As organizations work to create scalable, cost-effective, and efficient platform engineering systems, open-source tools have become strong alternatives to paid solutions. These tools provide flexibility, transparency, and innovation from a community of users, allowing platform engineering teams to manage infrastructure, security, monitoring, and deployment more effectively and at a lower cost. Let’s explore the top open-source Tools that replace paid tools in Platform Engineering
Developer Control Plane
Backstage is an open-source platform that simplifies platform engineering by providing a centralized portal for managing services, infrastructure, and data, offering a cost-effective alternative to paid tools like CloudBees Apiary. It enhances efficiency for platform engineering teams by consolidating workflows and delivering a flexible framework for overseeing complex systems, replacing costly proprietary solutions.
Cortex developed on prometheus, offers a scalable distributed tracing solution for platform engineering teams, facilitating effective monitoring and troubleshooting of microservices, and replacing the need for paid tools like datadog apm. It improves visibility, boosts efficiency, and guarantees cost-effective management of the infrastructure.
Gitpod is a cloud-based platform that offers continuous development environments, empowering platform engineering teams to establish standardized workflows, enhance developer productivity, and eliminate setup disparities among engineering teams.
OpenTofu is an open-source Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool that focuses on automating the creation, modification, and versioning of infrastructure with an emphasis on safety and efficiency, offering a community-driven alternative to Terraform Cloud.
Crossplane is a platform management solution that allows teams to manage infrastructure across various cloud providers, integrating with tools like Terraform, Helm, and others to offer a unified, scalable approach for resource provisioning and management, serving as an alternative to Terraform Cloud for multi-cloud environments.
Integration & Delivery Plane
Jenkins is an open-source automation server that helps platform engineering teams streamline CI/CD pipelines, improving application development, testing, and deployment, while replacing CircleCI for enhanced integration across environments.
Kratix is an open-source framework that empowers platform engineering teams to create and manage internal platforms, offering scalable, custom solutions for managing infrastructure, services, and workflows, boosting developer autonomy and productivity
Argo Workflows is an open-source, container-native engine designed for Kubernetes that allows platform engineering teams to define, orchestrate, and automate complex workflows, replacing tools like GitHub Actions and GitLab CI for more efficient management in cloud-native environments.
Qovery is a cloud-based platform tailored for deploying and managing containerized applications, offering platform engineering teams a streamlined, scalable solution for automating deployments and simplifying the management of containerized systems.
Vercel is a platform designed for deploying serverless functions and static websites, enabling platform engineering teams to rapidly scale and manage serverless applications, enhancing deployment speed and overall web application efficiency.
Resource Plane
Rancher is an open-source platform for container orchestration that allows teams to deploy, manage, and scale Kubernetes clusters across various environments, offering a self-managed alternative to services like Amazon EKS, Azure AKS, and Google GKE.
Kubernetes is an open-source platform that automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications, providing teams with a robust and flexible solution for container orchestration, acting as a replacement for managed services like Amazon EKS, Azure AKS, and Google GKE.
Ambassador is an open-source API Gateway powered by Envoy Proxy, aimed at simplifying the management and security of microservices within Kubernetes environments. It centralizes traffic routing, load balancing, and policy enforcement, improving developer workflows and observability in cloud-native applications.
Capsule is an open-source solution that assists platform engineering teams in creating secure, multi-tenant Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) based on Kubernetes. It allows various development teams to utilize a single Kubernetes cluster while ensuring isolation and autonomy, serving as a framework for developing self-service platforms within organizations.
Monitoring & Logging plane
Prometheus is an open-source monitoring system with a built-in time-series database that allows teams to gather and store metrics, offering a scalable and efficient alternative to Datadog Metrics for infrastructure monitoring and observability.
Grafana is an open-source platform for visualizing and analyzing data, enabling teams to build customizable dashboards for monitoring metrics and logs, serving as a replacement for Datadog Analytics to enhance data insights and visualization.
Logstash is an open-source tool designed to ingest, process, and store log data, allowing teams to efficiently handle and manage logs, providing an alternative to Datadog Logs for centralized log management
Fluent Bit is an open-source, resource-efficient tool designed for collecting, processing, and forwarding logs, metrics, and traces from diverse sources to different destinations. It plays a vital role in observability pipelines, especially in cloud and containerized environments, and supports integration with various backend systems such as Elasticsearch, Kafka, and others, ensuring compatibility across platforms.
Security Plane
Calico Open Source offers a robust networking and security solution for containers, virtual machines, and host-based workloads. It is compatible with various platforms such as Kubernetes, OpenShift, Docker EE, OpenStack, and bare metal, allowing platform engineering teams to manage secure and scalable networking across hybrid and cloud-native infrastructures.
Cilium is an open-source tool that ensures secure network communication between application services on container platforms such as Docker and Kubernetes. By leveraging eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter), it allows platform engineering teams to define network policies, enhance security, and track traffic in containerized environments
Armo focuses on Kubernetes security, offering Security and DevOps teams actionable, context-driven, and noise-free security insights through Kubernetes-native tools. The company is open-source-driven and developed Kubescape, a top Kubernetes security project that has now become an official CNCF initiative, helping platform engineering teams improve security and compliance in Kubernetes environments.
Sysdig’s open-source foundation plays a pivotal role in modern platform engineering, leveraging community-driven projects like Falco and Prometheus to enhance security and monitoring capabilities in cloud-native environments. By contributing to key open-source initiatives, Sysdig empowers platform engineering teams with transparent, scalable, and adaptable solutions for managing infrastructure security at cloud scale
Snyk is a developer-first security platform that helps identify and fix vulnerabilities in open-source dependencies, containers, and infrastructure as code (IaC). It integrates seamlessly into development workflows, enabling teams to secure applications without disrupting productivity. With automated scanning and remediation, Snyk ensures continuous security throughout the software development lifecycle.
