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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 cluster-side capability is hidden behind Cloud - everything the in-cluster binary does (topology, resources, Helm, GitOps, audit checks, MCP, per-user RBAC enforcement) ships in OSS; what Cloud adds is the control plane itself.

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Side by side

The Radar Cloud column describes the hosted service. Radar Cloud Self-Managed has the same features with the control plane in your own infrastructure: sign-in through your own OIDC provider, a license instead of Stripe billing, and an air-gapped option on Custom plans. In both, you install Radar in each cluster you connect. See Radar Cloud Self-Managed.

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Which one fits you

Pick OSS if you...

  • Want a fast, ad-hoc replacement for kubectl and 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.
  • Want nothing beyond your own clusters: local or in-cluster, with no control plane.

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 Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, OpenCode, Google Antigravity, or any other MCP client 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.
Can’t use a hosted service? Radar Cloud Self-Managed runs the control plane in your own infrastructure.

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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 whether cloud.enabled is set in Helm.

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Switch later

  • OSS → Cloud: install the chart with cloud.enabled=true against the same cluster.
  • Cloud → OSS: drop the cloud.* Helm values and Radar reverts to a self-contained in-cluster install.
K8s is the source of truth in both cases - there’s no Radar-side data format to migrate.