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Compare:
Cycle vs. Portainer

Cycle goes beyond container orchestration, providing your team a powerful, fully managed DevOps platform out of the box.
vs.
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Out-Scaling Portainer?

While Portainer can simplify container orchestration and management, much of the Kubernetes compexity remains as your company starts to scale. See how Cycle's native networking, built-in storage management, and automatic updates can help your team get out of the weeds and back to shipping product.
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Simplicity
(More opinionated)
Customizability
(More complex)

Hybrid and Multi-Cloud by Default

Portainer works well for single clusters, but scaling across data centers and clouds is on you. Cycle connects on-prem, colo, and cloud into a single fabric.

Not Just a UI Layer

Portainer provides visibility but relies on external tools for orchestration and automation. Cycle is a full control plane with networking, storage, and monitoring included.

Networking and Storage Built-In

With Portainer, networking and volumes are manual. Cycle provisions a managed overlay and persistent storage automatically.

More Than Just Containers

Portainer is container-only. Cycle supports containers and full VMs in one control plane, plus functions for task-based workloads.

Built for Scale

Portainer works for small clusters but struggles at scale. Cycle is designed for multi-cluster, hybrid, and edge deployments with reliability from day one.

Automated Upgrades

Portainer and its clusters require manual patching. Cycle automates rolling upgrades and security updates with zero downtime.

Expert Support Included

Portainer relies on community or limited paid tiers. Cycle includes direct access to engineers in every tier for design, migration, and operations.

Features

Cycle.io

Portainer

Architecture and Deployment
Model
Hybrid SaaS & PaaS
Self-Hosted
Management
hybrid(Self + Fully-Managed)
self-managed
Scope
On-prem / Colo / Cloud
On-prem / Colo / Cloud
Pricing
Tiered(Seats & Servers)
Open Source & Subscription
Bring Your Own Infrastructure
Bare Metal
Multi‑Cloud
Edge Support
Upgrade Automation
automatic
Manual
Core Infrastructure
Containers
VMs
Functions
BETA
Service Mesh
(Discovery)
Load Balancing
External
DNS
Networking
Automatic(managed overlay)
Manual(runtime-dependent)
Storage
Automatic(managed volumes)
Manual
DevOps & Automation
CI/CD
Integrations
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Stacks(JSON / YAML)
Templates
API
REST & Webhooks
REST
Monitoring
Basic
Operations & Governance
ACL / RBAC
Team roles
Multi‑Tenancy
Strong(Environments + Clusters + Namespaces)
limited(Teams)
Support Model
Included & Community
Paid & Community
Cycle on any infrastructure
Ready To Make The Switch?

Level Up Your DevOps

Portainer covers the basics, but Cycle goes much further with built‑in networking, volumes, and automated updates in one unified platform. Speak with an expert to get started with a free proof-of-concept today.

Schedule a Demo

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Bring Your Own Infrastructure.

Combine cloud and on-prem infrastructure, bare-metal or virtualized, under one platform. Cycle unifies it into a cohesive, managed private cloud.

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