Compare the Top Free Container Orchestration Software as of July 2025

What is Free Container Orchestration Software?

Container orchestration software is a platform that automates the deployment, management, scaling, and networking of containers in a distributed environment. These tools help manage the complexities of containerized applications by ensuring containers are running efficiently, scaled appropriately, and able to communicate with each other. The most popular container orchestration software uses tools like Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, or Apache Mesos, providing features such as load balancing, automated container provisioning, self-healing, and monitoring. These tools are essential for managing large-scale containerized applications and microservices, ensuring high availability, performance, and resilience. Compare and read user reviews of the best Free Container Orchestration software currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.

  • 1
    Google Cloud Platform
    Google Cloud Platform offers Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), a fully managed service for container orchestration. GKE simplifies the management of Kubernetes clusters, automating tasks such as scaling, load balancing, and rolling updates. With the $300 in free credits for new customers, users can run, test, and deploy containerized applications on GCP to understand how container orchestration works, all while minimizing initial costs. The service also integrates seamlessly with GCP’s monitoring and logging tools, providing deep insights into the health and performance of applications. Additionally, GKE supports multi-cluster management, making it easy for organizations to deploy containerized applications across multiple regions. This orchestration service is ideal for businesses that want to scale their containerized applications globally without compromising reliability or security.
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    Starting Price: Free ($300 in free credits)
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  • 2
    Kasm Workspaces

    Kasm Workspaces

    Kasm Technologies

    Kasm Workspaces streams your workplace environment directly to your web browser…on any device and from any location. Kasm uses our high-performance streaming and secure isolation technology to provide web-native Desktop as a Service (DaaS), application streaming, and secure/private web browsing. Kasm is not just a service; it is a highly configurable platform with a robust developer API and devops-enabled workflows that can be customized for your use-case, at any scale. Workspaces can be deployed in the cloud (Public or Private), on-premise (Including Air-Gapped Networks or your Homelab), or in a hybrid configuration.
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    Starting Price: $0 Free Community Edition
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  • 3
    Red Hat OpenShift
    The Kubernetes platform for big ideas. Empower developers to innovate and ship faster with the leading hybrid cloud, enterprise container platform. Red Hat OpenShift offers automated installation, upgrades, and lifecycle management throughout the container stack—the operating system, Kubernetes and cluster services, and applications—on any cloud. Red Hat OpenShift helps teams build with speed, agility, confidence, and choice. Code in production mode anywhere you choose to build. Get back to doing work that matters. Red Hat OpenShift is focused on security at every level of the container stack and throughout the application lifecycle. It includes long-term, enterprise support from one of the leading Kubernetes contributors and open source software companies. Support the most demanding workloads including AI/ML, Java, data analytics, databases, and more. Automate deployment and life-cycle management with our vast ecosystem of technology partners.
    Starting Price: $50.00/month
  • 4
    Appvia Wayfinder
    Appvia Wayfinder is a trusted infrastructure operations platform designed to increase developer velocity. It enables platform teams to operate at scale by providing self-service guardrails for standardisation. Supporting integration with AWS, Azure, and more, Wayfinder offers self-service provisioning of environments and cloud resources using a catalogue of manageable Terraform modules. Its built-in principles of isolation and least privilege ensure secure default configurations, while granting fine-grained control to platform teams over underlying CRDs. It offers centralized control and visibility over clusters, apps, and cloud resources across various clouds. Additionally, Wayfinder's cloud automation capability supports safe deployments and upgrades through the use of ephemeral clusters and namespaces. Choose Appvia Wayfinder for streamlined, secure, and efficient infrastructure management.
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    Starting Price: $0.035 US per vcpu per hour
  • 5
    Portainer Business
    Portainer is an intuitive container management platform for Docker, Kubernetes, and Edge-based environments. With a smart UI, Portainer enables you to build, deploy, manage, and secure your containerized environments with ease. It makes container adoption easier for the whole team and reduces time-to-value on Kubernetes and Docker/Swarm. With a simple GUI and a comprehensive API, the product makes it easy for engineers to deploy and manage container-based apps, triage issues, automate CI/CD workflows and set up CaaS (container-as-a-service) environments regardless of hosting environment or K8s distro. Portainer Business is designed to be used in a team environment with multiple users and clusters. The product includes a range of security features, including RBAC, OAuth integration, and logging - making it suitable for use in complex production environments. Portainer also allows you to set up GitOps automation for deployment of your apps to Docker and K8s based on Git repos.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 6
    Ambassador

