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  1. Stackups
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  4. Service Discovery
  5. Consul vs Kubernetes

Consul vs Kubernetes

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Consul
Consul
Stacks1.2K
Followers1.5K
Votes213
GitHub Stars29.5K
Forks4.5K
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
Stacks61.2K
Followers52.8K
Votes685

Consul vs Kubernetes: What are the differences?

Consul and Kubernetes are both powerful tools in the realm of microservices and container orchestration. Let's explore the key difference between them.

  1. Deployment management: Consul focuses on service discovery and service mesh capabilities, providing a way to find and connect services dynamically. On the other hand, Kubernetes is primarily an orchestrator for containerized applications, helping with deployment management, scaling, and load balancing of containers and services.

  2. Service mesh vs. container orchestrator: Consul acts as a service mesh that enables service-to-service communication, load balancing, and service discovery. It helps manage the networking layer within a distributed system. In contrast, Kubernetes is a container orchestrator that coordinates the deployment and running of containers across a cluster of machines, ensuring fault tolerance and scalability.

  3. Multi-cloud and multi-platform support: Consul is designed to work in a multi-cloud environment, allowing services to communicate seamlessly across different cloud providers. It also supports various platforms like VMs, containers, and bare metal servers. Kubernetes, similarly, provides multi-cloud support but is primarily focused on container orchestration, allowing applications to run consistently across different environments.

  4. Health checking and monitoring: Consul provides health checks for services, constantly monitoring their availability and ensuring that only healthy instances receive traffic. It allows proactive health monitoring and service recovery. Kubernetes also offers health checks but focuses more on container health. It restarts unhealthy containers and provides monitoring and logging capabilities through its ecosystem of tools.

  5. Service discovery mechanisms: Consul uses DNS, HTTP, and gRPC for service discovery, making it flexible and compatible with a wide range of applications and programming languages. Kubernetes, on the other hand, uses its own DNS-based service discovery system, where each service gets assigned a DNS name that resolves to the service's IP address.

  6. Configuration management: Consul provides a key-value store for configuration management, allowing applications to dynamically retrieve and update their configuration settings. Kubernetes also offers a key-value store called ConfigMap, but its main focus is on managing containerized applications rather than configuration management.

In summary, Consul is primarily a service mesh that focuses on service discovery, networking, and monitoring, while Kubernetes is a container orchestrator that handles deployment management, scaling, and load balancing.

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Advice on Consul, Kubernetes

Simon
Simon

Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH

Apr 27, 2020

DecidedonGitHubGitHubGitHub PagesGitHub PagesMarkdownMarkdown

Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

  • @{GitHub}|tool:27| (incl. @{GitHub Pages}|tool:683|/@{Markdown}|tool:1147| for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
  • Respectively @{Git}|tool:1046| as revision control system
  • @{SourceTree}|tool:1599| as @{Git}|tool:1046| GUI
  • @{Visual Studio Code}|tool:4202| as IDE
  • @{CircleCI}|tool:190| for continuous integration (automatize development process)
  • @{Prettier}|tool:7035| / @{TSLint}|tool:5561| / @{ESLint}|tool:3337| as code linter
  • @{SonarQube}|tool:2638| as quality gate
  • @{Docker}|tool:586| as container management (incl. @{Docker Compose}|tool:3136| for multi-container application management)
  • @{VirtualBox}|tool:774| for operating system simulation tests
  • @{Kubernetes}|tool:1885| as cluster management for docker containers
  • @{Heroku}|tool:133| for deploying in test environments
  • @{nginx}|tool:1052| as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
  • @{SSLMate}|tool:2752| (using @{OpenSSL}|tool:3091|) for certificate management
  • @{Amazon EC2}|tool:18| (incl. @{Amazon S3}|tool:25|) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
  • @{PostgreSQL}|tool:1028| as preferred database system
  • @{Redis}|tool:1031| as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)

The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:

  • Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
  • Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
  • Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
  • Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
  • Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
  • Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.
12.8M views12.8M
Comments
Anis
Anis

Founder at Odix

Nov 7, 2020

Review

I recommend this : -Spring reactive for back end : the fact it's reactive (async) it consumes half of the resources that a sync platform needs (so less CPU -> less money). -Angular : Web Front end ; it's gives you the possibility to use PWA which is a cheap replacement for a mobile app (but more less popular). -Docker images. -Kubernetes to orchestrate all the containers. -I Use Jenkins / blueocean, ansible for my CI/CD (with Github of course) -AWS of course : u can run a K8S cluster there, make it multi AZ (availability zones) to be highly available, use a load balancer and an auto scaler and ur good to go. -You can store data by taking any managed DB or u can deploy ur own (cheap but risky).

