If you're looking for an alternative to K9s, Aptakube is a great choice. While K9s is a great tool, it's not the most user-friendly if you're not well versed with the Terminal. Aptakube is a user-friendly, rich and interactive Kubernetes GUI that runs on your desktop and is the perfect alternative to K9s if you're looking for a graphical interface to interact with Kubernetes.
From a feature point of view, Aptakube and K9s are somewhat similar. Aptakube has an advantage on being multi-cluster, richer resource views and aggregated log viewer.
As for performance, you'd be surprised to know that they both perform fairly equally, despite Aptakube being a GUI which is usually heavier than a Terminal UI.
Choose Aptakube if you're looking for a user-friendly, rich and interactive experience. Being a commercial product means that it's actively maintained and supported.
Fast, slick UI that outperforms Lens and k9s. Each view is well designed and shows you everything at a glance. Works seamlessly with Teleport (and Okta) as well. Aptakube is a breath of fresh air in a landscape of increasingly bloated apps — I can't recommend it highly enough!
Here's a quick comparison between Aptakube and k9s.
| Aptakube vs K9s | Aptakube | K9s |
| Tech Stack | Tauri, Rust and Solid | Go |
| User Interface | GUI (Graphical) | TUI (Terminal) |
| App Disk Size1 | 39 MB | 91 MB |
| Time to Interactive1Time taken to get past the splash screen | ⚡️ Instantly | ⚡️ Instantly |
| User friendly viewRicher insights beyond just YAML views | No | |
| Memory Usage @ Home1How much memory was used when the app started | 98 MB | 20 MB |
| Memory Usage @ 2000 Pods1How much memory was used to list 3000 pods | 254 MB | 210 MB |
| Multi-clusterAbility to connect to multiple clusters simultaneously | No | |
| Aggregated Log ViewerView logs from multiple pods at once | ||
| Resource DiffCompare two resources side by side | No | |
| Licensing Model | Commercial | Open Source |
Conclusion
- Tested on a MacBook Pro 16" 2021 M1 Pro 16GB, running macOS Sequoia 15
- Aptakube 1.4.0
- K9s 0.32.5
If you notice any inaccuracies, please let us know at hello@aptakube.com.