If you're looking for an alternative to Lens and OpenLens, Aptakube is a great choice. Aptakube is a fast, lightweight and beautiful Kubernetes GUI that works on any platform.
From a feature point of view, Aptakube and Lens are somewhat similar. Aptakube has an advantage on being multi-cluster, richer resource views and aggregated log viewer. Our customers have reported that Aptakube is many times faster than Lens, as well as being much smaller in size and less resource intensive.
Aptakube doesn't require cloud authentication and uses a perpetual fallback license. You bought it, you own it.
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 Lens.
| Aptakube vs Lens | Aptakube | Lens |
| Tech Stack | Tauri, Rust and Solid | Electron, Node.js and React |
| User Interface | GUI (Graphical) | GUI (Graphical) |
| Time to Interactive1Time taken to get past the splash screen | ⚡️ Instantly | ~5 seconds |
| App Disk Size1 | 24 MB | 1.21 GB |
| Memory Usage @ Home1How much memory was used when the app started | 73 MB | 524 MB |
| Memory Usage @ 3000 Pods1How much memory was used to list 3000 pods | 218 MB | 713 MB |
| Multi-clusterAbility to connect to multiple clusters simultaneously | No | |
| Aggregated Log ViewerView logs from multiple pods at once | No | |
| Resource MetricsCPU and Memory usage metrics via standard Kubernetes Metrics API | Metrics-server or Prometheus | Requires Prometheus |
| Cloud AuthenticationWhether you need to login to use the app | No | Requires Lens ID 2 |
| Licensing Model | Commercial Perpetual Fallback License | Commercial Subscription |
| Pricing | $79/seat | $249/seat/year |
| Open Source | No | No |
- Tested on a MacBook Pro 16" 2021 M1 Pro 16GB, running macOS Ventura 13.3.
- Aptakube 1.4.0
- Lens 2022.12.11410-latest
- Lens is a commercial product built on top of OpenLens. OpenLens does not require cloud authentication, but Lens does.
If you notice any inaccuracies, please let us know at hello@aptakube.com.