Software Alternatives & Reviews

Apache OpenWhisk VS Knative

Compare Apache OpenWhisk VS Knative and see what are their differences

Apache OpenWhisk logo Apache OpenWhisk

Serverless / Task Processing

Knative logo Knative

Knative provides a set of components for building modern, source-centric, and container-based applications that can run anywhere.
  • Apache OpenWhisk Landing page
    Landing page //
    2019-10-18
  • Knative Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-27

Apache OpenWhisk videos

A Tour of the New Apache OpenWhisk Incubator Project and Its Numerous Repositories - Matt Rutkowski

More videos:

  • Review - 2018-05-23 Apache OpenWhisk Tech Interchange - Web Meeting
  • Review - 2018-06-20 Apache OpenWhisk Tech Interchange - Zoom Meeting

Knative videos

What is Knative?

More videos:

  • Review - Introduction to Knative | Cloud Academy
  • Review - Knative a Year Later: Serverless, Kubernetes and You (Cloud Next '19)

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Apache OpenWhisk and Knative)
Developer Tools
32 32%
68% 68
Cloud Computing
16 16%
84% 84
API Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Cloud Hosting
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Knative should be more popular than Apache OpenWhisk. It has been mentiond 14 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Apache OpenWhisk mentions (7)

  • The 2024 Web Hosting Report
    Serverless functions are now offered by many cloud providers, as well as having options like OpenFaaS, Knative, Apache's Openwhisk and more from the open source community that run in environments ranging from one server all the way up to globally replicated private clusters. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • My first serverless function on DigitalOcean
    The serverless functions with Digital Ocean are based on Apache Open Whisk, so the service has additional name space, which need to go into the URL. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • run a RestAPI on Every container?
    The two biggest options are OpenWhisk and OpenFaas. Check out /r/serverless for more options. I'm experimenting currently with OpenFaas as it's the lighter weigh to of the two. Source: over 1 year ago
  • which is best open source alternative to lamda
    If you meant lambda for cloud functions provided by Amazon then this is open source and free, as long as you host it yourself: https://openwhisk.apache.org/. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Orchestrator self hosted
    Not necessarily an orchestrator, but you could take a look at https://openwhisk.apache.org/ it's like AWS Lambdas but for kubernetes (and open shift if you swing that way). Haven't used it personally, but the reading I've done on it suggests you could probably use it for this. Source: about 2 years ago
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Knative mentions (14)

  • Rethinking Serverless with Flame
    Https://knative.dev/ - (CloudRun API is based on this OSS project). - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
  • Running Serverless Functions on Kubernetes
    Serverless functions are pieces of code that take an HTTP request object and provide a response. With serverless functions, your application is composed of modular functions that respond to events and can be scaled independently. In this article, you learned about Knative and how to run serverless functions on Kubernetes using Knative and the func CLI. You can learn more about Knative on knative.dev, and a cheat... - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • DevOpsCon Munich 2022 - Human Interactions that Matter
    That night Sebastian Meyen - the chief content officer at S&S Media took the speakers out and I had a great, deep conversation with Zbynek Roubalik - one of the maintainers of both Knative and KEDA. He got me all excited about the GPTchat. I even tried to play with it that same night when I came back to the hotel. But I got bored after 20 minutes. It still feels like talking to a machine... I don't see the threat... - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Running Cloudflare Workers (workerd) on Docker/Kubernetes
    I use Kubernetes for some client projects and I'm an advocate for Knative, a solution to build serverless, event-driven applications on Kubernetes. By serverless, I mean running a container that can automatically scale down to zero. How you manage the cluster is up to you, it could be self-managed on-premise or in the cloud. Perhaps use Google GKE Autopilot where you have almost no need to manage the cluster. The... - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • How to create cloud-native CI/CD Pipelines with Tekton
    Because these components are configured as Custom Resource Definitions on Kubernetes, you can create highly reusable pipelines, and Tekton is also compatible with Jenkins, Skaffold, Knative, and other CI/CD tools. Let’s take a look at getting started with Tekton, and start working on building our pipeline. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Apache OpenWhisk and Knative, you can also consider the following products

Azure Functions - Azure Functions is a serverless event driven experience that extends the existing Azure App Service platform.

AWS Lambda - Automatic, event-driven compute service

Fission - Edit audio in minutes, not hours.

Fission.io - Fission.io is a serverless framework for Kubernetes that supports many concepts such as event triggers, parallel execution, and statelessness.

Dkron - Easy, Reliable Cron jobs A distributed Cron service with, API, no SPOF and an easy to use dashboard.

Nuclio - Nuclio is an open source serverless platform.