Open source

The honest comparison: Radar on its own, or with Cloud.

Run Radar on your laptop or in your cluster. Radar Cloud adds a control plane on top, hosted by us or Self-Managed in your infrastructure, and connects to the Radar you run in each cluster. Here's exactly what you get with each, so you can make the right call for your team.

Star on GitHubTry hosted
Local binary
Apache 2.0 · 3.9k ★

Single binary. Your laptop. Done.

kubectl radar opens your browser in 30 seconds. No cluster install, no in-cluster footprint, no account. Best for individual engineers and on-call work.

Single native binary, every engine feature
Airgap-ready - anonymous version checks only; block releases.skyhook.io and api.github.com for zero outbound calls
Auto-discovers any CRD in your cluster
kubectl plugin / brew / krew / curl
$brew install skyhook-io/tap/radar
Full install guide in the docs →
In-cluster (Helm)
Apache 2.0 · in-cluster

Run Radar in your cluster. Your team logs in.

Deploy Radar to your cluster with Helm. OIDC or proxy auth lets your whole team in. Per-user K8s RBAC via impersonation. Same engine, no Cloud account. Best for one-cluster teams.

OIDC: Google, Okta, Dex, Keycloak
Proxy: oauth2-proxy, Pomerium, Cloudflare Access
Per-user K8s RBAC via impersonation
Airgap-ready - cluster data stays local; block the version-check endpoints for zero outbound calls
$helm repo add skyhook \
 https://skyhook-io.github.io/helm-charts
$helm install radar skyhook/radar \
 -n radar --create-namespace
In-cluster deployment docs →
Radar Cloud
Hosted or Self-Managed

Alerts, AI investigations and shared fleet views.

Radar Cloud adds a control plane on top of the Radar in each of your clusters, which connects out to it. Hosted by us, or Self-Managed on Enterprise and Custom.

Alerts in Slack or any webhook. Once, not per crash-looping pod
AI investigations: root cause with evidence, 100 a month free
Share any view with just a link, scoped by your existing RBAC
The whole fleet in one view; events kept up to 30 days
Try Radar Cloud free

Already running Radar in your cluster?
Click in its top bar, then Connect this cluster.

Radar Cloud Self-Managed

Or run Radar Cloud in your own infrastructure.

Fleet views, alerts, retained history and team access, with the control plane and dashboard running in your infrastructure instead of ours. Your clusters connect to a control plane you operate, so cluster data stays inside your network; optional AI investigations use your own model account (Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock or Vertex AI). Built for teams whose security policy rules out a hosted service.

Read the Self-Managed guideCreate your Radar Cloud account
  • The same fleet view, alerts, retained history, and team access as hosted Radar Cloud
  • Self-serve on Enterprise: create a Radar Cloud account, start the 14-day trial, and generate your license yourself, no sales call
  • Try it in one cluster first: one Helm command, no public address, open it with port-forward
  • No lock-in, either way: move clusters between hosted and Self-Managed with one command
  • Same per-cluster price as hosted, counted by your own control plane
  • The license is verified locally; a daily check-in renews it and reports your cluster count, never cluster data
  • Air-gapped deployments on Custom plans
Feature by feature

The full comparison matrix.

Same engine everywhere. Where open source is enough, it says so. Where Cloud adds value, we explain why.

Core engine

Topology graph

Live service + workload topology with real-time connections

Local binary
Yes
In-cluster (Helm)
Yes
Cloud
Enhanced (multi-cluster)

Resource explorer

Local binary
Yes
In-cluster (Helm)
Yes
Cloud
Yes

Helm release manager

Local binary
Yes
In-cluster (Helm)
Yes
Cloud
Yes

Image filesystem viewer

Local binary
Yes
In-cluster (Helm)
Yes
Cloud
Yes

TLS certificate tracker

Local binary
Yes
In-cluster (Helm)
Yes
Cloud
Yes

Traffic visualization

Auto-detects Hubble, Caretta, or Istio

Local binary
Yes
In-cluster (Helm)
Yes
Cloud
Yes

Cluster audit (44 checks)

Local binary
Yes
In-cluster (Helm)
Yes
Cloud
Yes

Cost insights (OpenCost)

Local binary
Yes
In-cluster (Helm)
Yes
Cloud
Yes

MCP / AI integration

Built-in MCP server, enabled by default

Local binary
Yes
In-cluster (Helm)
Yes
Cloud
Yes

GitOps (FluxCD + ArgoCD)

Sync state, app-of-apps, reconciliation triggers

Local binary
Yes
In-cluster (Helm)
Yes
Cloud
Yes

AI investigations

OSS runs Diagnose through your own agent CLI (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or OpenCode), under your existing subscription. Cloud runs investigations hosted, on request or from an alert rule: 100 a month free, more per cluster on paid plans.

