Find the best continuous delivery platform for your projects
The era of big releases and intermittent updates is over. Continuous delivery allows developers to seamlessly integrate smaller changes into their applications as soon as they’re ready to go live, rather than accepting downtime and unexpected issues as inevitable consequences of keeping an application up to date.
One of the most commonly used and best-supported platforms for achieving continuous delivery is Spinnaker. Yet, with the platform’s relatively venerable age and single-minded focus on CD, it isn’t surprising that newcomers and veterans alike may be searching for Spinnaker alternatives.
Whether you’re starting a new project or searching for a different platform for existing applications, this guide will help you find suitable candidates to investigate next. First, let’s establish what Spinnaker is used for and how it achieved its place of prominence.
What Is Spinnaker Used For?
Spinnaker is a multi-cloud continuous delivery platform. That means it helps application developers release software changes rapidly. Its hierarchical framework divides projects into applications, clusters, and server groups (Spinnakers clusters are just collections of server groups, and are not to be confused with Kubernetes clusters).
Spinnaker began life as an internal tool at Netflix. The streaming entertainment giant created Spinnaker as a replacement for Asgard, its previous tool for automating AWS deployments. Netflix first released Spinnaker as an open-source project under the Apache License 2.0 in 2015 with built-in integrations for both AWS and GCP. Further updates in the following years expanded its capabilities, including tighter integration with Kubernetes and continuous integration frameworks.
Spinnaker remains a powerful tool for many purposes after nearly a decade of service—thanks in no small part to its open-source extensibility. Yet, as Infrastructure-as-Code and hybrid cloud development tools open up greater efficiencies, this older platform’s on-premises limitations and single-minded focus on CD have sent many developers in search of Spinnaker alternatives.
5 Spinnaker Alternatives and Competitors
1. DuploCloud
DuploCloud is a DevOps automation platform that allows developers to quickly provision secure and compliant infrastructure. Its integrated approach to continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) makes it easy to merge changes to your main branch while using automatic deployments to eliminate user error and accelerate release cycles.
While building on a Spinnaker infrastructure requires a significant investment in skilled DevOps roles, DuploCloud can reduce or outright remove the need to hire additional staff to handle your CI/CD processes. Its low-code/no-code interface allows team members with no public cloud technical background to provision infrastructure for cloud applications, all with intelligent guardrails to prevent compromised or non-compliant code from ever reaching production.
DuploCloud Pricing
DuploCloud’s pricing is available in four monthly tiers:
- DevOps: Built to help you automate application deployment with AWS/Azure/GCP services, all for $3,000 for your first 25 nodes.
- DevSecOps: This tier adds compliance and security controls in addition to everything included in the DevOps tier, all for $4,500 for your first 50 nodes.
- DevSecOps PLUS: This tier is built to meet advanced regulatory standards. It includes everything from the DevSecOps tier as well as NIST, PCI, and HITRUST compliance for cloud or on-prem, all for $6,500 for your first 75 nodes.
2. Octopus Deploy
Octopus Deploy is a software delivery automation platform that handles release management while also automating complex application deployments and operations tasks. Its CD focus means it can serve as a direct Spinnaker alternative. Across more than a decade in operation, Octopus Deploy has a long history of delivering on continuous deployment demands with helpful features inducing runbook automation and multi-tenancy.
Those years of growth and development have led some users to cite the hierarchy and configuration of Octopus Deploy as difficult to start on. Slow performance when using containers and acquiring containers may also be potential drawbacks.
Octopus Deploy Pricing
Octopus Deploy offers three tiers of pricing based on organization:
- Community: $10 per month for cloud deployments-as-a-service, or free when hosted on your own infrastructure
- Professional: $12 per target per month
- Enterprise: $18 per target per month
3. ArgoCD
ArgoCD is a continuous delivery tool made for Kubernetes based on the GitOps pattern. It works from the premise that application definitions, configurations, and environments should be declarative and version-controlled. It extends that vision to enable deeper automation and auditing, as well as greater intuitiveness of the application deployment and lifecycle management processes.
One of the primary drawbacks of ArgoCD is that it is only built to function with Kubernetes. If you use a different containerization framework, or you are creating a more traditional application, it will not be suited for your purposes. ArgoCD’s focus on building out a single cluster within a Git repository can also be a difficult limitation for larger organizations.
ArgoCD Pricing
- Free
4. GitLab
While Spinnaker is deliberately limited to CD, GitLab takes a broader stance to present a comprehensive DevOps platform that also encompasses CI. Its built-in security and testing tools help create more resilient applications, while its user interface is easy to use across disciplines—including CI/CD support commands issued through Slack via AI chat.
Though not all developers may need the comprehensive features GitLab offers, its flexibility means it’s still well-suited to a range of cloud-native, Kubernetes, and multi-cloud products.
GitLab Pricing
GitLab offers a three-tiered pricing model:
- Free: No payment is required for personal projects, though this plan tops out at 400 support minutes per month.
- Premium: This plan is built for “scaling organizations and multi-team usage” and bumps the cap up to 10,000 compute minutes per month. It costs $29 per month.
- Ultimate: Up to 50,000 monthly compute minutes, dynamic application security testing, and other features separate this plan from premium. Its prices are not shared publicly.
5. Azure DevOps
Azure DevOps is another comprehensive platform, this time with the substantial backing of Microsoft Azure. It offers cloud-hosted pipelines for Linux, macOS, and Windows, with web, desktop, and mobile app build options. Azure DevOps supports cloud and on-premises deployments across a range of languages, and it includes extensible support for container registries such as Docker Hub and Azure Container Registry.
The most obvious drawback of Azure DevOps is that it’s built to be natively compatible with Microsoft Azure. That said, external integrations such as AWS Toolkit for Azure DevOps make it relatively easy to clear the gap between cloud providers.
Azure DevOps Pricing
Azure DevOps pricing is offered by individual services and user licenses:
- Individual Services
- Azure Pipelines: For Microsoft-hosted deployments, the first 1,800 minutes are free with one free parallel job. Additional parallel jobs are $40 each.
- Azure Artifacts: Starter plans offer 2 GiB free per month, then charge $2 per GiB on top of that.
- User Licenses
- Basic Plan: The first five users get access to Azure Pipelines, Boards, Repos, and Artifacts for free. Each subsequent user costs $6 per month.
- Basic + Test Plans: In addition to Basic features, you can also get test planning, browser-based tests, centralized reporting, and other features for $52 per user per month.
Simplify and Optimize Your CD with DuploCloud
Don’t limit your search for Spinnaker alternatives to standalone CD solutions. DuploCloud offers integrated automations that can serve as a force multiplier for your development team, helping you work more efficiently at every stage of the software development lifecycle. Schedule a free demo today.
