Google Kubernetes Engine vs HashiCorp Nomad comparison

Google and HashiCorp are both solutions in the Container Management category. Google is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.1, while HashiCorp is ranked #15 with an average rating of 8.0. Google holds a 2.1% mindshare in CM, compared to HashiCorp’s 3.5% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Google users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of HashiCorp users who would recommend it.

Google Kubernetes Engine

Read 39 Google Kubernetes Engine reviews

1,122 Views
763 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

HashiCorp Nomad

Read 2 HashiCorp Nomad reviews

919 Views
891 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Google Kubernetes Engine

HashiCorp Nomad

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 13, 2024

Google Kubernetes Engine and HashiCorp Nomad compete in the container orchestration solutions category, with HashiCorp Nomad generally having the upper hand due to its flexibility and scalability, particularly appealing for diverse deployment environments.

Features: Google Kubernetes Engine provides deep integration with Google Cloud, automatic scaling, and multi-cluster support to efficiently manage workloads. HashiCorp Nomad is versatile, supporting workloads beyond containers, making it robust for mixed environments, and offers flexibility for varied architectures.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Google Kubernetes Engine benefits from streamlined deployment within the Google Cloud ecosystem, though its complexity may pose a steep learning curve. It offers extensive customer support. HashiCorp Nomad, with a simpler deployment model and comprehensive documentation, enables easy integration into existing infrastructures. Its community-driven approach and clear guides are practical for implementation.

Pricing and ROI: Google Kubernetes Engine generally incurs higher setup costs due to its cloud-centric model, delivering significant ROI for projects aligned with Google Cloud. HashiCorp Nomad offers lower initial costs and improved ROI potential for organizations leveraging multi-cloud strategies or on-premise resources. Its cost-effectiveness appeals to those seeking diverse deployment capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed Google Kubernetes Engine vs. HashiCorp Nomad Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Google Kubernetes Engine vs. HashiCorp Nomad

September 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 869,566 peers since 2012

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 Kubernetes Engine

Ranking in Container Management

10th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

HashiCorp Nomad

Ranking in Container Management

15th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Google Kubernetes Engine is 2.1%, down from 2.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HashiCorp Nomad is 3.5%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Container Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Google Kubernetes Engine	2.1%
HashiCorp Nomad	3.5%
Other	94.4%

Container Management

Featured Reviews

Parthasarathy T

Cloud Associate DevOps at Publicis Sapient

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.

Read full review

Zeeshan Akhtar

Full stack developer at VMware

Has out of the box features , which is good for companies that don't want to spend too much time on research

I've noticed a few UI issues. For example, when monitoring services and tasks, sometimes the tasks keep disconnecting. If you open the shell in HashiCorp Nomad using the exit button, it often disconnects, and you have to log in again. Sometimes, when I check the logs in the UI for microservices tasks, I encounter an issue where the logs are not visible. However, if I log in again after some time, refresh the page, or check a different container, the logs usually appear. These logs are being generated, as I can see them being shipped to my LogView. I'm not sure if this is a product issue or something related to our deployment, but I've noticed it.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The deployment of the cluster is very easy."

"The logs are important for detecting problems in our clusters."

"GKE's plugin management and configuration sync are excellent features. The amount of data it provides is good, and I've been able to integrate it with the things I need."

"The product has valuable security features. It can connect with multiple DevOps tools."

"The most valuable aspect of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is its managed nature, which significantly reduces the burden on our platform team."

"GKE is easier to understand and use than Elastic Kubernetes Service."

"Regarding deployment in the cloud platform, it is simple because there are pre-configured configurations."

"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."

More Google Kubernetes Engine pros

"If you face an issue with an image during deployment, the solution will automatically revert to the last stable image."

"You could get most of HashiCorp Nomad's features from other microservice orchestrators like Kubernetes. The tool's advantage is its ease of use and integration with services like Envoy. With Kubernetes, you must think about many things, like UI integration, which vault to use, and how to discover the service. With the tool, many things come out of the box, making it easy to start. For example, using the Ingress proxy with the tool is quite easy, while it's trickier with Kubernetes."

Cons

"There are some security issues, but it might just be because we are not up to speed yet as much as we should be and so we haven't found it in the documentation yet. That's why I don't want to confuse this. Still, it could be a little bit easier to understand and implement."

"The solution does not have a visual interface."

"There is a limitation for our infrastructure. It's very complex to see in one dashboard all the components and all the behavior on performance. I am looking for some additional tools for that. If I want to check the disk or file storage, it gets complex. There should be an integrated dashboard so that we can manage everything through a single pane."

"The notifications are not informative."

"Our critique is that we have to do too much work to get the cluster production-ready."

"t is not very stable."

"Google Kubernetes Engine is less stable in some highly complex deployments with many nodes."

