Self-hosted PaaS on Kubernetes
Anyport vs Canine
Canine is the closest thing to Anyport that exists, and this is the page where we win the fewest rows. It is a real PaaS on Kubernetes, it does multi-cluster, it is free to self-host with nothing paywalled, and its hosted tier gives you your first cluster free forever against our one free cluster. If you want to read one competitor's site properly before choosing, read theirs.
Three things separate the products. Canine connects to a cluster with a kubeconfig and dials its Kubernetes API; our agent dials out and the API server is never exposed. Canine has no database backup feature; we back up and point-in-time-restore managed Postgres and MySQL. Canine curates nine Helm charts, three of which hand your app a connection URL; we operate twelve services and wire the credentials in.
What both of them do
This much is common ground, so the table below is only about where they differ.
- A real deploy experience on Kubernetes: push to deploy, rollbacks, automatic HTTPS.
- More than one cluster from a single console.
- Preview environments per pull request, torn down automatically.
- Logs, metrics and a terminal into a running container.
- Cron jobs, one-off tasks and a command that runs before a deploy.
- Builds from a Dockerfile or buildpacks, running on your own cluster.
- Your compute is never metered by either of us.
Where they differ
The short answer first, and the detail underneath it where the short answer would otherwise mislead.
| Canine | Anyport | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Canine A PaaS you install into your cluster Or a hosted console that connects to it. | Anyport A hosted control plane, your cluster Wherever that cluster happens to be. |
| Runtime | Canine Kubernetes | Anyport Kubernetes Anyport can install k3s on a bare machine if you do not have a cluster. |
| How it reaches your cluster | Canine A kubeconfig it dials Except in self-hosted cluster mode, where it runs inside the one cluster it manages and uses a service account. | Anyport Your cluster connects out The agent dials us and holds one connection open. |
| What your cluster must expose | Canine A reachable Kubernetes API server This is about cluster management, not your apps: Canine ships a one-click cloudflared package for publishing services without inbound ports. | Anyport Nothing No inbound port, no public IP, no reachable API server. |
| Managed services | Canine Nine curated Helm charts Three of them give an app a connection URL. Anything else on Artifact Hub installs unmanaged. | Anyport Twelve, operated Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, ClickHouse, Qdrant, OpenSearch, NATS, RabbitMQ, object storage and more, with credentials wired into the app. |
| Database backups | Canine None No backup or restore feature is documented or present in the source. | Anyport Scheduled, with point-in-time restore On managed Postgres and MySQL, restoring into a new instance. |
| Preview environments | Canine Yes, created by hand You pick an open pull request from a list. Cleanup is automatic. | Anyport Yes, automatic Created on the pull request event, with the URLs posted as a comment, and reaped on merge, close or a week idle. |
| Roles and audit | Canine Roles yes, audit log no Owner, admin and member, plus grants from a team to a resource. | Anyport Roles and an audit log Admin, editor and viewer, with per-resource permissions. |
| Single sign-on | Canine LDAP, OIDC and SAML Theirs, not ours. | Anyport Not yet This is a real gap and we would rather you read it here than find it later. |
| Price | Canine Free to self-host Hosted: the first cluster is free forever, then $20 a cluster a month. Checked 6 September 2026. | Anyport $5/mo or $50/yr 1 cluster free, 3 on Pro, then $4 a month or $40 a year each. Compute is never metered. |
| Compliance | Canine Not certified | Anyport Not certified yet Controls are published in full on the security page instead. |
What Canine is
Taken from their own documentation, read on 6 September 2026.
Canine installs onto a Kubernetes cluster you already have, with Helm. Their architecture documentation states that Canine communicates with Kubernetes clusters via the Kubernetes API using the cluster's kubeconfig, and their own k3s setup instructions pass --tls-san with your server IP and then tell you that you may need to allow connections to the Kubernetes API on port 6443.
Self-hosted in cluster mode it runs inside the cluster it manages, using a service account rather than a kubeconfig. That single-cluster case needs no reachability. A second cluster is connected by kubeconfig like any other.
Their curated service catalog is nine Helm charts. PostgreSQL, Redis and ClickHouse are the three that hand an application a connection URL. Any chart on Artifact Hub can also be installed, unmanaged.
There is no backup feature. We looked for one in their repository and found no backup table, job, schedule or restore path.
They have things we do not: single sign-on with LDAP, OIDC and SAML, a REST API with an OpenAPI specification, an MCP server that speaks HTTP with OAuth 2.0 where ours speaks stdio, and cloud development environments in the browser.
Choose Canine if
- You want the source, and you want to run the control plane yourself. Ours is hosted and closed.
- You need single sign-on with SAML, OIDC or LDAP today.
- Your cluster's API server is reachable from where the console runs, so the connection model costs you nothing.
- One cluster is all you have, and their hosted free tier covers it forever.
- You want a REST API with a published OpenAPI specification.
Choose Anyport if
- Your cluster's API server is not reachable: on-premises, behind NAT, at an edge site, or inside a customer's network. Our agent dials out and nothing dials in.
- You run managed databases that have to be backed up and restored to a point in time.
- You want managed services operated rather than charts installed, with credentials wired into your apps.
- You want previews created and commented on the pull request without anyone clicking anything.
- You need an audit log of who changed what.
Questions
- Is Canine a serious alternative to Anyport?
- Yes, and it is the most serious one on this site. It is a genuine PaaS on Kubernetes with multi-cluster support that does not meter your compute, which is the same combination we lead with. We think we are ahead on database operations, on previews and on connecting to clusters nobody can dial into, and they are ahead on single sign-on, on their API and on being open source. Read both.
- Can Canine manage a cluster with no public API server?
- Self-hosted inside that cluster, yes, because it is already there and uses a service account. For any cluster it connects to remotely it uses a kubeconfig and dials the Kubernetes API, which needs to be reachable from wherever Canine is running. We have not tested their hosted service against a private cluster and make no claim about it.
- What does Anyport require of a cluster?
- A Kubernetes cluster you can run one command against, or a bare Linux machine where Anyport installs k3s first. No inbound port, no public IP, no load balancer that can obtain one, and no kubeconfig handed to us. The agent opens a connection outward and holds it open.
- What does Anyport cost?
- One cluster is free with every feature and unlimited members, apps and projects. Pro is $5 a month for 3 clusters, then $4 each. Compute is never metered because it is not ours. The one counted resource is traffic our gateway carries for clusters with no public address of their own: 10 GB a month free, 100 GB on Pro, then $0.05 per GB.
- Is Anyport audited or certified?
- Not yet. In place of a report, the security page documents what the agent runs with inside your cluster, what crosses the boundary and how secrets are stored, so a reviewer can evaluate the controls directly. Two of them hold regardless of certification: we never receive credentials for your Kubernetes API, and your workloads keep serving whether or not our control plane is reachable.
Sources
Read on 6 September 2026. If one of these pages now says something different, the source is right and this page is stale.
If Anyport is the one you want
Connecting a cluster is one command and takes a few minutes. Everything is free today, and the pricing page lists the limits that are actually enforced rather than the ones a plan would imply.