About Lens, closed source and list of alternatives

[ogarcia]

Lens has gone closed source, this is respectable, but personally I feel better supporting open source projects. Since for now there is no lens fork (and honestly I don't think there will be any in the short term), I leave here the list of alternatives I know (and many of them I package for Arch Linux in the AUR). Feel free to comment and expand the list.

• k9s
• kdash
• Headlamp (it is the application most similar to Lens)
• Seabird

[dominch]

k8sstudio seems promising

list of shame: kubernetic - initially license was $15 (one time), then they changed it to per month license also failing to deliver recent k8s support (it took more than 1y to fix it).

[coddy82]

Seems like k8sstudio is closed source? There's also Infra and Aptakube that are closed source

Aside from what has been mentioned, OpenLens still works, but it's very outdated

[msa0311]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. We understand the importance of open-source for many users. However, this repository focuses on issues related to Lens Desktop product. While we appreciate the knowledge of alternatives, we'd like to keep our issues and discussions Lens-centric. Feel free to share any Lens-specific feedback or ideas you might have!

[nathanael-h]

There is kubenav at https://github.com/kubenav/kubenav

[DevBey]

best alternative is devtron

[CappyT]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. We understand the importance of open-source for many users. However, this repository focuses on issues related to Lens Desktop product. While we appreciate the knowledge of alternatives, we'd like to keep our issues and discussions Lens-centric. Feel free to share any Lens-specific feedback or ideas you might have!

With all due respect, you gave us no choice when it came to using Lens.
It felt like a "bait and switch" scheme, using Lens in an open-source manner as a lure and then switching to a subscription model once the adoption was high enough.

I understand that there might be a shift of interests and focus inside Mirantis, and thus the "close" on the source.
I won't touch on how wrong is to receive contributions from the community and then "steal" said code to sell in a product, as I don't even know nor I am aware of the community even contributing something significant... but here we're just helping members who cannot justify switching to a subscription model (Homelabs, personal clusters, learning... etc) to have alternatives.

So we ask you kindly to not start censoring alternatives. You had your change of heart on the future of Lens. The community can have its change of heart too.

Thanks for understanding and comprehension.

[huseyinbabal]

Monokle, it also has SaaS version

[desaintmartin]

Given that Mirantis is stating "doubling down on open source" (https://thenewstack.io/kubecon24-mirantis-doubles-down-on-open-source/), will we see Lens going open source again ?

[techdragon]

I'll be surprised if Mirantis actually change course.

[cr1cr1]

Tried all the open source from above, and others: Monokle, Kubenav, Rancher, Headlamp, Jet Pilot.

And tried again after some months (towards an year), with the idea that things will improve. None of them reaches (for me) the productivity level of OpenLens and K9S and plain old kubectl+stern. And most of them will never improve, because I think the UX design decisions are... well, weird and unwieldy. Headlamp is particularly slow and most of the times it does not work.

Kui is interesting as a concept, but meh.

Most of them are confusing to use, I have to dig for stuff, basic filtering missing, some do not even have search. Overall, from an UX perspective, they suck.

Also, Kubernetes Dashboard made a comeback. Granted, not an IDE, it is deployed in the cluster, but... it works just fine. Then again, I apply gitops principles since more than 7 years now, I do not directly handle objects in a k8s cluster.

VSCode + kubernetes plugin is decent as it is the unmaintained Weaveworks gitops plugin (I use FluxCD so it is convenient for me).

Also, what's with the monthly subscription for some of the other K8S GUIs that offer little more than pretty colors for what is a simple DAG of k8s objects and an YAML editor ? :) Well, I guess this is the defacto business model nowadays.

[swatimehta26]

I'm using kubewall https://github.com/kubewall/kubewall It's pretty new but does the job just fine.
It's a single binary browser-based k8s dashboard.

[olstjos]

Headlamp is very good! https://headlamp.dev/