Local binary
Your own agent CLI
In-cluster (Helm)
Your own agent CLI
Cloud
Hosted, 100/month free

Scope

Clusters

Local binary connects via your kubeconfig, one active context at a time. In-cluster Helm sees the cluster it runs in. Cloud connects multiple clusters via in-cluster Radar instances and shows them all in one fleet view.

Local binary
Any cluster via kubeconfig
In-cluster (Helm)
Cluster where deployed
Cloud
Unlimited, all in one fleet view

Users

Local binary is single-user (your laptop). In-cluster Helm authenticates via OIDC or proxy and impersonates each user against the K8s API. Cloud users sign in to your workspace.

Local binary
1 (local)
In-cluster (Helm)
Unlimited (OIDC + RBAC)
Cloud
Unlimited

Multi-cluster dashboards

Local binary
No
In-cluster (Helm)
No
Cloud
Yes

Cross-cluster search

Local binary
No
In-cluster (Helm)
No
Cloud
Yes

Data retention

Event timeline

Radar stores timeline evidence in memory by default or local SQLite when persistence is configured. Radar Cloud adds cloud-backed event retention up to 30 days.

Local binary
In-memory or local SQLite
In-cluster (Helm)
Local SQLite, configurable
Cloud
24 hours / 3 days / 30 days

Audit log of UI actions

Cloud and paid plans only: 30 days on Team, 1 year on Enterprise. The Free plan has no audit log.

Local binary
No
In-cluster (Helm)
No
Cloud
Team 30 days / Enterprise 1 year

Resource-change diffs while retained

Local binary
Yes
In-cluster (Helm)
Yes
Cloud
Yes

Authentication & access

Auth modes

Local binary uses your kubeconfig directly. In-cluster Helm supports proxy auth (oauth2-proxy, Pomerium, Cloudflare Access) and OIDC (Google, Okta, Dex, Keycloak). Cloud adds Google/GitHub sign-in on every plan, with SAML/OIDC SSO and SCIM on Enterprise.

Local binary
kubeconfig
In-cluster (Helm)
Proxy, OIDC
Cloud
Google & GitHub on every plan; SAML/OIDC + SCIM on Enterprise

Team workspaces

Local binary
No
In-cluster (Helm)
No
Cloud
Yes

Role-based access control

In-cluster uses K8s RBAC via impersonation. Cloud adds workspace-level scoped roles.

Local binary
K8s native
In-cluster (Helm)
K8s native (impersonation)
Cloud
K8s native + scoped roles

Collaboration

Shareable deep-links

Local binary
No
In-cluster (Helm)
Within your network
Cloud
Yes

Annotations on resources

Local binary
No
In-cluster (Helm)
No
Cloud
Yes

Slack and webhook alerts

Local binary
No
In-cluster (Helm)
No
Cloud
Yes

Webhook integrations

Local binary
No
In-cluster (Helm)
No
Cloud
Yes

Operations

Hosting

With Radar Cloud, Radar runs in each of your clusters and connects to a control plane, hosted by us or Self-Managed in your own infrastructure.

Local binary
Your laptop
In-cluster (Helm)
Your cluster
Cloud
Radar in your cluster; control plane hosted by us or Self-Managed

Updates

Local binary
Manual binary upgrade
In-cluster (Helm)
Manual `helm upgrade`
Cloud
Automatic when hosted; you upgrade Self-Managed

Uptime SLA

A contractual 99.9% uptime SLA comes with the Custom plan. Free, Team and Enterprise don't include an uptime SLA.

Local binary
No
In-cluster (Helm)
No
Cloud
99.9% on Custom

Professional support

Cloud Free uses community support. Team adds email, in-app chat, and a dedicated Slack channel. Enterprise adds priority response, and Custom adds a dedicated CSM and phone support.

Local binary
GitHub Discussions
In-cluster (Helm)
GitHub Discussions
Cloud
Varies by Cloud tier

Outbound network calls

Both OSS deployments run airgapped: block egress to releases.skyhook.io and api.github.com (its fallback) and there are zero outbound calls. Otherwise outbound traffic is limited to anonymous version checks when the UI opens (version plus OS/arch). Cloud-connected Radar instances open an outbound tunnel to the Radar control plane.

