Commercial Kubernetes platforms
Anyport vs Porter
Porter describes itself as a platform as a service that runs in your own cloud, and its quick start is to connect a cloud account and create a cluster.
That is the whole difference in one sentence: Porter's model starts at a cloud account, and Anyport's starts at a cluster that already exists. If you have the former, Porter's migration story from Heroku is well-worn and worth reading.
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 Kubernetes you own.
- Your workloads and data stay in your own infrastructure.
- Builds from Git, revisions and rollbacks.
- Roles, an audit log and a Heroku-shaped workflow on top of Kubernetes.
Where they differ
The short answer first, and the detail underneath it where the short answer would otherwise mislead.
| Porter | Anyport | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Porter A PaaS inside your cloud account AWS, GCP or Azure. | Anyport A hosted control plane, your cluster Wherever that cluster happens to be. |
| Runtime | Porter Kubernetes in a supported public cloud | Anyport Kubernetes anywhere Including bare metal, k3s and edge sites. |
| Where the control plane runs | Porter Hosted by Porter | Anyport Hosted by us There is nothing for you to install, upgrade or back up. |
| How it reaches your infrastructure | Porter A cloud account you connect | Anyport Your cluster connects out The agent dials us. No cloud account is involved. |
| What your infrastructure must expose | Porter A supported cloud account | Anyport Nothing No inbound port, no public IP, no reachable API server. |
| Who provisions the cluster | Porter Porter creates one in your account | Anyport You do We never create infrastructure or take cloud credentials. |
| Price | Porter Published, plus your cloud bill You pay your provider for what it runs on. | Anyport Free today Up to 10 private and 20 public clusters. Compute is never metered. |
| Compliance | Porter See their site | Anyport Not certified yet Controls are published in full on the security page instead. |
What Porter is
Taken from their own documentation, read on 4 September 2026.
Porter is documented as a PaaS that runs in your own cloud, supporting AWS, GCP and Azure, with a quick start that connects a cloud account, creates a cluster and deploys an application.
Its clearest positioning is for teams outgrowing Heroku who want the same experience on infrastructure they are billed for directly.
We did not find documentation for deploying to an on-premises cluster, so this page makes no claim about whether that is supported.
Choose Porter if
- You are on AWS, GCP or Azure and want the cluster created and operated for you.
- You are migrating off Heroku and want a path somebody has walked many times.
- Your evaluation requires named production customers from the vendor.
Choose Anyport if
- The infrastructure is not in a public cloud, or not in one of those three.
- The cluster exists already and re-platforming it is not on the table.
- The cluster cannot be reached from outside, which rules out anything that connects inward.
- You want several clusters in different places under one console rather than one cloud account per platform.
Questions
- Does Porter work outside AWS, GCP and Azure?
- Its documentation describes it as running in your own cloud and names AWS, GCP and Azure. We did not find documentation for an on-premises cluster, and this page does not claim there is none. Check their docs.
- 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.