    Ambassador

    Ambassador Labs

    Ambassador Edge Stack is a Kubernetes-native API Gateway that delivers the scalability, security, and simplicity for some of the world's largest Kubernetes installations. Edge Stack makes securing microservices easy with a comprehensive set of security functionality, including automatic TLS, authentication, rate limiting, WAF integration, and fine-grained access control. The API Gateway contains a modern Kubernetes ingress controller that supports a broad range of protocols including gRPC and gRPC-Web, supports TLS termination, and provides traffic management controls for resource availability. Why use Ambassador Edge Stack API Gateway? - Accelerate Scalability: Manage high traffic volumes and distribute incoming requests across multiple backend services, ensuring reliable application performance. - Enhanced Security: Protect your APIs from unauthorized access and malicious attacks with robust security features. - Improve Productivity & Developer Experience
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    VNS3

    VNS3

    Cohesive Networks

    The all-in-one networking device promising connectivity, security and flexibility at a fraction of the cost. Launch a VNS3 image through a public cloud marketplace. We are available in AWS, Azure and GCP. Via private image sharing. We will gladly share a private image with your account. We can also provide a VDI/VDK file which you can import into your environment of choice, be that VMWare or a locked down cloud environment. The Cohesive Networks support team will provide you a license in minutes. Upgrading your VNS3 controller's license can be done via the VNS3 console or the API. The VNS3 Overlay Network is an optional feature that provides end-to-end encryption, increased performance (in most cloud environments), and IP address mobility across regions and cloud providers. An overlay network is layered over the native networking layers, but can be independent from all underlying hardware and software. The overlay is dependent on the native networking layers.
    Starting Price: $150 per month
  • 8
    Telepresence

    Telepresence

    Ambassador Labs

    Telepresence streamlines your local development process, enabling immediate feedback. You can launch your local environment on your laptop, equipped with your preferred tools, while Telepresence seamlessly connects them to the microservices and test databases they rely on. It simplifies and expedites collaborative development, debugging, and testing within Kubernetes environments by establishing a seamless connection between your local machine and shared remote Kubernetes clusters. Why Telepresence: Faster feedback loops: Spend less time building, containerizing, and deploying code. Get immediate feedback on code changes by running your service in the cloud from your local machine. Shift testing left: Create a remote-to-local debugging experience. Catch bugs pre-production without the configuration headache of remote debugging. Deliver better, faster user experience: Get new features and applications into the hands of users faster and more frequently.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 9
    Platform9

    Platform9

    Platform9

    Platform9 is the leader in simplifying enterprise private clouds. Our platform uniquely combines ease of use with flexibility, integrating seamlessly with existing storage and server infrastructure as well as other enterprise platforms. With automated migration tools, open APIs, and flexible deployment options—self-hosted, air-gapped, or SaaS—Platform9 gives you the freedom to run your private cloud, your way. Our flagship product, Private Cloud Director, turns existing servers and storage into a fully featured private cloud. It delivers a familiar management experience for virtualization teams—with the ability to run VMs and containers side by side—and enterprise-grade features including High Availability, live migration, Dynamic Resource Rebalancing, Software Defined Networking, Self Service, and secure multi-tenancy. Hundreds of enterprises, including Rackspace Technology, Cloudera, and Juniper Networks use Platform9 today.
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    Bacula Enterprise

