Portainer
by Portainer · Container management for Kubernetes, Docker and edge fleets
61.2 — BenchRank score out of 100
Screenshots of Portainer
Homepage Pricing page
Overview
Portainer is a control plane for running Kubernetes, Docker and Swarm environments from one interface. It covers multi-cluster fleet management, GitOps deployment with promotion gates and rollback, RBAC with SSO, LDAP and OIDC, audit logging with SIEM export, and asynchronous delivery to offline or air-gapped edge sites.
- Best for
- IT and OT teams running container fleets across many clusters or sites without Kubernetes specialists
- Pricing
- The pricing page describes three licensing tracks (Enterprise IT, Industrial & IoT, Home & Student) and a free tier of 3 nodes, but the captured text shows no figures.
- Runs on
- WebSelf-hosted
Strengths and trade-offs
Strengths
- Manages Kubernetes, Docker and Swarm from one control plane
- Works with EKS, AKS, GKE, Rancher, K3s, OpenShift and Talos
- GUI deployment; pages state no YAML or command line needed
- Runs in air-gapped, offline and intermittent networks
Trade-offs
- No prices published; figures require contacting sales
- Free tier capped at 3 nodes
- GitOps runs centrally on the Portainer Server, not in each cluster
How this score is made up
Each dimension is scored out of 100 and combined into the headline score using fixed weights.
- MCP support
- 60 out of 100
- API quality
- 30 out of 100
- Documentation
- 90 out of 100
- Agent friendliness
- 85 out of 100
- Pricing transparency
- 45 out of 100
- Changelog
- 100 out of 100
- Marketing site structure
- 70 out of 100
- Operational trust
- 0 out of 100
Measured, but not part of the score
Useful to know, but not a mark for or against the product — so these do not affect the ranking.
- Openness
- 65 out of 100
- Maintenance
- 100 out of 100
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