Kuma
7.5#1 in service mesh platformsFree planFree planWebAPILinuxmacOS
VisitKuma vs Linkerd
What both publish
| Fact | Kuma | Linkerd |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment | Kuma supports single-zone and multi-zone deployments across clouds, regions, and Kubernetes clusters. | Linkerd is installed into a Kubernetes cluster and adds its data plane to workloads by injecting proxies into their pods. |
| Integrations | Kuma's observability documentation describes integrations with Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, and Datadog. | Linkerd can use Prometheus and Grafana for metrics and dashboards, and supports distributed tracing. |
| Observability | Listed observability features include service maps, traces, access logs, metrics, and OpenTelemetry. | Linkerd records request volume, success rates, and latency distributions for HTTP, HTTP/2, and gRPC traffic, plus TCP-level metrics. |
| Security | Listed security features include multi-mesh, mutual TLS, and mesh traffic permissions. | Linkerd automatically enables mutual TLS for communication between meshed applications and supports authorization policies between services. |
Kuma plans
- Kuma open-sourceFree
- Open sourceFree
Linkerd plans
- Linkerd open sourceFree
Pick Kuma if…
Kuma suits teams managing service meshes across Kubernetes, VMs, or bare metal, including multi-zone or multi-mesh setups. It is aimed at teams comfortable with self-hosted software and its production security considerations.
Pick Linkerd if…
It suits teams running workloads on Kubernetes that need service-level traffic controls, metrics, and mutual TLS. It also fits environments with an existing metrics store to supplement.