    Bacula Enterprise

    Bacula Systems

    Bacula Enterprise delivers Physical, Virtual, Container and Hybrid Cloud Backup & Recovery software for the Modern Data Center - all from a single platform. Designed for medium and large organizations, Bacula Enterprise backup and recovery software brings unique innovation, modern architecture, business value benefits and low cost of ownership. Bacula Enterprise corporate data backup software solution uses exclusive technologies that increase the interoperability, power, flexibility and functionality of Bacula Enterprise into a wide range of IT environments such as enterprise data centers, managed service providers, software vendors or cloud providers. Thousands of organizations worldwide use Bacula Enterprise in mission-critical environments, including NASA, Texas A&M University, Unicredit, Swisscom, Sky, and many more. Bacula provides additional security features over other vendors and offers advanced, hybrid Cloud connectivity to Amazon, S3, Google, Oracle and many more.
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    harpoon

    harpoon

    harpoon

    harpoon is a drag-and-drop Kubernetes tool for deploying any software in seconds. Whether you're new to Kubernetes or are looking for the best way to learn, harpoon has all the features you need to be successful in deploying and configuring your software using the industry-leading container orchestrator, all with no code. Our visual Kubernetes interface enables anyone to deploy production-grade software with no code. Easily accomplish simple or complex enterprise-grade cloud deployments to deploy and configure software and autoscale Kubernetes without writing any code or configuration scripts. Instantly search for and find any piece of commercial or open source software on the planet and deploy it to the cloud with one click. Before running any applications or services, harpoon will run automated scripts that will secure your cloud provider account. Connect harpoon to your source code repository anywhere and set up an automated deployment pipeline.
    Starting Price: $50 per month
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    mogenius

    mogenius

    mogenius

    mogenius combines visibility, observability, and automation in a single platform for comprehensive Kubernetes control. Connect and visualize your Kubernetes clusters and workloads​. Provide visibility for the entire team. Identify misconfigurations across your workloads. Take action directly within the mogenius platform. Automate your K8s operations with service catalogs, developer self-service, and ephemeral environments​. Leverage developer self-service to simplify deployments for your developers. Optimize resource allocation and avoid configuration drift through standardized and automated workflows. Eliminate duplicate work and encourage reusability with service catalogs. Get full visibility into your current Kubernetes setup. Deploy a cloud-agnostic Kubernetes operator to receive a complete overview of what’s going on across your clusters and workloads. Provide developers with local and ephemeral testing environments in a few clicks that mirror your production setup.
    Starting Price: $350 per month
  • 13
    Northflank

    Northflank

    Northflank

    The self-service developer platform for your apps, databases, and jobs. Start with one workload, and scale to hundreds on compute or GPUs. Accelerate every step from push to production with highly configurable self-service workflows, pipelines, templates, and GitOps. Securely deploy preview, staging, and production environments with observability tooling, backups, restores, and rollbacks included. Northflank seamlessly integrates with your preferred tooling and can accommodate any tech stack. Whether you deploy on Northflank’s secure infrastructure or on your own cloud account, you get the same exceptional developer experience, and total control over your data residency, deployment regions, security, and cloud expenses. Northflank leverages Kubernetes as an operating system to give you the best of cloud-native, without the overhead. Deploy to Northflank’s cloud for maximum simplicity, or connect your GKE, EKS, AKS, or bare-metal to deliver a managed platform experience in minutes.
    Starting Price: $6 per month
  • 14
    Codiac

    Codiac

    Codiac

    Codiac is your all‑in‑one solution to managing infrastructure at scale, offering a unified control plane that handles container orchestration, multi‑cluster operations, and dynamic configuration with turnkey simplicity, no YAML or GitOps required. With a closed‑loop system powered by Kubernetes, it automates workload scaling, ephemeral cluster creation, blue/green and canary rollouts, and “zombie mode” scheduling to reduce cost by shutting down idle environments. You get instant ingress, domain, and URL management paired with seamless integration of TLS certificates via Let’s Encrypt. Every deployment generates immutable system snapshots and versioning, enabling instant rollbacks and audit‑ready compliance. RBAC, granular permissions, and detailed audit logs enforce enterprise‑grade security, while support for CI/CD pipelines, real‑time logs, and observability dashboards provides full visibility across all assets and environments.
    Starting Price: $189 per month
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    Apache Mesos

