more than 1,000 to 2,000 workloads in one node pool makes changing the node pool name difficult for all those workloads. I choose eight out of ten mainly because of the node pool upgrade challenge I mentioned, but also because of the existence of Anthos service mesh, which is the ingress controller available only for the enterprise Kubernetes Engine. It would be beneficial if it could be offered in the normal Kubernetes Engine with any limitations.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Google Cloud Run has positively impacted my organization in numerous ways, such as significant cost efficiency and reduced overhead since we only pay for the resources that we use."
"Google Cloud Run has positively impacted our organization by saving us five thousand dollars per month based on scheduling our infrastructure from nine p.m. to nine a.m. for shutdown and starting, as well as stopping the MongoDB clusters."
"Google Cloud Run and the Google Cloud environment positively impact my organization by providing almost 99.9% availability for applications, which instills confidence in the organization and users by reducing the dependency on the physical network and allowing access to applications and data."
"Google Cloud Run has impacted my organization positively through faster deployment and development, where developers can deploy applications quickly without worrying about infrastructure, push the app live with just containers, speed up time to market significantly, launch features faster and iterate more often, pay only when code runs without maintaining idle servers, reduce cloud costs dramatically for applications with low or unpredictable traffic, automatically scale based on traffic spikes to handle sudden loads without manual intervention so our business does not lose users during peak hours, and let developers focus on business logic instead of DevOps."
"Google Cloud Run is a very good tool that I use for deploying applications; its ease of deployment, auto scaling features, and resource optimization are very nice features that help individuals deploy their apps and solutions into the cloud without any hiccups."
"In Google Cloud Run, we are mainly using the feature where we can directly pull images from Docker Hub."
"The initial setup process is simpler and more user-friendly than other cloud providers."
"The initial setup is very easy. We can create our cluster using the command line, or using our console."
"Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) takes care of managing Kubernetes, including the main control plane. It also offers solutions for monitoring resources and handling external traffic, which is essential for us. Being a cloud-native solution, it relieves us from worrying about these operational aspects."
"It is easy to use and deploy."
"The most beneficial feature is the ability to separate each project and manage permissions more effectively."
"The product’s dashboard is very intuitive."
"The most valuable feature of Google Kubernetes Engine is how you can automatically scale and load balance."
"Its functionalities, such as computing the namespaces, clusters, pods, and restart logs, are easy to use."
 

Cons

"There are a few areas where Google Cloud Run could improve."
"When it starts from idle to full run, it scales slowly, causing slowness in the service deployed; sometimes some of the APIs fail to respond."
"There are a few areas that could be improved. We have experienced cold start latency because when scaling from zero, the first request is slow."
"One area where Google Cloud Run could be better is the cold start; when a container scales, it starts from zero and takes a moment to boot up before it can serve the request."
"If speaking about improvements for Google Cloud Run, I think they could reduce the cold starts and manage to configure a set number of minimum instances to keep the instances in a warm phase."
"One of the things I missed a bit is the visibility and availability of solutions. If I compare it to a different solution, it is a bit behind."
"The primary area for improvement would be the complexity involved when working with Google Kubernetes Engine, especially when using Terraform."
"The price could be a bit cheaper."
"I have created a couple of issues with Google tech support, and I am not satisfied with the assistance I received."
"We would like to see some improvement in the ease of integration with this solution."
"The support is not that great. I rate the support a three or four out of ten."
"While the GKE cluster is secure, application-level security is an essential aspect that needs to be addressed. The security provided by GKE includes the security of communication between nodes within the cluster and the basic features of Kubernetes security. However, these features may not be sufficient for the security needs of an enterprise. Additional security measures must be added to ensure adequate protection. It has become a common practice to deploy security tools within a Kubernetes cluster. It would be ideal if these tools were included as part of the package, as this is a standard requirement in the industry. Thus, application-level security should be integrated into GKE for improved security measures."
"t is not very stable."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The pricing for GKE is dependent on the type of machine or virtual machine (VM) that is selected for the nodes in the cluster. There is a degree of flexibility in choosing the specifications of the machine, such as the number of CPUs, GPUs, and so on. Google provides a variety of options, allowing the user to create the desired cluster composition. However, the cost can be quite steep when it comes to regional clusters, which are necessary for high availability and failover. This redundancy is crucial for businesses and is required to handle an increase in requests in case of any issues in one region, such as jumping to a different region in case of a failure in the Toronto region. While it may be tempting to choose the cheapest type of machines, this may result in a limited capacity and user numbers, requiring over-provisioning to handle additional requests, such as those for a web application."
"This is an open source solution, so there is no pricing or licensing."
"The tool's licensing costs are yearly."
"Its pricing is good. They bill us only per user. That's nice."
"It is competitive, and it is not expensive. It is almost competitive with AWS and the rest of the cloud solutions. We are spending around 3K USD per month. There are four projects that are currently running, and each one is incurring a cost of around 3K USD."
"I would rate the solution's pricing a nine out of ten. The tool costs around 3000 dollars per month. There are no additional costs apart from these."
"Initially, Google Kubernetes Engine was a little bit cheaper, but now its prices have been increased compared to the pricing model and the features that are made available by its competitors."
"I rate the product's price a six on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price. The product is competitively priced."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
22%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
Retailer
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business21
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise16
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Google Cloud Run?
If speaking about improvements for Google Cloud Run, I think they could reduce the cold starts and manage to configure a set number of minimum instances to keep the instances in a warm phase. Addit...
What is your primary use case for Google Cloud Run?
In my day-to-day work, I use Google Cloud Run for managing and running cluster and containerized applications on the Google Kubernetes Engine and Google Console. I have created multiple application...
What advice do you have for others considering Google Cloud Run?
If any organization has a lot of load on their Google Kubernetes Engine or on Google Cloud, they can easily switch to Google Cloud Run and should start using it because it will help them in many wa...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google Kubernetes Engine?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Google Kubernetes Engine is straightforward, as I previously indicated. The need for humans is reduced with GCP since there is no need for ...
What needs improvement with Google Kubernetes Engine?
The price could be a bit cheaper. I don't see anything with Google Kubernetes Engine that needs to be improved. I think they are already implementing Kubernetes itself, so they are the owners. Howe...
What is your primary use case for Google Kubernetes Engine?
I use Google Kubernetes Engine for many purposes, most notably for websites, but the websites are microservices. However, some mega projects have many machines that needed to be containerized, so w...
 

Also Known As

Google Cloud Functions, Google Run, GCF
GKE, Google Kubernetes
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Philips Lighting, Alpha Vertex, GroupBy, BQ
Find out what your peers are saying about Google Cloud Run vs. Google Kubernetes Engine and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
896,803 professionals have used our research since 2012.