Gardener vs Portainer
| Gardener | Portainer | |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | No | Yes |
| Free trial | No | Yes |
| Paid from | — | $12.92/mo |
| Open source | No | No |
| Platforms | api, self-hosted, Web | api, Linux, self-hosted, Web |
| Control plane management | vendor-managed | both |
| Supported environments | Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Azure, Equinix Metal, GCP, Hetzner Cloud, IronCore, KubeVirt, metal-stack, OpenStack, STACKIT, vSphere | EKS, AKS, GKE, bare metal, on-premises, Docker, Docker Swarm, Podman, Azure ACI |
| Cluster provisioning | Yes | Yes |
| Multi-cluster management | Yes | Yes |
| Policy enforcement | Yes | Yes |
| Upgrade management | Yes | Yes |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
Both are listed in Best Kubernetes Management Platforms. On Inferse, Portainer scores higher on our published basis.