    Apache Mesos

    Apache Software Foundation

    Mesos is built using the same principles as the Linux kernel, only at a different level of abstraction. The Mesos kernel runs on every machine and provides applications (e.g., Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, Elasticsearch) with API’s for resource management and scheduling across entire datacenter and cloud environments. Native support for launching containers with Docker and AppC images.Support for running cloud native and legacy applications in the same cluster with pluggable scheduling policies. HTTP APIs for developing new distributed applications, for operating the cluster, and for monitoring. Built-in Web UI for viewing cluster state and navigating container sandboxes.
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    HashiCorp Nomad
    A simple and flexible workload orchestrator to deploy and manage containers and non-containerized applications across on-prem and clouds at scale. Single 35MB binary that integrates into existing infrastructure. Easy to operate on-prem or in the cloud with minimal overhead. Orchestrate applications of any type - not just containers. First class support for Docker, Windows, Java, VMs, and more. Bring orchestration benefits to existing services. Achieve zero downtime deployments, improved resilience, higher resource utilization, and more without containerization. Single command for multi-region, multi-cloud federation. Deploy applications globally to any region using Nomad as a single unified control plane. One single unified workflow for deploying to bare metal or cloud environments. Enable multi-cloud applications with ease. Nomad integrates seamlessly with Terraform, Consul and Vault for provisioning, service networking, and secrets management.
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    Aptible

    Aptible

    Aptible

    Aptible automatically implements the security controls you need to achieve regulatory compliance and pass customer audits. Out-of-the-box compliance. Aptible Deploy enables you to meet and maintain regulatory compliance and customer audit requirements automatically. Aptible provides everything you need to meet encryption requirements so your Databases, traffic, and certificates are secure. You get automatic backups of your data every 24 hours. You can trigger a manual backup at any time, and restore in a few clicks. Logs are generated and backed up for every deploy, config change, database tunnel, and console operation, and session. Aptible monitors the underlying EC2 instances in your stacks for potential intrusions, such as unauthorized SSH access, rootkits, file integrity issues, and privilege escalation. The Aptible Security Team responds on your behalf 24/7 to investigate and resolve issues as they arise.
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    Nebula Container Orchestrator

    Nebula Container Orchestrator

    Nebula Container Orchestrator

    Nebula container orchestrator aims to help devs and ops treat IoT devices just like distributed Dockerized apps. It aim is to act as Docker orchestrator for IoT devices as well as for distributed services such as CDN or edge computing that can span thousands (possibly even millions) of devices worldwide and it does it all while being open-source and completely free. Nebula is a open source project created for Docker orchestration and designed to manage massive clusters at scale, it achieves this by scaling each project component out as far as required. The project’s aim is to act as Docker orchestrator for IoT devices as well as for distributed services such as CDN or edge computing. Nebula is capable of simultaneously updating tens of thousands of IoT devices worldwide with a single API call in an effort to help devs and ops treat IoT devices just like distributed Dockerized apps.
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    Marathon
    Marathon is a production-grade container orchestration platform for Mesosphere’s Datacenter Operating System (DC/OS) and Apache Mesos. High Availability. Marathon runs as an active/passive cluster with leader election for 100% uptime. Multiple container runtimes. Marathon has first-class support for both Mesos containers (using cgroups) and Docker. Stateful apps. Marathon can bind persistent storage volumes to your application. You can run databases like MySQL and Postgres, and have storage accounted for by Mesos. Beautiful and powerful UI. Service Discovery & Load Balancing. Several methods available. Health Checks. Evaluate your application’s health using HTTP or TCP checks. Event Subscription. Supply an HTTP endpoint to receive notifications - for example to integrate with an external load balancer. Metrics. Query them at /metrics in JSON format, push them to systems like Graphite, StatsD and DataDog, or scrape them using Prometheus.
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    Helios

