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.
From a performance perspective, you'd be surprised to know that they both perform fairly equally. The exception being that K9s doesn't seem to be very optimized for larger number of resources in terms of memory usage.
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 | 24 MB | 63 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 | 73 MB | 20 MB |
| Memory Usage @ 3000 Pods1How much memory was used to list 3000 pods | 218 MB | 275 MB |
| Multi-clusterAbility to connect to multiple clusters simultaneously | No | |
| Aggregated Log ViewerView logs from multiple pods at once |
Conclusion
- Tested on a MacBook Pro 16" 2021 M1 Pro 16GB, running macOS Ventura 13.0.
- Aptakube 1.4.0
- K9s 0.27.3
If you notice any inaccuracies, please let us know at hello@aptakube.com.