Commercial

Anyport vs Northflank

Northflank

Public LoadBalancer IPs

Their requirement, verbatim: the installation must be able to provision external, public IPs for LoadBalancer Services.

What your infrastructure must expose

Anyport

Nothing

No inbound port, no public IP, no reachable API server.

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.

01Common ground

What both of them do

This much both products do, 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.

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.

Northflank	Question	Anyport
Northflank A hosted platform, your cloud account It deploys into a Kubernetes cluster you run there.	What it is	Anyport A hosted control plane, your cluster Wherever that cluster happens to be.
Northflank Kubernetes 1.34 or 1.35 Cilium is required as the CNI, with the L7 proxy enabled.	Runtime	Anyport Kubernetes No CNI is required. The network policy baseline applies only where the CNI enforces it.
Northflank Hosted by Northflank	Where the control plane runs	Anyport Hosted by us There is nothing for you to install, upgrade or back up.
Northflank A cluster in a supported cloud AWS, GCP, Azure, Civo, OCI, CoreWeave or Nebius.	How it reaches your infrastructure	Anyport Your cluster connects out The agent dials us and holds one connection open. No cloud account is involved.
Northflank Public LoadBalancer IPs Their requirement, verbatim: the installation must be able to provision external, public IPs for LoadBalancer Services.	What your infrastructure must expose	Anyport Nothing No inbound port, no public IP, no reachable API server.
Northflank You do, in your cloud account Meeting the published requirements.	Who provisions the cluster	Anyport You do Or Anyport installs k3s on a bare Linux machine.
Northflank Usage-based, including on your own hardware Their pricing page has a second, bring-your-own-cloud tab: $0.01389 per vCPU-hour, $0.00139 per GB-hour, and $0.00278 per GB of GPU vRAM-hour, for compute running in your own account. 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.
Northflank SOC 2 Type II	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 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.

04In their words

What Northflank is

Taken from their own documentation and pricing.

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. Nodes of at least 4 vCPUs and 8 GB of memory, with 8 vCPUs and 16 GB across the cluster, and three or more nodes recommended. And a warning not to import a cluster that runs production workloads, because a failed install can leave it unhealthy.

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.

05Questions

Questions people ask

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. 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