    Helios

    Spotify

    Helios is a Docker orchestration platform for deploying and managing containers across an entire fleet of servers. Helios provides a HTTP API as well as a command-line client to interact with servers running your containers. It also keeps a history of events in your cluster including information such as deploys, restarts and version changes. The binary release of Helios is built for Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS, but Helios should be buildable on any platform with at least Java 8 and a recent Maven 3 available. Use helios-solo to launch a local environment with a Helios master and agent. Helios is pragmatic. We're not trying to solve everything today, but what we have, we try hard to ensure is rock-solid. So we don't have things like resource limits or dynamic scheduling yet. Today, for us, it has been more important to get the CI/CD use cases, and surrounding tooling solid first. That said, we eventually want to do dynamic scheduling, composite jobs, etc.
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    Nextflow

    Nextflow

    Seqera Labs

    Data-driven computational pipelines. Nextflow enables scalable and reproducible scientific workflows using software containers. It allows the adaptation of pipelines written in the most common scripting languages. Its fluent DSL simplifies the implementation and deployment of complex parallel and reactive workflows on clouds and clusters. Nextflow is built around the idea that Linux is the lingua franca of data science. Nextflow allows you to write a computational pipeline by making it simpler to put together many different tasks. You may reuse your existing scripts and tools and you don't need to learn a new language or API to start using it. Nextflow supports Docker and Singularity containers technology. This, along with the integration of the GitHub code-sharing platform, allows you to write self-contained pipelines, manage versions, and rapidly reproduce any former configuration. Nextflow provides an abstraction layer between your pipeline's logic and the execution layer.
    Starting Price: Free
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    k0s

    k0s

    Mirantis

    k0s is the simple, solid & certified Kubernetes distribution that works on any infrastructure: bare-metal, on-premises, edge, IoT, public & private clouds. It's 100% open source & free. Zero Friction - k0s drastically reduces the complexity of installing and running a fully conformant Kubernetes distribution. New kube clusters can be bootstrapped in minutes. Developer friction is reduced to zero, allowing anyone, with no special skills or expertise in Kubernetes to easily get started. Zero Deps - k0s is distributed as a single binary with zero host OS dependencies besides the host OS kernel. It works with any operating system without additional software packages or configuration. Any security vulnerabilities or performance issues can be fixed directly in the k0s distribution. Zero Cost - k0s is completely free for personal or commercial use, and it always will be. The source code is available on GitHub under Apache 2 license.
    Starting Price: $0
  • 23
    Centurion

    Centurion

    New Relic

    A deployment tool for Docker. Takes containers from a Docker registry and runs them on a fleet of hosts with the correct environment variables, host volume mappings, and port mappings. Supports rolling deployments out of the box, and makes it easy to ship applications to Docker servers. We're using it in our production infrastructure. Centurion works in a two part deployment process where the build process ships a container to the registry, and Centurion ships containers from the registry to the Docker fleet. Registry support is handled by the Docker command line tools directly so you can use anything they currently support via the normal registry mechanism. If you haven't been using a registry, you should read up on how to do that before trying to deploy anything with Centurion. This code is developed in the open with input from the community through issues and PRs. There is an active maintainer team within New Relic.
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    Portworx

    Portworx

    Pure Storage

    Run Kubernetes in production with the #1 Kubernetes platform for persistent storage, backup, DR, data security and capacity management. Easily protect, restore and migrate your Kubernetes applications in any cloud or data center. The Portworx Enterprise Storage Platform is your end-to-end storage and data management solution for all your Kubernetes projects, including container-based CaaS, DBaaS, SaaS, and Disaster Recovery initiatives. Your apps will benefit from container-granular storage, disaster recovery, data security, multi-cloud migrations and more. Easily solve the enterprise requirements needed to run data service on Kubernetes. Effortlessly offer a cloud-like DbaaS to your users without giving up control. Scale the backend data services powering your SaaS app without operational complexity. Add DR to any Kubernetes app with a single command. Easily backup and restore all your Kubernetes applications.
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