HashiCorp Nomad vs Kubernetes comparison

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HashiCorp Nomad

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 13, 2024

HashiCorp Nomad and Kubernetes are products competing in the orchestration and scheduling space. Kubernetes often leads due to its widespread adoption and extensive ecosystem.

Features: HashiCorp Nomad supports multiple workloads in a single cluster, manages non-containerized applications, and offers a simplistic architecture. Kubernetes provides advanced networking, strong persistent storage, and extensive community support, making it suitable for complex orchestrations.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: HashiCorp Nomad features straightforward deployment and integrates flexibly with existing tools, minimizing overhead. Kubernetes, though complex to deploy, is supported by comprehensive documentation and resources, enhancing the deployment process. Its customer support ecosystem is more extensive, offering numerous community-driven solutions.

Pricing and ROI: HashiCorp Nomad generally involves lower initial setup costs due to its simple architecture, offering quicker ROI for small-scale environments. Kubernetes may incur higher setup costs but provides significant ROI for complex and scalable applications, making it suitable for enterprises that need extensive scalability.

To learn more, read our detailed HashiCorp Nomad vs. Kubernetes Report (Updated: December 2025).

HashiCorp Nomad vs. Kubernetes

December 2025

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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

HashiCorp Nomad

Ranking in Container Management

14th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Kubernetes

Ranking in Container Management

3rd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of HashiCorp Nomad is 4.0%, up from 2.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Kubernetes is 6.9%, up from 4.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Container Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Kubernetes	6.9%
HashiCorp Nomad	4.0%
Other	89.1%

Container Management

Featured Reviews

Zeeshan Akhtar

Full stack developer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Has out of the box features , which is good for companies that don't want to spend too much time on research

I've noticed a few UI issues. For example, when monitoring services and tasks, sometimes the tasks keep disconnecting. If you open the shell in HashiCorp Nomad using the exit button, it often disconnects, and you have to log in again. Sometimes, when I check the logs in the UI for microservices tasks, I encounter an issue where the logs are not visible. However, if I log in again after some time, refresh the page, or check a different container, the logs usually appear. These logs are being generated, as I can see them being shipped to my LogView. I'm not sure if this is a product issue or something related to our deployment, but I've noticed it.

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RohitVerma2

DevOps Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Automated deployments and self-healing have transformed how I run reliable chat services

For improvements, I would definitely suggest some enhancements to Kubernetes. While Kubernetes is very powerful, there are still a few areas where it could be improved. Our challenge is the learning curve and operational complexity. For new team members, concepts such as networking, RBAC, Ingress, and troubleshooting distributed systems can take time to understand. Better built-in onboarding tools or simplified abstractions would help. Another pain point is debugging and observability. While kubectl provides good basic visibility, deep debugging across multiple services, pods, and nodes often requires external tooling such as Prometheus, Grafana, or centralized logging. Stronger native observability features would be very helpful. Networking and Ingress configuration can also be complex, especially when dealing with certificates, routing rules, and cloud-specific integrations. A more standardized experience across environments could reduce operational overhead. From a cost perspective, managing and optimizing resource usage at scale still requires careful monitoring and tuning. Better built-in cost visibility would be very helpful. For the needed improvements, I think that covers most of my main concerns. The biggest areas for improvement are still around simplifying operations, better native observability, and easier cost visibility. If I had to add one more point, it would be around standardization and developer experience. Sometimes different clusters, cloud providers, or tooling setups behave slightly differently, which increases maintenance efforts. More consistent defaults and opinionated best practices could help teams adopt Kubernetes faster and with fewer surprises. Overall, despite these challenges, Kubernetes is a very mature and reliable platform, and the benefits clearly outweigh the limitations for most production use cases. An additional area that could be improved is upgrade and version management. While managed services help coordinate Kubernetes version upgrades, API deprecations and compatibility with add-ons can still be time-consuming and risky for production environments. Better tooling and clearer migration automation would make upgrades safer and easier. Another improvement could be around documentation, consistency, and discoverability. Kubernetes documentation is very comprehensive, but for beginners, it can sometimes be overwhelming to navigate and identify best practice paths.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"If you face an issue with an image during deployment, the solution will automatically revert to the last stable image."

"You could get most of HashiCorp Nomad's features from other microservice orchestrators like Kubernetes. The tool's advantage is its ease of use and integration with services like Envoy. With Kubernetes, you must think about many things, like UI integration, which vault to use, and how to discover the service. With the tool, many things come out of the box, making it easy to start. For example, using the Ingress proxy with the tool is quite easy, while it's trickier with Kubernetes."

"If you're switching from VMs to Kubernetes, you will see a return because you can pack more into the Kubernetes architecture using containers rather than VMs. You'll see some more savings on your infrastructure, as well."

"Provision of a managed platform as a service."

"I am impressed with the product's coupling of resources and flexibility."

"There are many good features. I feel that the scale-out features, like replica sets, are very good. The number of running containers can be autoscaled."

"If you don't have resources, you can certainly add another worker node and expand the cluster."

"The most valuable feature of Kubernetes is its support for load balancing."

"This solution is cost effective and fast. We are able to use Kubernetes to orchestrate hundreds of container images which has been a major benefit."

"Kubernetes is scalable and the elasticity is sustainable."

