Alternative to Portainer
LayerOps vs Portainer
Portainer gives you a UI for Docker and Kubernetes. LayerOps gives you a complete platform — infrastructure provisioning, multi-cloud orchestration, load balancing, autoscaling and monitoring, all built-in.
Why teams outgrow Portainer
Still managing servers yourself
Portainer is a management UI — you still provision VMs, install Docker, configure networking and handle updates. LayerOps provisions and manages the infrastructure for you.
No native multi-cloud
Portainer manages one Docker host or one Kubernetes cluster at a time. Distributing workloads across AWS, OVHcloud and Scaleway requires manual orchestration. LayerOps does it natively.
No built-in load balancing
Portainer doesn't include a load balancer. You need to configure Traefik, Nginx or HAProxy yourself. LayerOps includes HTTP/2 load balancers with automatic SSL certificates.
No cross-cloud autoscaling
Portainer has no concept of autoscaling instances across providers. LayerOps dynamically scales both services and infrastructure across any cloud based on demand.
Limited monitoring
Portainer shows basic container stats. LayerOps provides full Grafana dashboards, custom alerts, and per-environment cost analytics out of the box.
No environment isolation
Portainer's RBAC is basic — team management requires the Business license. LayerOps offers granular environment-level RBAC with role-based permissions on every resource.
| Portainer | LayerOps | |
|---|---|---|
| InfrastructureServer provisioning | Manual (you manage VMs) | Automatic — any cloud provider |
| Multi-cloud deployment | Native — single control plane | |
| Hybrid cloud (cloud + bare-metal) | Manual Docker install | Native — mix any infrastructure |
| Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) | N/A | ✓ — deploy to your own accounts |
| OrchestrationDocker image deployment | ||
| Git-based deployments | Built-in Git integration | |
| Auto-scaling (services) | Built-in, per-service | |
| Auto-scaling (instances) | Built-in, cross-provider | |
| Load Balancer with SSL | DIY (Traefik, Nginx…) | Built-in HTTP/2 LB + auto SSL |
| Custom domains | Manual DNS setup | One-click domain mapping |
| Rolling updates | Basic (Docker Compose) | Automatic zero-downtime deploys |
| Monitoring & SecurityMonitoring dashboards | Basic container stats | Full Grafana dashboards |
| Alerting | Built-in custom alerts | |
| Cost analytics | Built-in per-environment analytics | |
| RBAC | Business Edition only ($) | Included — environment-level RBAC |
| SSH access to services | Docker exec (full host access) | Temporary authorized SSH |
| OperationsGPU workloads | Manual GPU passthrough | Native GPU auto-provisioning |
| Backup & Restore | DIY | Built-in |
| API / CI-CD integration | Limited API | Full REST API + YAML CI/CD |
| Pricing | Free CE / $12+/node Business | From €49/mo — unlimited nodes |
When Portainer is the right choice
Portainer is a great tool for developers managing a few Docker hosts in a lab or staging environment. If you need a simple UI to inspect containers on a single server, it does the job well.
But when you need production-grade orchestration — multi-cloud, autoscaling, load balancing, monitoring, RBAC — that's where LayerOps takes over. See also how we compare to Kubernetes, AWS Fargate and Azure ACI.
Need to deploy on your own infrastructure? Discover LayerOps On-Premise — self-hosted, white-label, air-gap compatible.
Ready to go beyond Docker management?
Deploy your services across any cloud provider in minutes — with built-in load balancing, autoscaling and monitoring.