Kubernetes

Anyport vs Canine

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.

How it reaches your cluster

Anyport

Your cluster connects out

The agent dials us and holds one connection open.

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, where ours gives you three. 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; point our managed Postgres or MySQL at a bucket you own and it backs up on a schedule and restores to a point in time. Canine curates nine Helm charts, three of which hand your app a connection URL; we operate twenty-seven services and wire the credentials in.

01Common ground

What both of them do

This much both products do, 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.
Compute on your own cluster is never metered by either of us.

02The differences

Where they differ

Each row asks one question and sets the two answers across a seam. The highlighted row is the one this comparison turns on.

Canine	Question	Anyport
Canine A PaaS you install into your cluster Or a hosted console that connects to it.	What it is	Anyport A hosted control plane, your cluster Wherever that cluster happens to be.
Canine Kubernetes	Runtime	Anyport Kubernetes Anyport can install k3s on a bare machine if you do not have a 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.	How it reaches your cluster	Anyport Your cluster connects out The agent dials us and holds one connection open.
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.	What your cluster must expose	Anyport Nothing No inbound port, no public IP, no reachable API server.
Canine Nine curated Helm charts Three of them give an app a connection URL. Anything else on Artifact Hub installs unmanaged.	Managed services	Anyport Twenty-seven, operated Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, ClickHouse, Qdrant, OpenSearch, NATS, RabbitMQ, object storage and more, with credentials wired into the app.
Canine None No backup or restore feature is documented or present in the source.	Database backups	Anyport Scheduled, to a bucket you own Point managed Postgres or MySQL at an S3-compatible bucket and it backs up on a schedule and restores to a point in time, into a new instance.
Canine Yes, created by hand You pick an open pull request from a list. Cleanup is automatic.	Preview environments	Anyport Yes, automatic Created on the pull request event, with the URLs posted as a comment, reachable on your own hostnames by a header, and reaped on merge, close or a week idle.
Canine Roles yes, audit log no Owner, admin and member, plus grants from a team to a resource.	Roles and audit	Anyport Roles and an audit log Admin, developer and viewer, with access levels per cluster and project, and grants to a person or a team.
Canine LDAP, OIDC and SAML On the hosted service and self-hosted alike.	Single sign-on	Anyport Self-hosted: any OIDC issuer Keycloak, Entra, Okta, Authentik. The hosted console has no per-organisation SSO yet.
Canine REST, with an OpenAPI specification And an MCP server that speaks HTTP with OAuth 2.0.	API and config as code	Anyport GraphQL, with a published schema Service tokens for scripts and CI, an anyport.yaml the repository carries, and an MCP server in the CLI.
Canine Free to self-host Hosted: the first cluster is free forever, then $20 a cluster a month. Checked 2 October 2026.	Price	Anyport $5/mo or $50/yr 3 clusters free, then $2 a month each, billed by the hour. Compute on your own clusters is never metered.
Canine Not certified	Compliance	Anyport Not certified yet Controls are published in full on the security page instead.

03The decision

Which one to choose

Each list is written to be true. If the first one describes you, the better product is theirs.

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 on a hosted console today, or SAML or LDAP anywhere. Ours is OIDC and self-hosted only.
Your cluster's API server is reachable from where the console runs, so the connection model costs you nothing.
You want a REST API with an OpenAPI specification rather than GraphQL.

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 two or three clusters: ours are free up to three, where their hosted tier is $20 a month for each past the first.
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.
You have no cluster yet. Anyport Cloud runs one, where Canine needs a cluster to install into or connect to.

04In their words

What Canine is

Taken from their own documentation and pricing.

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.

05Questions

Questions people ask

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, on config as code and on connecting to clusters nobody can dial into, and they are ahead on single sign-on for a hosted console 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. With no cluster at all, Anyport Cloud runs one for you on Pro, billed for what your apps use.

What does Anyport cost?

Three clusters are free with every feature and unlimited members, apps and projects. Pro is $5 a month with $5 of credit back each month; clusters past the free three are $2 a month each, and clusters on Anyport Cloud $5, billed by the hour. Compute on your own clusters is never metered because it is not ours, and the one counted resource there is traffic our gateway carries for clusters with no public address of their own: 10 GB a month free, 100 GB on Pro, then $0.02 per GB. A cluster on Anyport Cloud runs on our hardware instead and is billed for what your apps use, at $12 per vCPU and $6 per GiB of memory a month, from credit.

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.

Start with three free.

Connecting a cluster is one command and takes a few minutes. Three clusters are free with every feature, and the pricing page works out what yours would cost.

Pricing