IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service vs. SUSE Rancher

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Score 9.2 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service is a managed Kubernetes offering, delivering user tools and built-in security for rapid delivery of applications that users can bind to cloud services related to IBM Watson®, IoT, DevOps and data analytics. As a certified K8s provider, IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service provides intelligent scheduling, self-healing, horizontal scaling, service discovery and load balancing, automated rollouts and rollbacks, and secret and configuration management. The Kubernetes…N/A
SUSE Rancher
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Developed by Rancher Labs and now from SUSE, Rancher is open-source software that enables organizations to deploy and manage Kubernetes at scale, on any infrastructure across the data center, cloud, branch offices, and the network edge. Rancher centrally manages Kubernetes clusters across the organization in order to ensure security and accelerate transformation. Rancher is also available hosted. Hosted Rancher is a fully managed Rancher control plane - presented as the fastest, most cost…
$7,594.99
per year up to 500 nodes
Pricing
IBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceSUSE Rancher
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Subscription license
7,594.99
per year up to 500 nodes
Standard Subscription
11,234.99
per year 10 nodes
Priority Subscription
30,514.99
per year 10 nodes
Management Server Priority Subscription
41,830.99
per year 1 instance
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceSUSE Rancher
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
IBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceSUSE Rancher
Considered Both Products
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Chose IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
All of the container management systems we evaluated are popular and each has its unique features and benefits. Kubernetes is the solution we found with containerization, agile development, and continuous delivery which would shorten the time it took to get a project up and …
SUSE Rancher

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
IBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceSUSE Rancher
Container Management
Comparison of Container Management features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
7.5
14 Ratings
5% below category average
SUSE Rancher
8.8
5 Ratings
11% above category average
Security and Isolation7.514 Ratings8.64 Ratings
Container Orchestration8.214 Ratings9.05 Ratings
Cluster Management7.714 Ratings9.55 Ratings
Storage Management7.514 Ratings8.44 Ratings
Resource Allocation and Optimization7.414 Ratings8.84 Ratings
Discovery Tools6.814 Ratings9.34 Ratings
Update Rollouts and Rollbacks7.614 Ratings8.35 Ratings
Self-Healing and Recovery7.713 Ratings8.94 Ratings
Analytics, Monitoring, and Logging7.014 Ratings8.55 Ratings
Best Alternatives
IBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceSUSE Rancher
Small Businesses
Portainer
Portainer
Score 9.3 out of 10
Portainer
Portainer
Score 9.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Docker
Docker
Score 9.2 out of 10
Docker
Docker
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
Docker
Docker
Score 9.2 out of 10
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
IBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceSUSE Rancher
Likelihood to Recommend
8.1
(79 ratings)
9.7
(15 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.9
(16 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
8.7
(16 ratings)
7.3
(2 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.7
(4 ratings)
6.8
(2 ratings)
Online Training
8.7
(15 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
7.6
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
4.5
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
1.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceSUSE Rancher
Likelihood to Recommend
IBM
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service is ideal for deploying modern applications on a microservices architecture -- where easy scaling and ability to update are important. IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service also handles automated deployments and load balancing very well, particularly if you're already working in the IBM Cloud ecosystem. There are applications less suited to IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service -- such as very small applications, where managing an IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service cluster would be overkill. Also, users not familiar with container organization might find IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service to be a challenge to manage effectively.
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SUSE
SUSE Rancher as a management tool becomes useful on a larger scale. Small deployments not so much. If someone also requires Kubernetes capacity or storage, Rancher is an excellent choice. Also, without Kubernetes' skills, it is unlikely that Rancher deployment is going to be a success. Then again if someone else is managing your Kubernetes capacity, setting up the software's capacity will yield greater control. Rancher is not a very integrated solution similar to others in the market.
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Pros
IBM
  • IBM has a strong focus on serverless and Kubernetes. This shows in the platform. Deploying containers to Kubernetes was very easy.
  • Deploying a Kubernetes cluster through the GUI is very easy and quick. On top of that, IBM Cloud offers a single node cluster for Free.
  • Container Registry is a very good product for managing container images. Integration with Kubernetes was seemless.
  • Portability. To transition from Google Cloud Kubernetes to IBM Cloud Kubernetes took almost no effort. We mostly use the CLI and the standard tools such as kubectl were present.