You pay less money, but u need some technical 2 - 3 guys to make that done.

Good luck

115k views115k
Comments
Michael
Michael

CEO at asencis Ltd

Jan 5, 2021

Needs advice

We develop rapidly with docker-compose orchestrated services, however, for production - we utilise the very best ideas that Kubernetes has to offer: SCALE! We can scale when needed, setting a maximum and minimum level of nodes for each application layer - scaling only when the load balancer needs it. This allowed us to reduce our devops costs by 40% whilst also maintaining an SLA of 99.87%.

272k views272k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Consul
Consul
Kubernetes
Kubernetes

Consul is a tool for service discovery and configuration. Consul is distributed, highly available, and extremely scalable.

Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.

Service Discovery - Consul makes it simple for services to register themselves and to discover other services via a DNS or HTTP interface. External services such as SaaS providers can be registered as well.;Health Checking - Health Checking enables Consul to quickly alert operators about any issues in a cluster. The integration with service discovery prevents routing traffic to unhealthy hosts and enables service level circuit breakers.;Key/Value Storage - A flexible key/value store enables storing dynamic configuration, feature flagging, coordination, leader election and more. The simple HTTP API makes it easy to use anywhere.;Multi-Datacenter - Consul is built to be datacenter aware, and can support any number of regions without complex configuration.
Lightweight, simple and accessible;Built for a multi-cloud world, public, private or hybrid;Highly modular, designed so that all of its components are easily swappable
Statistics
GitHub Stars
29.5K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
4.5K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
1.2K
Stacks
61.2K
Followers
1.5K
Followers
52.8K
Votes
213
Votes
685
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 61
    Great service discovery infrastructure
  • 35
    Health checking
  • 29
    Distributed key-value store
  • 26
    Monitoring
  • 23
    High-availability
Pros
  • 166
    Leading docker container management solution
  • 130
    Simple and powerful
  • 108
    Open source
  • 76
    Backed by google
  • 58
    The right abstractions
Cons
  • 16
    Steep learning curve
  • 15
    Poor workflow for development
  • 8
    Orchestrates only infrastructure
  • 4
    High resource requirements for on-prem clusters
  • 2
    Too heavy for simple systems
Integrations
No integrations available
Vagrant
Vagrant
Docker
Docker
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine
Ansible
Ansible
Google Kubernetes Engine
Google Kubernetes Engine

What are some alternatives to Consul, Kubernetes?

Rancher

Rancher

Rancher is an open source container management platform that includes full distributions of Kubernetes, Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm, and makes it simple to operate container clusters on any cloud or infrastructure platform.

Docker Compose

Docker Compose

With Compose, you define a multi-container application in a single file, then spin your application up in a single command which does everything that needs to be done to get it running.

Docker Swarm

Docker Swarm

Swarm serves the standard Docker API, so any tool which already communicates with a Docker daemon can use Swarm to transparently scale to multiple hosts: Dokku, Compose, Krane, Deis, DockerUI, Shipyard, Drone, Jenkins... and, of course, the Docker client itself.

Tutum

Tutum

Tutum lets developers easily manage and run lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers from any application. AWS-like control, Heroku-like ease. The same container that a developer builds and tests on a laptop can run at scale in Tutum.

Portainer

Portainer

It is a universal container management tool. It works with Kubernetes, Docker, Docker Swarm and Azure ACI. It allows you to manage containers without needing to know platform-specific code.

Eureka

Eureka

Eureka is a REST (Representational State Transfer) based service that is primarily used in the AWS cloud for locating services for the purpose of load balancing and failover of middle-tier servers.

Codefresh

Codefresh

Automate and parallelize testing. Codefresh allows teams to spin up on-demand compositions to run unit and integration tests as part of the continuous integration process. Jenkins integration allows more complex pipelines.

Zookeeper

Zookeeper

A centralized service for maintaining configuration information, naming, providing distributed synchronization, and providing group services. All of these kinds of services are used in some form or another by distributed applications.

etcd

etcd

etcd is a distributed key value store that provides a reliable way to store data across a cluster of machines. It’s open-source and available on GitHub. etcd gracefully handles master elections during network partitions and will tolerate machine failure, including the master.

CAST.AI

CAST.AI

It is an AI-driven cloud optimization platform for Kubernetes. Instantly cut your cloud bill, prevent downtime, and 10X the power of DevOps.

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