Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Google Kubernetes Engine vs Kubernetes 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
4.8
Google Kubernetes Engine offers cost efficiency and productivity, though additional service costs and competition may affect returns.
Sentiment score
8.6
Organizations experience various ROI benefits from Kubernetes like stability, efficiency, cost savings, and enhanced infrastructure use via containerization.
By migrating from AWS to Google Cloud Platform, we have saved a lot of time and money.
Director at Taotesting
What earlier required manual coordination and took thirty to forty minutes per release is now usually completed within ten to fifteen minutes.
DevOps Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
We receive revenue and returns from its deployment due to improved services and applications.
Scholar Trainee/Project Engineer at Wipro Limited
I have seen a return on investment, and the metrics in return for the investment are very fast.
Site Reliability Engineer at Tiendanube
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
3.3
User satisfaction with Google Kubernetes Engine support is mixed, with some praising efficiency and others noting delays and challenges.
Sentiment score
6.7
Kubernetes users balance self-management and community resources with vendor and third-party support for efficient issue resolution.
In addition to official support, Kubernetes community ecosystem is very strong.
DevOps Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
The application is stable, and I seldom require support.
Scholar Trainee/Project Engineer at Wipro Limited
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
5.0
Google Kubernetes Engine excels in scalability, supporting dynamic scaling for enterprises and cloud platforms, ideal for diverse applications.
Sentiment score
8.1
Kubernetes enables seamless scalability and efficient resource management across diverse environments, supporting businesses of all sizes and workloads.
The autoscaling capabilities of Google Kubernetes Engine have significantly impacted our operations.
Director at Taotesting
Overall, Kubernetes gives a lot of flexibility to handle growth and spikes without re-architecting the system.
DevOps Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Kubernetes is highly scalable, earning a rating of eight out of ten.
Scholar Trainee/Project Engineer at Wipro Limited
By using horizontal pod autoscalers, Kubernetes automatically adjusts the number of pods based on CPU, memory usage, or other metrics.
AWS DevOps Engineer at Hexaware Technologies Limited
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.4
Google Kubernetes Engine is stable, with minimal downtime and consistent performance, appreciated for scalability and adaptability across environments.
Sentiment score
7.4
Kubernetes is stable and reliable, with proper maintenance and best practices essential for seamless operation in managed environments.
If I have 100 replicas of containers and the traffic suddenly pushes to 1,000 within a fraction of a second, the selected machine type must be fast.
Cloud Associate DevOps at Publicis Sapient
As long as best practices are followed, such as proper resource limits, health checks, and monitoring, Kubernetes provides a stable foundation for production workloads.
DevOps Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Our organization performs robust testing before sending changes to production, ensuring the stability of Kubernetes in live environments.
AWS DevOps Engineer at Hexaware Technologies Limited
Kubernetes offers high stability, allowing for easy scaling of ports and containers.
Scholar Trainee/Project Engineer at Wipro Limited
 

Room For Improvement

Users suggest improvements in pricing, upgrades, interface, security, support, integration, backup, and performance visibility for Google Kubernetes Engine.
Kubernetes users seek an intuitive dashboard, improved integration, enhanced security, better documentation, and simplified deployment and management.
When looking at the web interface, it feels kind of slow due to the many features involved.
Product Manager at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
Log observability could be made easier so someone from high school can use it without having technological expertise.
Consultant at HSBC
It would be helpful if I could easily find log information in a particular namespace without needing to write certain labels.
Director at Taotesting
Kubernetes is a very mature and reliable platform, and the benefits clearly outweigh the limitations for most production use cases.
DevOps Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Improved documentation would help in gaining scalable knowledge and making it more understandable.
Scholar Trainee/Project Engineer at Wipro Limited
After the upgrade, some pods were not up as expected, leading to downtime.
AWS DevOps Engineer at Hexaware Technologies Limited
 

Setup Cost

Google Kubernetes Engine offers usage-based pricing with flexibility, but costs may rise with robust configurations and small deployments.
Kubernetes is cost-effective at scale but pricier for smaller setups, with costs affected by cloud resources and managed services.
Instead, we only pay for the hardware we use, which results in cost-cutting.
Cloud Associate DevOps at Publicis Sapient
Google is considered cheaper compared to AWS, making it suitable for smaller to medium companies concerning cost.
Product Manager at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
The on-demand nodes are quite expensive.
Director at Taotesting
Kubernetes itself is open source and free, so there is no licensing cost for the software.
DevOps Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Since we use Kubernetes on-premises, the costs are related to our expertise and the personnel we hire.
Head of Data Science center of excellence at Ameriabank CJSC
the setup costs are high.
Site Reliability Engineer at Tiendanube
 