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SUSE
  • Public and private cloud infrastructure providers based on K8s CAPI
  • REST API that can be used to integrate company services with Rancher
  • GUI that is easy to learn and use in daily operations
  • Builtin GitOps automation solution based on Fleet project
  • It is fully open source
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Cons
IBM
  • I constantly get this error even when everything is well configured prefect.exceptions.AuthorizationError: [{'path': ['auth_info'], 'message': 'AuthenticationError: Forbidden', 'extensions': {'code': 'UNAUTHENTICATED'}}]
  • Then sometimes the error disapear without changine anything, happened twice to me. Should there be an issue with the authentication service? Please let's improve or let users know why this may be happening.
  • Improve the UX in the browse console when removing many images at once
  • UX on the process of installing KeyCloack operator
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SUSE
  • No possibility to snapshot Projects. You can snapshot and restore the whole Kubernetes cluster, but not a Project or Namespace. For this, you have to use external tools.
  • You cannot detach the Rancher-created Kubernetes clusters from Rancher management.
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Likelihood to Renew
IBM
We have our application running on a CentOS compartment on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service. We have been utilizing the help since IBM Cloud initially dispatched. We liked the adaptability and versatility that IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service give us. Since we are tiny, the Kubernetes administration is just utilized at present inside my venture bunch.
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SUSE
No answers on this topic
Usability
IBM
We actually haven't had any real problems in our clusters recently and the results we have gotten from adopting IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service have been beyond even our greatest expectations. The community has helped optimize the use of the system and make it relatively simpler to use.
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SUSE
The usability and user experience are good in general, although sometimes some errors can cause confusion, especially for those users who are not experts.
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Reliability and Availability
IBM
IBM's cloud is almost infallible.
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SUSE
No answers on this topic
Performance
IBM
IBM's cloud has a site in my conuntry (MEXICO) so the network latency was almost 0
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SUSE
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
IBM
The self-guided support was solid, and there are plenty of online videos to guide first time users, but I think one area of improvement is a faster way to transfer a large quantity of files from our local machine to the cloud for storage (Aspera)
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SUSE
Use cases can be complex hence support as well. Problems have been solvable, but not always easily. It's great that there is support!
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Online Training
IBM
Online training is really an important resource for using these tools. IBM's help center is rich in useful information and tips. Also, external guides and tutorials are available (e.g. on youtube), but I followed only IBM ones and I had no difficulties.
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SUSE
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
IBM
Ease of use. Very intuitive. We have been looking for a product that allows us to orchestrate our docker containers in a way where it allows us to effectively scale our applications to production. It also provides us a way of monitoring all our infrastructure in a very clear concise way.
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SUSE
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
IBM
The IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service is quite flexible platform with profitable Cloud functions performance and the data security through IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service is nice. To manage container easily and process huge amount of data at the same time, the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service is amazing ad the platform deployment is very easy after training.
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SUSE
As we use only AWS EKS Clusters originally we were using the AWS Console and CLI but that is too limited in scope. Also, we were using AWS IAM roles to provide access to users but that was lots of extra work to have them integrated into SSO while on Rancher we have just connected our GitHub login with the Alfresco organization and that uses, in turn, Okta for SSO so provisioning for access is automatic for any developer who has been assigned to GitHub.
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
IBM
No answers on this topic
SUSE
The investment for small environments is quite significant. There has to be a compelling case to enhance the areas where SUSE Rancher brings in value to make such a financial leap. There is also a free version to test the value propositions, which will help support the user's buying decisions. More clusters, more volume, more tasks and more complexity in the environment equals more value that Rancher can provide.
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Scalability
IBM
IBM's CKS does not offers automatic autoscaling nor vertical scaling (automatic). Other services like Google Kubernetes Engine scales up and down very well
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SUSE
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
IBM
  • IKS can provide around 30% savings when it comes to operational costs since Kubernetes is designed to run applications in most machines in the most efficient manner possible.
  • Managed Kubernetes can save a company time by 45% since Managed Kubernetes usually is seamlessly updated, without any interruptions with the workload. IKS fall into this benefit.
  • We heard people had saved in maintenance downtimes when it comes to Kubernetes by a factor of 10 so IKS can contribute to more flexible and distributed services with virtually no downtime.
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SUSE
  • Shortens "Time-to-Market" factor for new business applications or implementing new functionalities. From 1 to 50 microservices-based business applications in 6 years.
  • 24/7 availability, generates more money. There are many infrastructure components that are regularly powered-off for maintenance or upgrade, bur we rarely are turning off our downstream Kubernetes clusters where our business applications lives.
  • Single Point of Contact with platform maintenance and development Team, eases implementation of new business applications
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ScreenShots