Amazon EKS vs Platform9 (2026): Pricing, Features & Verdict

A

Why choose Amazon EKS

• Higher Integration score (9/10 vs 7/10)
• Higher Customization score (9/10 vs 7/10)

Why choose Platform9

• Has a free plan (Amazon EKS does not)
• Lower estimated cost for 10 users: Free vs $73/mo
• Higher Support score (8/10 vs 6/10)
• Higher Cost score (6/10 vs 4/10)

A

Amazon EKS

Pros

• Scales to clusters of up to 100,000 worker nodes, and reviewers consistently name scalability as its main strength.
• Integrates deeply with AWS: IAM and Pod Identity for pod credentials, ECR, load balancers, VPC Lattice, GuardDuty, and CloudWatch.
• Offers several compute options in one service: EC2 node groups, Fargate serverless pods, Auto Mode, Outposts, Hybrid Nodes, and air-gapped EKS Anywhere.
• Backs the control plane with a financially backed SLA of 99.95%, or 99.99% with Provisioned Control Plane, with credits of up to 100%.
• Holds broad compliance coverage, including SOC, PCI, ISO, FedRAMP Moderate, HITRUST, and HIPAA eligibility.
• Allows version rollback within 7 days of an upgrade at no extra cost.

Cons

• Practitioners call it the least managed of the big three Kubernetes services, because control plane, node, and add-on upgrades are separate manual steps.
• Charges about $73 per month per cluster before any workloads run, and $438 per month once a version falls into extended support. AKS charges no control plane fee on its free tier.
• The default VPC CNI assigns real VPC IPs to pods and can exhaust subnet address space unless IP space is planned in advance.
• Real bills can climb well above estimates because of NAT gateway, cross-AZ transfer, and CloudWatch ingestion costs.
• Reviewers say prior Kubernetes knowledge is needed and the learning curve is steep. Some also note there is no built-in in-console cluster shell like GKE's.

Platform9

Pros

• The free Community Edition has no time limit and includes the full feature set for a single region, which makes evaluation and small production use cheap.
• The free vJailbreak tool migrates VMs from VMware while keeping IP addresses and network and storage configuration, which lowers cutover risk.
• It reuses existing servers and enterprise storage from vendors such as Dell EMC, NetApp, Pure Storage and HPE, so buyers avoid a hardware refresh.
• Per-core pricing includes all features and support, and third-party estimates put it well below VMware Cloud Foundation per-core costs.
• Support is a strong point: G2 reviewers of its Kubernetes product rate support quality 9.6, and the vendor reports 100% CSAT four years running.
• Automation through OpenStack-compatible APIs, the pcdctl CLI and a first-party Terraform provider.

Cons

• Enterprise pricing is quote-only. Third-party estimates of about 200 to 350 USD per core per year are unverified.
• It is built on OpenStack, so troubleshooting the lower layers requires OpenStack knowledge.
• With the SaaS option, control depends on Platform9's hosted management plane.
• Built-in PaaS services such as managed databases, DNS and VPN are still on the roadmap.
• It is not hosting. Customers supply and run their own hardware, and analysts say it does not suit small businesses.
• Independent reviews are few. Most evidence and case studies come from the vendor, and one aggregator notes reports that support quality varies.