Detailed Feature Comparison

Harness Cloud Cost Management Vs. Kubecost

Before we begin…

At first glance, Kubecost seems to do it all – and while it does knock it out of the park in multiple ways, it’s important to remember that Kubecost is primarily for Kubernetes costs – as implied by the name. As always, we love giving credit where it’s due: Kubecost monitors costs in Kubernetes fantastically well – but it stops there. For any costs outside of Kubernetes, you may find yourself needing another service…

…or, alternatively, you could go with a product that does both well – like Harness Cloud Cost Management. You probably use too many tools to manage cloud costs already – why not bring that all into a single pane of glass on the Harness platform?

Cloud Support:

Kubecost does a good job of supporting Kubernetes-based services on major cloud providers, like AWS EKS and Azure AKS, for example. However, non-Kubernetes costs won’t be covered as well with Kubecost (and we can’t find evidence otherwise in their documentation), which is where Harness comes in. Harness provides a premier Kubernetes cost management solution, along with every other kind of cloud cost, on all major cloud providers, whether in single cloud, multi-cloud, or hybrid cloud environments.

Visibility:

As you’ll notice, nearly all Visibility categories are marked as “Yes, With Caveats.” This is to serve as a reminder that while Kubecost does provide this visibility, it serves it up primarily within a Kubernetes context. Any costs that aren’t associated with a Kubernetes cluster may be taken into account, however we were unable to prove or disprove this. Harness, on the other hand, provides all visibility with no caveats, giving you extremely granular, real-time visibility into your complete cloud spend – Kubernetes or otherwise.

Cloud Event Correlation:

To correlate feature releases or engineering deployments with changes in cloud costs, a cloud cost management tool needs to have context behind an organization’s Continuous Delivery pipelines. Kubecost cannot obtain this context. Harness ties right into a customer’s pipelines to make the correlation between deployments and cost changes.

Key Takeaways:

Kubecost provides a good set of visibility and monitoring tools. It provides insights that engineering teams can use to create more efficiencies across their Kubernetes infrastructure. As a firm believer in empowering engineers to manage cloud costs – not just finance teams – we must give credit where it’s due and congratulate Kubecost on their efforts to implement bottom-up, not top-down accountability. However, Kubecost falls short in providing support for non-cluster services, whether that’s visibility, optimization, or forecasting. While the world is moving towards Kubernetes adoption, non-cluster cloud usage is still king. Customers may find themselves using multiple tools across their cloud infrastructure, which can create discrepancies in reporting and lack of trust in the insights surfaced. Overall, Kubecost is a good tool if your primary use case is to monitor, allocate, and save costs in Kubernetes alone.

If you’re looking for rich multi-cloud and container cost visibility, savings, and forecasting, Harness Cloud Cost Management is the clear winner. Harness understands the pressure on engineering and financial management teams, and the requirement to paint a full picture of cloud costs that includes container costs. Harness is a low-effort solution that gets customers more value out of the cloud.

*Please note: Our competitors, just like us, release updates to their products on a regular cadence. We keep these pages updated to the best of our ability, but there are bound to be discrepancies. For the most up-to-date information on competitor features, browsing the competitor’s new release pages and communities are your best bet.

Try Harness For Free