Valuable Features

Google Kubernetes Engine excels with auto-scaling, easy deployment, integration, security, and reduced complexity for seamless application management.
Kubernetes offers scalable, automated container orchestration with features like auto-repair, high availability, and seamless cloud integration.
The most valuable aspect of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is its managed nature, which significantly reduces the burden on our platform team.
Product Manager at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
The best advantage of Google Kubernetes Engine is that it manages Kubernetes for you, making everything related to the master nodes managed for you with automatic updating and upgrading.
Solution Architect at Rutotech
GKE is easier to understand and use than Elastic Kubernetes Service.
Consultant at HSBC
Kubernetes also offers rollback control and auto-scaling capabilities, which are crucial for maintaining an application's availability even if nodes or pods go down.
AWS DevOps Engineer at Hexaware Technologies Limited
The feature that stands out most for me is self-healing. If a pod crashes or a node fails, Kubernetes automatically recreates the pod and maintains the desired state.
DevOps Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
For us, having fast storage classes is very important.
Head of Data Science center of excellence at Ameriabank CJSC
 

Categories and Ranking

Google Kubernetes Engine
Ranking in Container Management
9th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Kubernetes
Ranking in Container Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
80
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Google Kubernetes Engine is 2.4%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Kubernetes is 6.9%, up from 4.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Container Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Kubernetes6.9%
Google Kubernetes Engine2.4%
Other90.7%
Container Management
 

Featured Reviews

Parthasarathy T - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
RV
DevOps Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Automated deployments and self-healing have transformed how I run reliable chat services
For improvements, I would definitely suggest some enhancements to Kubernetes. While Kubernetes is very powerful, there are still a few areas where it could be improved. Our challenge is the learning curve and operational complexity. For new team members, concepts such as networking, RBAC, Ingress, and troubleshooting distributed systems can take time to understand. Better built-in onboarding tools or simplified abstractions would help. Another pain point is debugging and observability. While kubectl provides good basic visibility, deep debugging across multiple services, pods, and nodes often requires external tooling such as Prometheus, Grafana, or centralized logging. Stronger native observability features would be very helpful. Networking and Ingress configuration can also be complex, especially when dealing with certificates, routing rules, and cloud-specific integrations. A more standardized experience across environments could reduce operational overhead. From a cost perspective, managing and optimizing resource usage at scale still requires careful monitoring and tuning. Better built-in cost visibility would be very helpful. For the needed improvements, I think that covers most of my main concerns. The biggest areas for improvement are still around simplifying operations, better native observability, and easier cost visibility. If I had to add one more point, it would be around standardization and developer experience. Sometimes different clusters, cloud providers, or tooling setups behave slightly differently, which increases maintenance efforts. More consistent defaults and opinionated best practices could help teams adopt Kubernetes faster and with fewer surprises. Overall, despite these challenges, Kubernetes is a very mature and reliable platform, and the benefits clearly outweigh the limitations for most production use cases. An additional area that could be improved is upgrade and version management. While managed services help coordinate Kubernetes version upgrades, API deprecations and compatibility with add-ons can still be time-consuming and risky for production environments. Better tooling and clearer migration automation would make upgrades safer and easier. Another improvement could be around documentation, consistency, and discoverability. Kubernetes documentation is very comprehensive, but for beginners, it can sometimes be overwhelming to navigate and identify best practice paths.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Container Management solutions are best for your needs.
881,565 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
24%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business21
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise15
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business26
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise47
 

Questions from the Community

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 do you like most about Kubernetes?
There are many good features. I feel that the scale-out features, like replica sets, are very good. The number of running containers can be autoscaled.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Kubernetes?
I have had a good experience with pricing, but the setup costs are high.
What needs improvement with Kubernetes?
Kubernetes can be improved, though I cannot specify exactly how at this time.
 

Also Known As

GKE
K8
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Philips Lighting, Alpha Vertex, GroupBy, BQ
China unicom, NetEase Cloud, Nav, AppDirect
Find out what your peers are saying about Google Kubernetes Engine vs. Kubernetes and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,565 professionals have used our research since 2012.