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Google Cloud Run vs Google Kubernetes Engine comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Google Cloud Run
Ranking in Container Management
14th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
2.2
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Containers as a Service (CaaS) (6th)
Google Kubernetes Engine
Ranking in Container Management
11th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

AS
Technical Lead at a tech consulting company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Microservices deployment has become faster and cost optimization is driving daily development
While Google Cloud Run does a great job of reducing costs, to mitigate cold starts, users can set minimum instances, but scaling to zero costs has become a cost-saving advantage even when idle, and idle instance costs might occur. This can be avoided because whenever a heavy container causes a cold start, it affects latency and sensitivity of the application. When it starts from idle to full run, it scales slowly, causing slowness in the service deployed; sometimes some of the APIs fail to respond. It is difficult to identify the bug because it is often due to the idleness of the application and not the code, which can be quite frustrating. Additionally, simple tasks for developers who just want to run a few lines of code can be more complex. I would say optimizing concurrency can improve the experience; currently, managing multiple containers in a single Google Cloud Run instance becomes quite difficult, especially tasks such as logging and local proxy monitoring. Google provides fully orchestrated alternatives, but Cloud Run is better for scaling. Slowness in applications is a notable issue.
ParthasarathyT - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Publicis Sapient
Managed solutions enable efficient handling of web applications and migration projects
Google Kubernetes Engine can be improved by enabling the in-place upgrade of the machine type of an existing node pool since I currently need to destroy and recreate it. There is no feature present where I can upgrade directly, and having more than 1,000 to 2,000 workloads in one node pool makes changing the node pool name difficult for all those workloads. I choose eight out of ten mainly because of the node pool upgrade challenge I mentioned, but also because of the existence of Anthos service mesh, which is the ingress controller available only for the enterprise Kubernetes Engine. It would be beneficial if it could be offered in the normal Kubernetes Engine with any limitations.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Google Cloud Run has positively impacted our organization by saving us five thousand dollars per month based on scheduling our infrastructure from nine p.m. to nine a.m. for shutdown and starting, as well as stopping the MongoDB clusters."
"Google Cloud Run is a very good tool that I use for deploying applications; its ease of deployment, auto scaling features, and resource optimization are very nice features that help individuals deploy their apps and solutions into the cloud without any hiccups."
"Google Cloud Run has positively impacted my organization in numerous ways, such as significant cost efficiency and reduced overhead since we only pay for the resources that we use."
"Google Cloud Run has impacted my organization positively through faster deployment and development, where developers can deploy applications quickly without worrying about infrastructure, push the app live with just containers, speed up time to market significantly, launch features faster and iterate more often, pay only when code runs without maintaining idle servers, reduce cloud costs dramatically for applications with low or unpredictable traffic, automatically scale based on traffic spikes to handle sudden loads without manual intervention so our business does not lose users during peak hours, and let developers focus on business logic instead of DevOps."
"Google Cloud Run and the Google Cloud environment positively impact my organization by providing almost 99.9% availability for applications, which instills confidence in the organization and users by reducing the dependency on the physical network and allowing access to applications and data."
"The logs are important for detecting problems in our clusters."
"The most valuable feature is the horizontal staging of applications."
"Its functionalities, such as computing the namespaces, clusters, pods, and restart logs, are easy to use."
"I rate Google Kubernetes Engine a ten out of ten."
"It is easy to use and deploy."
"The product has no downtime."
"Before using this solution, it was a lot of manual tasks and a lot of people participated in the process."
"GKE is easier to understand and use than Elastic Kubernetes Service."
 

Cons

"There are a few areas where Google Cloud Run could improve."
"If speaking about improvements for Google Cloud Run, I think they could reduce the cold starts and manage to configure a set number of minimum instances to keep the instances in a warm phase."
"One area where Google Cloud Run could be better is the cold start; when a container scales, it starts from zero and takes a moment to boot up before it can serve the request."
"There are a few areas that could be improved. We have experienced cold start latency because when scaling from zero, the first request is slow."
"When it starts from idle to full run, it scales slowly, causing slowness in the service deployed; sometimes some of the APIs fail to respond."
"The network configuration has to be simplified."
"Google Kubernetes Engine's cost should be improved because it is high."
"The user interface could be improved."
"The support is not that great. I rate the support a three or four out of ten."
"One of the things I missed a bit is the visibility and availability of solutions. If I compare it to a different solution, it is a bit behind."
"Google Kubernetes Engine can be improved by enabling the in-place upgrade of the machine type of an existing node pool since I currently need to destroy and recreate it."
"I would like to see the ability to create multiple notebook configurations."
"There is a limitation for our infrastructure. It's very complex to see in one dashboard all the components and all the behavior on performance. I am looking for some additional tools for that. If I want to check the disk or file storage, it gets complex. There should be an integrated dashboard so that we can manage everything through a single pane."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The price for Google Kubernetes Engine could be lower - I'd rate its pricing at three out of five."
"This is an open source solution, so there is no pricing or licensing."
"The tool's licensing costs are yearly."
"I rate the product's price a six on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price. The product is competitively priced."
"Initially, Google Kubernetes Engine was a little bit cheaper, but now its prices have been increased compared to the pricing model and the features that are made available by its competitors."
"The product is a little bit expensive."
"Its pricing is good. They bill us only per user. That's nice."
"I would rate the solution's pricing a nine out of ten. The tool costs around 3000 dollars per month. There are no additional costs apart from these."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
33%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Wholesaler/Distributor
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Healthcare Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business21
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise17
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Google Cloud Run?
If speaking about improvements for Google Cloud Run, I think they could reduce the cold starts and manage to configure a set number of minimum instances to keep the instances in a warm phase. Addit...
What is your primary use case for Google Cloud Run?
In my day-to-day work, I use Google Cloud Run for managing and running cluster and containerized applications on the Google Kubernetes Engine and Google Console. I have created multiple application...
What advice do you have for others considering Google Cloud Run?
If any organization has a lot of load on their Google Kubernetes Engine or on Google Cloud, they can easily switch to Google Cloud Run and should start using it because it will help them in many wa...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google Kubernetes Engine?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Google Kubernetes Engine is straightforward, as I previously indicated. The need for humans is reduced with GCP since there is no need for ...
What needs improvement with Google Kubernetes Engine?
The price could be a bit cheaper. I don't see anything with Google Kubernetes Engine that needs to be improved. I think they are already implementing Kubernetes itself, so they are the owners. ...
What is your primary use case for Google Kubernetes Engine?
I use Google Kubernetes Engine for many purposes, most notably for websites, but the websites are microservices. However, some mega projects have many machines that needed to be containerized, so w...
 

Also Known As

Google Cloud Functions, Google Run, GCF
GKE, Google Kubernetes
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Philips Lighting, Alpha Vertex, GroupBy, BQ
Find out what your peers are saying about Google Cloud Run vs. Google Kubernetes Engine and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
921,523 professionals have used our research since 2012.