More Kubernetes pros

Cons

"It would be good to have a UI interface so that developers could receive notifications for jobs in a bad state."

"I've noticed a few UI issues. For example, when monitoring services and tasks, sometimes the tasks keep disconnecting. If you open the shell in HashiCorp Nomad using the exit button, it often disconnects, and you have to log in again. Sometimes, when I check the logs in the UI for microservices tasks, I encounter an issue where the logs are not visible. However, if I log in again after some time, refresh the page, or check a different container, the logs usually appear. These logs are being generated, as I can see them being shipped to my LogView. I'm not sure if this is a product issue or something related to our deployment, but I've noticed it."

"The Kubernetes dashboard can be improved. It is currently a mess. We were using Rancher earlier, and everyone was happy with the dashboard. Right now, we are using Kubernetes, and it's not working with Microsoft workstations. We still have problems with the dashboard. It's terrible."

"Setup was not straightforward."

"The solution lacks some flexibility."

"There are several areas where Kubernetes could improve."

"Kubernetes could improve security. The security is really hard to deploy with proxies and other elements. Additionally, We have had some issues downloading repos and libraries."

"Kubernetes can be complicated to understand."

"Kubernetes' VM functionality and security could be improved."

"This product should have a more advanced built-in scheduler that uses real application metrics in the scheduling strategy."

More Kubernetes cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"We use the solution's open-source version."

"I am using the solution's open-source version."

"Microsoft provides reasonable costs for Kubernetes."

"I would say the solution is worth the money, but it depends on the required workloads, the type of workload, and the scaling requirements etc."

"There is a license to use Kubernetes."

"The solution is open source and has no fees."

"The price of Kubernetes could be lower. However, it is less expensive than VMware Tanzu. Additionally, technical support is expensive. The overall cost of the solution is approximately $1,000 annually."

"You need to pay for a license if you buy branded products. For example, if you take the services from Azure, AWS, or Google, the price of the Kubernetes cluster is inclusive of the service that's being offered to us on a pay-and-use model."

More Kubernetes pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	26
Midsize Enterprise	10
Large Enterprise	47

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with HashiCorp Nomad?

Sometimes, the job is in a bad state, and we don't get any notifications. It would be good to have a UI interface so that developers could receive notifications for jobs in a bad state.

What is your primary use case for HashiCorp Nomad?

We use HashiCorp Nomad mainly to deploy our images in the form of jobs. It is also used for load balancing, containerization, and instance deployment.

What advice do you have for others considering HashiCorp Nomad?

I would recommend HashiCorp Nomad to other users because it is the best tool for deployment. It is easy for a beginner to learn to use HashiCorp Nomad for the first time. Any developer with a decen...

What do you like most about Kubernetes?

There are many good features. I feel that the scale-out features, like replica sets, are very good. The number of running containers can be autoscaled.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Kubernetes?

I have had a good experience with pricing, but the setup costs are high.

What needs improvement with Kubernetes?

Kubernetes can be improved, though I cannot specify exactly how at this time.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform vs HashiCorp Nomad

Comparisons

Compared 25% of the time

Red Hat OpenShift vs HashiCorp Nomad

Compared 18% of the time

Docker vs HashiCorp Nomad

Compared 10% of the time

Portainer vs HashiCorp Nomad

Compared 8% of the time

Rancher Labs vs HashiCorp Nomad

Compared 5% of the time

More HashiCorp Nomad Competitors

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Kubernetes

Compared 17% of the time

Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) vs Kubernetes

Compared 12% of the time

Portainer vs Kubernetes

Compared 9% of the time

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform vs Kubernetes

Compared 7% of the time

HPE Ezmeral Container Platform vs Kubernetes

Compared 6% of the time

More Kubernetes Competitors

Product Reports

Download HashiCorp Nomad product report

Container Management

January 2026

Download Kubernetes product report

January 2026

Also Known As

No data available

Overview

HashiCorp was founded by Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar in 2012 with the goal of revolutionizing datacenter management: application development, delivery, and maintenance.

The datacenter of today is very different than the datacenter of yesterday, and we think the datacenter of tomorrow is just around the corner. We're writing software to take you all the way from yesterday to today, and then safely to tomorrow and beyond.

Physical, virtual, containers. Private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS. Windows, Linux, Mac. These are just some of the choices faced when architecting a datacenter of today. And the choice is not one or the other; instead, it is often a combination of many of these.

HashiCorp builds tools to ease these decisions by presenting solutions that span the gaps. Our tools manage both physical machines and virtual machines, Windows, and Linux, SaaS and IaaS, etc. And we're committed to supporting next-generation technologies, as well.

HashiCorp was founded and continues to be run by the primary authors of all our core technologies powering thousands of companies worldwide. We speak at conferences and write books related to application and infrastructure management.

All our foundational technologies are open source and developed openly, and have been since 2010.

The Tao of HashiCorp is the foundation that guides our vision, roadmap, and product design. As you evaluate using or contributing to HashiCorp's products, it may be valuable to understand the motivations and intentions for our work.

HashiCorp

Kubernetes (K8s) is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery. Kubernetes builds upon 15 years of experience of running production workloads at Google, combined with best-of-breed ideas and practices from the community.

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

China unicom, NetEase Cloud, Nav, AppDirect