The Rancher Difference

Rancher is the complete enterprise computing platform to run Kubernetes clusters on-premises, in the cloud or at the edge. 100% open source software with zero lock-in, Rancher fits perfectly with your multi-cluster, hybrid or multi-cloud container orchestration strategy.

100% open-source

Free Kubernetes management platform with zero vendor lock-in

Kubernetes management platforms from RedHat, VMware and Cisco add features that restrict you to their environment. Some legacy vendors even insist on bundling in their own expensive, proprietary tooling. Choosing one of these platforms means that you will drift away from the core of Kubernetes, making it harder to move to a different platform should your requirements change.

By contrast, Rancher supports any CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution including RKE and K3s. It also integrates popular open-source projects like Prometheus, Grafana, Fluentd and Istio to make Kubernetes even more useful.

If you ever decide to stop using Rancher, we provide a clean uninstall process that leaves you able to manage each cluster independently, as if we were never there.

Rancher, RKE, K3s and all other Rancher products are 100% free and open source.

Day-2 multi-cluster Kubernetes operations

Use Rancher to install and configure multiple production-grade Kubernetes clusters on-prem, in the cloud and at the edge. Once up and running, Rancher handles all aspects of day-2 operations for your multi-cluster Kubernetes deployment:

Control access to your Kubernetes clusters using centralized RBAC
Deploy multi-cluster apps from our eco-system catalog
Monitor workload health with built-in observability tools like Prometheus and Grafana
Get instant notifications of failures by email, text, Slack or PagerDuty
Connect clusters to existing CI/CD pipelines in Jenkins, GitLab, Travis and more.

Cloud-hosted Kubernetes services. Only better.

Hybrid and multi-cloud are the ‘new normal’ of IT. While cloud-hosted Kubernetes services like GKE, EKS, and AKS are an excellent way to operate Kubernetes within a single cloud, they are, by definition, silos. Rancher works closely with these cloud services and enhances what they offer, providing you a common management platform for all your Kubernetes distributions.

Rancher supports any number of on-prem or hosted Kubernetes installations running on any certified distribution. It not only enables you to import and manage clusters through a single interface, apply uniform security policies, centrally audit logs, and monitor performance across them all. If you have an internal identity provider such as Active Directory, OpenLDAP or Okta, you can even use those users and groups to control access to your hybrid cluster operations.