Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Knative VS Apache OpenWhisk

Compare Knative VS Apache OpenWhisk and see what are their differences

Knative logo Knative

Knative provides a set of components for building modern, source-centric, and container-based applications that can run anywhere.

Apache OpenWhisk logo Apache OpenWhisk

Serverless / Task Processing
  • Knative Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-27
  • Apache OpenWhisk Landing page
    Landing page //
    2019-10-18

Knative features and specs

  • Serverless Capabilities
    Knative provides powerful serverless capabilities, allowing developers to deploy and manage applications without the need to manage infrastructure. This enables automatic scaling based on demand.
  • Kubernetes Integration
    Because Knative is built on top of Kubernetes, it integrates seamlessly with existing Kubernetes clusters, leveraging Kubernetes features and security policies.
  • Event-Driven Architecture
    Knative offers a robust event-driven architecture that enables applications to efficiently react to events, increasing responsiveness and reducing resource consumption.
  • Flexibility
    Knative provides developers with flexibility to use any programming language, runtime, or framework, allowing diverse applications to be deployed and managed.
  • Open Source Community
    Knative has a strong open-source community, offering extensive resources, continuous development, and a wealth of shared knowledge.

Possible disadvantages of Knative

  • Complexity
    Deploying and managing Knative can introduce complexity, especially for teams unfamiliar with Kubernetes or serverless paradigms.
  • Learning Curve
    There is a significant learning curve associated with Knative, which can be daunting for new users or teams without Kubernetes experience.
  • Resource Intensive
    Running Knative on Kubernetes requires considerable resources, which might not be cost-effective for small-scale applications or organizations.
  • Maturity
    As a relatively new technology, Knative may encounter issues related to maturity, stability, and support compared to more established platforms.
  • Limited Ecosystem
    Although growing, Knative's ecosystem is still limited compared to other serverless solutions, which might restrict available plugins and integrations.

Apache OpenWhisk features and specs

No features have been listed yet.

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)

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

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Knative and Apache OpenWhisk)
Cloud Computing
81 81%
19% 19
Cloud Hosting
89 89%
11% 11
Developer Tools
72 72%
28% 28
Backend As A Service
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 16 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.

Knative mentions (16)

  • Building Microservices Using Knative
    As described above, Knative provides a rich ecosystem for managing and executing microservices that can be developed in a variety of programming languages. Any language that can be crafted into a web service and packaged as a kubernetes container is a viable execution candidate for a Knative service. Since 2018, Knative has evolved as a viable microservices platform and in 2022 was accepted by the CNCF at the... - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • A Brief History Of Serverless
    In 2018, Google announced an OSS project called Knative. Knative was meant to be executed on top of Kubernetes and streamline the deployment of applications on the platform. - Source: dev.to / 12 months ago
  • Rethinking Serverless with Flame
    Https://knative.dev/ - (CloudRun API is based on this OSS project). - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year 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 / over 2 years 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 2 years ago
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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 / about 1 year 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 2 years 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 2 years 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 2 years 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 3 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

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

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.

AWS Lambda - Automatic, event-driven compute service

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

Google Cloud Run - Bringing serverless to containers

Nuclio - Nuclio is an open source serverless platform.