Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
linkerd vs Rancher: What are the differences?
Developers describe linkerd as "Twitter-Style Operability for Microservices". linkerd is an out-of-process network stack for microservices. It functions as a transparent RPC proxy, handling everything needed to make inter-service RPC safe and sane--including load-balancing, service discovery, instrumentation, and routing. On the other hand, Rancher is detailed as "Open Source Platform for Running a Private Container Service". 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.
linkerd belongs to "Microservices Tools" category of the tech stack, while Rancher can be primarily classified under "Container Tools".
Some of the features offered by linkerd are:
- Adaptive load-balancing
- Fine-grained instrumentation
- Abstractions over service discovery
On the other hand, Rancher provides the following key features:
- Manage Hosts, Deploy Containers, Monitor Resources
- User Management & Collaboration
- Native Docker APIs & Tools
linkerd and Rancher are both open source tools. It seems that Rancher with 11.8K GitHub stars and 1.31K forks on GitHub has more adoption than linkerd with 5K GitHub stars and 499 GitHub forks.
Pros of linkerd
- CNCF Project3
- Fast Integration1
- Pre-check permissions1
- Light Weight1
- Service Mesh1
Pros of Rancher
- Easy to use103
- Open source and totally free79
- Multi-host docker-compose support63
- Load balancing and health check included58
- Simple58
- Rolling upgrades, green/blue upgrades feature44
- Dns and service discovery out-of-the-box42
- Only requires docker37
- Multitenant and permission management34
- Easy to use and feature rich29
- Cross cloud compatible11
- Does everything needed for a docker infrastructure11
- Simple and powerful8
- Next-gen platform8
- Very Docker-friendly7
- Support Kubernetes and Swarm6
- Application catalogs with stack templates (wizards)6
- Supports Apache Mesos, Docker Swarm, and Kubernetes6
- Rolling and blue/green upgrades deployments6
- High Availability service: keeps your app up 24/76
- Easy to use service catalog5
- Very intuitive UI4
- IaaS-vendor independent, supports hybrid/multi-cloud4
- Awesome support4
- Scalable3
- Requires less infrastructure requirements2
Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions
Cons of linkerd
Cons of Rancher
- Hosting Rancher can be complicated10
Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions
What is linkerd?
What is Rancher?
Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
What companies use linkerd?
What companies use Rancher?
Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions
What tools integrate with Rancher?
Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions
Blog Posts
+7
+12
+2