Commercial Kubernetes platforms
Anyport vs Northflank
Northflank is the closest architectural analogue on this site: their control plane, your cluster, your data. They are the older company, with a broader surface and a SOC 2 Type II report we do not have, and where procurement requires that report the decision is already made.
The difference that matters is written in their own requirements: your cluster has to be able to hand out public load balancer IPs, and it has to run Cilium. If your cluster can do that, they are a serious option and you should treat this page as a reason to read theirs.
What both of them do
This much is common ground, so the table below is only about where they differ.
- A hosted control plane in front of a Kubernetes cluster you own.
- Your workloads and data stay in your own infrastructure.
- Builds from Git, revisions and rollbacks.
- Managed databases running inside your cluster.
- Roles, an audit log and one console over several clusters.
Where they differ
The short answer first, and the detail underneath it where the short answer would otherwise mislead.
| Northflank | Anyport | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Northflank A hosted platform, your cloud account It deploys into a Kubernetes cluster you run there. | Anyport A hosted control plane, your cluster Wherever that cluster happens to be. |
| Runtime | Northflank Kubernetes 1.34 or 1.35 Cilium is required as the CNI, with the L7 proxy enabled. | Anyport Kubernetes No CNI is required. The network policy baseline applies only where the CNI enforces it. |
| Where the control plane runs | Northflank Hosted by Northflank | Anyport Hosted by us There is nothing for you to install, upgrade or back up. |
| How it reaches your infrastructure | Northflank A cluster in a supported cloud AWS, GCP, Azure, Civo, OCI, CoreWeave or Nebius. | Anyport Your cluster connects out The agent dials us and holds one connection open. No cloud account is involved. |
| What your infrastructure must expose | Northflank Public LoadBalancer IPs Their requirement, verbatim: the installation must be able to provision external, public IPs for LoadBalancer Services. | Anyport Nothing No inbound port, no public IP, no reachable API server. |
| Who provisions the cluster | Northflank You do, in your cloud account Meeting the published requirements. | Anyport You do Or Anyport installs k3s on a bare Linux machine. |
| Price | Northflank Usage-based Published on their site. BYOC is on all plans including free. | Anyport Free today Up to 10 private and 20 public clusters. Compute is never metered. |
| Compliance | Northflank SOC 2 Type II | Anyport Not certified yet Controls are published in full on the security page instead. |
What Northflank is
Taken from their own documentation, read on 4 September 2026.
Northflank runs a hosted control plane and deploys into a Kubernetes cluster in your own cloud account, which they call BYOC or BYOK.
Their published requirements are specific. Kubernetes 1.34 or 1.35. Cilium as the CNI, with the L7 proxy and Envoy configuration enabled. CoreDNS in kube-system with the DNS Service named kube-dns. At least 8 vCPUs and 16 GB of memory across the cluster, with three or more nodes recommended.
The load-bearing line for this comparison is theirs, quoted verbatim: your Kubernetes installation must be able to provision external, public IPs for Kubernetes Service resources of type LoadBalancer.
They hold a SOC 2 Type II report, publish usage-based pricing, and offer BYOC on all plans including the free one.
Choose Northflank if
- Your clusters live in AWS, GCP, Azure, Civo, OCI, CoreWeave or Nebius and can obtain public load balancer IPs.
- A SOC 2 Type II report is a hard gate in your security review.
- You want the broader surface area and the longer track record of an older company.
- Your procurement process requires named production references from the vendor.
Choose Anyport if
- Your cluster cannot obtain a public load balancer IP, because it is on-premises, behind NAT, at an edge site or inside a customer's network.
- You cannot standardise on Cilium, because the cluster is not yours to re-platform.
- There is no cloud account to connect. The hardware is in a rack you own or lease.
- You want the control plane to have no route into the cluster at all, only a connection the cluster itself opened.
Questions
- Does Northflank work with a cluster that has no public IP?
- Their published BYOC and BYOK requirements state that the Kubernetes installation must be able to provision external, public IPs for Service resources of type LoadBalancer. A cluster that cannot do that does not meet the documented requirements. This is the single external fact our positioning rests on, so it is worth reading on their site rather than taking from ours.
- Is Anyport a drop-in replacement for Northflank?
- No. Northflank has capabilities we do not, and a compliance posture we do not. If your infrastructure meets their requirements, the honest comparison is feature by feature and we lose several of those rows.
- 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?
- Every feature is free today, for everyone on your team, on up to 10 private clusters and 20 public ones. 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, with an allowance of 10 GiB a month.
- 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 4 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.