Radar comes in two flavors. The cluster-side binary is identical in both. Cloud adds a hosted, multi-tenant control plane on top: orgs, RBAC, SSO, billing, audit log, fleet views. No features are hidden behind Cloud - if it’s documented anywhere in these docs, it ships in the OSS binary.Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://radarhq.io/docs/llms.txt
Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
Side by side
| Radar OSS | Radar Cloud | |
|---|---|---|
| License | Apache 2.0 | Proprietary SaaS (engine remains Apache 2.0) |
| Where it runs | Your machine or your cluster | Hosted control plane at app.radarhq.io; the Radar binary still runs in your cluster |
| Account required | No | Yes (WorkOS auth) |
| Cost | Free | Free tier (3 clusters) / Team / Enterprise |
| Multi-cluster | One Radar at a time; switch by re-pointing kubeconfig | All clusters under one URL, fleet views |
| Auth | OIDC or proxy headers, configured per install | WorkOS (Google / passkey / SSO), centrally |
| Team workflow | Whatever auth you wire in | Orgs, roles, invitations, audit log |
| Persistence | Pod-local (timeline in memory or SQLite) | Postgres for org / billing / audit; pod-local for cluster data |
| MCP for AI | Local MCP endpoint | Per-cluster MCP via personal access tokens |
| Cross-cluster topology | Per-cluster only | Per-cluster today; cross-cluster on the roadmap |
| SSO (SAML / OIDC) | OIDC for the web UI | SAML, Google, Okta via WorkOS Admin Portal |
| Billing | Not applicable | Stripe, per-cluster on Team plan |
| Audit log | Pod-local Kubernetes events only | Org-scoped activity log with CSV export |
| Notifications | None (emit your own from K8s events) | In-app inbox + Slack / webhooks for cluster / org / billing events |
Which one fits you
Pick OSS if you...
- Want a fast, ad-hoc replacement for
kubectland the K8s dashboard, on your own machine. - Need to run Radar in an air-gapped environment.
- Are comfortable wiring auth (oauth2-proxy, OIDC) yourself for a shared in-cluster install.
- Prefer self-hosted with no vendor in the loop.
Pick Cloud if you...
- Manage more than one cluster and want them all behind a single URL.
- Have a team and want central role-based access, invitations, and an audit trail.
- Want SSO without configuring OIDC per cluster.
- Want to give Claude / Cursor / Claude Code MCP access to your clusters without managing tokens per cluster.
- Want fleet-wide views: which clusters have audit failures, which packages are drifting, where a resource lives across clusters.
Use both at once
Run OSS locally against your dev cluster while your team uses Cloud for shared environments. Same binary; the only difference is whethercloud.enabled is set in Helm.
Switch later
- OSS → Cloud: install the chart with
cloud.enabled=trueagainst the same cluster. - Cloud → OSS: drop the
cloud.*Helm values and Radar reverts to a self-contained in-cluster install.