"The product could be cheaper."

More Google Kubernetes Engine cons

"It would be good to have a UI interface so that developers could receive notifications for jobs in a bad state."

"I've noticed a few UI issues. For example, when monitoring services and tasks, sometimes the tasks keep disconnecting. If you open the shell in HashiCorp Nomad using the exit button, it often disconnects, and you have to log in again. Sometimes, when I check the logs in the UI for microservices tasks, I encounter an issue where the logs are not visible. However, if I log in again after some time, refresh the page, or check a different container, the logs usually appear. These logs are being generated, as I can see them being shipped to my LogView. I'm not sure if this is a product issue or something related to our deployment, but I've noticed it."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This is an open source solution, so there is no pricing or licensing."

"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."

"Currently, it costs around $1000 per month which sorted our deployment. So once we get more clients, having a huge suffix, costs can go up."

"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 Kubernetes' pricing four out of five."

"The product is a little bit expensive."

"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."

"Pricing is a bit expensive compared to some other products, but it's acceptable."

More Google Kubernetes Engine pricing and cost advice

Information not available

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Container Management solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

869,566 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

25%

Computer Software Company

10%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

20%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	20
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	15

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Google Kubernetes Engine?

The product has no downtime.

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Google Kubernetes Engine?

See all answers

What needs improvement with HashiCorp Nomad?

Sometimes, the job is in a bad state, and we don't get any notifications. It would be good to have a UI interface so that developers could receive notifications for jobs in a bad state.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for HashiCorp Nomad?

We use HashiCorp Nomad mainly to deploy our images in the form of jobs. It is also used for load balancing, containerization, and instance deployment.

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering HashiCorp Nomad?

I would recommend HashiCorp Nomad to other users because it is the best tool for deployment. It is easy for a beginner to learn to use HashiCorp Nomad for the first time. Any developer with a decen...

See all answers

Comparisons

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform vs Google Kubernetes Engine

Compared 24% of the time

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Google Kubernetes Engine

Compared 17% of the time

Docker vs Google Kubernetes Engine

Compared 17% of the time

Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode) vs Google Kubernetes Engine

Compared 14% of the time

Kubernetes vs Google Kubernetes Engine

Compared 13% of the time

More Google Kubernetes Engine Competitors

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform vs HashiCorp Nomad

Compared 32% of the time

Rancher Labs vs HashiCorp Nomad

Compared 13% of the time

Portainer vs HashiCorp Nomad

Compared 12% of the time

Red Hat OpenShift vs HashiCorp Nomad

Compared 9% of the time

Kubernetes vs HashiCorp Nomad

Compared 9% of the time

More HashiCorp Nomad Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Google Kubernetes Engine

September 2025

Download Google Kubernetes Engine product report

Buyer's Guide

Container Management

September 2025

Download HashiCorp Nomad product report

Also Known As

GKE

No data available

Overview

Kubernetes Engine is a managed, production-ready environment for deploying containerized applications. It brings our latest innovations in developer productivity, resource efficiency, automated operations, and open source flexibility to accelerate your time to market.

Google

HashiCorp was founded by Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar in 2012 with the goal of revolutionizing datacenter management: application development, delivery, and maintenance.

The datacenter of today is very different than the datacenter of yesterday, and we think the datacenter of tomorrow is just around the corner. We're writing software to take you all the way from yesterday to today, and then safely to tomorrow and beyond.

Physical, virtual, containers. Private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS. Windows, Linux, Mac. These are just some of the choices faced when architecting a datacenter of today. And the choice is not one or the other; instead, it is often a combination of many of these.

HashiCorp builds tools to ease these decisions by presenting solutions that span the gaps. Our tools manage both physical machines and virtual machines, Windows, and Linux, SaaS and IaaS, etc. And we're committed to supporting next-generation technologies, as well.

HashiCorp was founded and continues to be run by the primary authors of all our core technologies powering thousands of companies worldwide. We speak at conferences and write books related to application and infrastructure management.

All our foundational technologies are open source and developed openly, and have been since 2010.

The Tao of HashiCorp is the foundation that guides our vision, roadmap, and product design. As you evaluate using or contributing to HashiCorp's products, it may be valuable to understand the motivations and intentions for our work.

HashiCorp

Sample Customers

Philips Lighting, Alpha Vertex, GroupBy, BQ

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Google Kubernetes Engine vs. HashiCorp Nomad

September 2025

Free Report: Google Kubernetes Engine vs. HashiCorp Nomad

Find out what your peers are saying about Google Kubernetes Engine vs. HashiCorp Nomad and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

869,566 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Google Kubernetes Engine vs. HashiCorp Nomad report.

See our list of best Container Management vendors.

We monitor all Container Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.