The honest comparison: Radar OSS vs Radar Cloud.
No marketing gymnastics. Here's exactly what you get in each — so you can make the right call for your team.
Local-first. Single binary. Yours to run.
Install Radar locally or in-cluster. Get topology, events, resource browsing, Helm, and traffic — all running on your infrastructure with zero outbound connections. Great for an individual engineer on a laptop, or for a single cluster's on-call view.
$brew install skyhook-io/tap/radarHosted. Multi-cluster. Built for teams.
Radar Cloud is the hosted control plane that sits on top of the OSS engine. It adds the things that only make sense at team scale: fleet-wide views, long-term event retention, SSO, and collaborative links.
$helm install radar skyhook/radar \\ --set cloud.token=$TOKENThe full comparison matrix.
Where OSS is enough, it says so. Where Radar Cloud adds value, we explain why.
| Feature | Radar OSS | Radar |
|---|---|---|
| Core engine | ||
Topology graph Live service + workload topology with real-time connections | Enhanced (multi-cluster) | |
Resource explorer | ||
Helm release manager | ||
Image filesystem viewer | ||
TLS certificate tracker | ||
Traffic visualization | ||
Cluster audit (31 checks) | ||
Cost insights (OpenCost) | ||
MCP / AI integration | ||
| Scope | ||
Clusters OSS connects to any cluster via your kubeconfig, one active context at a time. Cloud connects multiple clusters through agents and shows them all in one fleet view. Free tier on Cloud is limited to 3 connected clusters. | Unlimited (one active at a time) | Unlimited, all in one fleet view |
Users Local binary = 1 user; Radar = unlimited in your workspace | 1 (local) | Unlimited |
Multi-cluster dashboards | ||
Cross-cluster search | ||
| Data retention | ||
Event timeline OSS uses local SQLite (ephemeral); Radar persists to managed storage | Local, session-based | 30 days to unlimited |
Audit logs | 7 days to unlimited | |
Metrics history | 30 days to 1 year | |
Post-mortem replay | ||
| Authentication & access | ||
Auth modes OSS supports kubeconfig proxy & OIDC when self-hosted | Proxy, OIDC | Google, GitHub, SAML, OIDC, SCIM |
Team workspaces | ||
Role-based access control | K8s native | RBAC + custom roles |
Namespace scoping | Manual | Group-to-namespace mapping |
| Collaboration | ||
Shareable deep-links | ||
Annotations on resources | ||
Slack / PagerDuty / MS Teams alerts | ||
Webhook integrations | ||
| Operations | ||
Hosting | Self-hosted (Helm chart or local binary) | Fully managed SaaS |
Updates | Manual `helm upgrade` | Automatic, zero-downtime |
Uptime SLA | 99.9% (Enterprise) | |
Professional support | GitHub Discussions | Email / priority / CSM |
Data residency controls | Your cluster, your data | US hosted; EU region or BYOC on Enterprise |
| Compliance | ||
SOC 2 Type 2 | N/A (you host) | |
BYOC / on-prem deployment | Enterprise plan | |
Source code visibility | Full (Apache 2.0) | Agent only (Apache 2.0) |
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.
Radar agent is open-source too.
The in-cluster agent that connects to Radar is Apache 2.0 and auditable. You can read every line of code that runs in your cluster.
Loved by Kubernetes operators.
Unfiltered signal from teams running Radar in their clusters. Click any card to see the original.
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 😂
Just opened it in under 15 seconds, the topology view is awesome.
Damn, this is pretty impressive. It's already on my homelab.
Was already solid, but the updates you push every week? They are amazing. Love the new Audit Page. Love the keyboard shortcuts, so intuitive!
I like what I see so far! The timeline feature is a very nice touch.
I tried `radar` for the first time (great work, btw!).
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.
Nice one! In-cluster deployment works like a charm, and may replace my current dashboard I am using.
Works way, way better! For the 322-node cluster the startup time was ~65 sec. Impressive!
Looks quite interesting and unique for visualization & monitoring.
A fresh, lightweight take on how we interact with our clusters.
It's working like a charm, thank you very much!
Looks very promising at first sight, especially the visualizations for topology, timeline and traffic.
loudly said oo0o0oo when I got it running.
I am really liking Radar so far and I am finding it much more useful and streamlined than using Lens IDE.
Love it. A fantastic bit of work here. Well done!
The topology feature is great.
It looks gorgeous.
More feedback every week on GitHub, Reddit, and the Kubernetes Slack.
You probably want Radar Cloud when...
Try it. Both of them.
Install OSS Radar in 30 seconds. Connect it to Radar Cloud in 30 more. See the difference.
Apache 2.0 OSS · Unlimited clusters self-hosted · Hosted free tier for up to 3 clusters