Cluster API vs Gardener
| Cluster API | Gardener | |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | Yes | No |
| Free trial | No | No |
| Paid from | Free | — |
| Open source | No | No |
| Platforms | api, Linux, macOS, self-hosted, Windows | api, self-hosted, Web |
| Control plane management | customer-managed | vendor-managed |
| Supported environments | AWS, Azure, Azure Stack HCI, CloudStack, DigitalOcean, GCP, IBM Cloud, KubeVirt, Metal3, Nutanix, OCI, OpenStack, Outscale, Proxmox, vSphere, VMware Cloud Director, and other provider environments | Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Azure, Equinix Metal, GCP, Hetzner Cloud, IronCore, KubeVirt, metal-stack, OpenStack, STACKIT, vSphere |
| Cluster provisioning | Yes | Yes |
| Multi-cluster management | Yes | Yes |
| Upgrade management | Yes | Yes |
| Policy enforcement | — | Yes |
Both are listed in Best Kubernetes Management Platforms. On Everything Xiaomi, Cluster API scores higher on our published basis.