Spinnaker Reviews

Name: Spinnaker
Brand: Spinnaker
Rating: 4.0 (4 reviews)

4.0 out of 5

4 reviews
75% willing to recommend

What is Spinnaker?

Spinnaker provides application management and deployment to help you release software changes with high velocity and confidence. Spinnaker is an open-source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform that combines a powerful and flexible pipeline management system with integrations to the major cloud providers. If you are looking to standardize your release processes and improve quality, Spinnaker is for you.

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Spinnaker is the #8 ranked solution in top Release Automation solutions. PeerSpot users give Spinnaker an average rating of 8.0 out of 10. Spinnaker is most commonly compared to GitLab: Spinnaker vs GitLab. Spinnaker is popular among the large enterprise segment, accounting for 62% of users researching this solution on PeerSpot. The top industry researching this solution are professionals from a computer software company, accounting for 21% of all views.

Buyer's Guide

Release Automation

May 2025

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Featured Spinnaker reviews

Anurag Bandyopadhyay

Product Development Engineer at Razorpay

Regarding areas for improvement, one significant issue is the lack of maker-checker flows to ensure that newly created pipelines are accurate and tested. We currently use an in-house abstraction over Spinnaker to verify pipeline specs, environment variables, etc. It would be beneficial if Spinnaker could offer this functionality within their product.

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reviewer2509398

architect at Salesforce

I am not sure if anything can be improved in Spinnaker because it was written and designed before Kubernetes was around. All of its authentication, role-based access control, application definition, and other stuff happen outside of Kubernetes, so Spinnaker is not a Kubernetes-native tool. You have to mimic a lot of the stuff you already have the provisions for in Kubernetes. Kubernetes also has parallels to what it is in Spinnaker. If your deployment infrastructure is Kubernetes, to get it running on Kubernetes takes a lot of customizations that you have to do, and it is something that the company has done. One of the downsides of Spinnaker is its scalability. The amount of data that it stores in each pipeline or from a pipeline context is huge. Every time it goes to run a pipeline, it just generates a lot of data, and its database is not exactly tuned out of the box, meaning it is not tuned for high scalability. You start to run a bunch of pipelines in parallel, and very quickly, within a couple of hundred pipeline runs, you start to run into scalability and performance issues.

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Shubham Chakraworty

Infrastructure Engineer at Infosys

The solution's deployment is pretty easy. If you want to go back to the previous version, the rollback is pretty much easy. Spinnaker makes the developer's life easy with respect to the solution's deployment or integration with Slack or any other channel. Spinnaker's notifications are good, and it is pretty much easy to configure. The base setup is pretty much complicated, but it's very easy to use once the setup is done.

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Spinnaker mindshare

As of June 2025, the mindshare of Spinnaker in the Release Automation category stands at 1.5%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year, according to calculations based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Release Automation

Key learnings from peers

Valuable Features

"The tool's most valuable feature is its intuitive interface for converting existing Kubernetes specs into working pipelines. It's easy for anyone to deploy anything on any environment when they need to test or deploy for a specific merchant or use case. Instead of going into the specs and changing different variables, they can do it through the UI, which is very useful."
"Spinnaker is used for automating a variety of deployment tasks, infrastructure, provisioning tasks, and all kinds of things."
"The most valuable feature of Spinnaker is the rollback."

Room for Improvement

"Regarding areas for improvement, one significant issue is the lack of maker-checker flows to ensure that newly created pipelines are accurate and tested. We currently use an in-house abstraction over Spinnaker to verify pipeline specs, environment variables, etc. It would be beneficial if Spinnaker could offer this functionality within their product."
"Every time it goes to run a pipeline, it just generates a lot of data, and its database is not exactly tuned out of the box, meaning it is not tuned for high scalability."
"Spinnaker's configuration setup is too complicated and should be made easy."

Pricing

Spinnaker is an open-source solution available at no cost for enterprises. Organizations benefit from not incurring setup or licensing fees but must budget for server expenses essential for deployment. Teams often manage licensing internally, allowing for streamlined integration without additional costs. The open-source nature provides flexibility and accessibility, making it an attractive option for enterprise users seeking efficient deployment solutions.

"The solution is open-source."
"Spinnaker is an open-source product. The tool is completely free for users."
"Spinnaker is a free-to-use, open-source solution."

Popular Use Cases

Spinnaker is utilized primarily for deployment purposes, deploying Docker containers and images to GKE. It automates deployment tasks and infrastructure provisioning while serving as a generalized workflow engine akin to Argo Workflows. Users employ Spinnaker to create custom pipelines for environments such as staging and production, avoiding manual deployment. Although not Kubernetes-native, Spinnaker efficiently manages various deployment activities across differing environments.

These insights are based on the in-depth reviews provided by peers to help you make a better buying decision.

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