Local binary
Anonymous version check only
In-cluster (Helm)
Anonymous version check only
Cloud
In-cluster → control plane (ours, or yours when Self-Managed)

Data residency

Local binary
Your laptop
In-cluster (Helm)
Your cluster
Cloud
US hosted; EU region on Enterprise; your infrastructure when Self-Managed

Compliance

SOC 2 Type 2

Local binary
N/A (runs on your machine)
In-cluster (Helm)
N/A (runs in your cluster)
Cloud
Yes

Cloud control plane on your infrastructure

Radar Cloud Self-Managed runs the Cloud control plane on your infrastructure and keeps cluster data in your environment. It is self-serve on Enterprise: start the trial and generate the license yourself. Air-gapped deployments are on Custom. Local and in-cluster Radar OSS need no Cloud control plane.

Local binary
N/A (no Cloud control plane)
In-cluster (Helm)
N/A (no Cloud control plane)
Cloud
Self-Managed on Enterprise; air-gapped on Custom

Source code visibility

Local binary
Full (Apache 2.0)
In-cluster (Helm)
Full (Apache 2.0)
Cloud
In-cluster Radar only (Apache 2.0)
Our commitments

Four promises we make to the OSS community.

You're going to invest time learning Radar. Here's what we commit to in return.

The OSS stays OSS.

Radar is Apache 2.0. It will remain Apache 2.0. We will not relicense to BUSL, SSPL, Elastic License, or any other 'open-ish' license that reserves commercial rights for us.

No artificial crippling.

We won't remove features from the OSS to push you toward Radar. If a feature ships in OSS, it stays in OSS. Radar features exist because they can't work in a local binary - not because we gated them.

Community contributions welcome.

We review PRs from the community the same way we review internal PRs. Maintainers at Skyhook are paid to make the OSS better, not to keep it behind Radar Cloud.

What runs in your cluster is open-source too.

The in-cluster Radar install that connects to Radar Cloud is Apache 2.0 and auditable. You can read every line of code that runs in your cluster.

Cloud Native Computing Foundation Silver Member

We're a Silver Member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation - the foundation that stewards Kubernetes and the cloud native ecosystem we build on.

Live · Community signal·3.9k

Loved by Kubernetes operators.

Unfiltered signal from teams running Radar in their clusters. Click any card to see the original.

Blogwilliamlam.com

I really like what the Skyhook OSS team has done with Radar, I am definitely a fan. It has a much cleaner, modern look and feel … will be using it as my go-to k8s visualization.

William Lamview →
Redditr/devops

Just opened it in under 15 seconds, the topology view is awesome.

u/shellwhaleview →
Redditr/devops

Damn, this is pretty impressive. It's already on my homelab.

u/kryptnview →
Redditr/devops

I got kicked out of Lens free dashboard and now I need to subscribe, after using it since like 2020. Saw this post, made the switch and holy I am in love … Lens should be free and this dashboard should be paid 😂

u/More-Lavishness-9969view →
Redditr/kubernetes

Love it. A fantastic bit of work here. Well done!

u/Double_Intention_641view →
GitHubskyhook-io/radar #54

The topology feature is great.

@vrabbiview →
Redditr/kubernetes

It looks gorgeous.

u/Double_Intention_641view →

More feedback every week on GitHub, Reddit, and the Kubernetes Slack.

When to upgrade

You probably want Radar Cloud when...

Something breaks at 3am, nobody has Radar open, and nobody finds out until morning.
Kubernetes deleted the events an hour after the incident, and nobody had set up persistence. Cloud keeps them for up to 30 days.
A teammate asks what prod looks like right now, and the honest answer is a screenshot.
You want a root cause with evidence without installing an agent CLI or wiring up an API key.
You run more than one cluster and jumping kubeconfigs is slowing down incidents.
Your security team needs SSO, SCIM, and an audit log, or needs the whole control plane inside your own infrastructure.

Try it. Both of them.

Run Radar OSS locally or in your cluster. Add Radar Cloud for alerts, AI investigations and shared fleet views.

Install with HelmTry hostedLet's Talk

Apache 2.0 OSS · Unlimited clusters with Radar OSS · Hosted free tier for up to 3 clusters