Distr vs Replicated

Distr and Replicated are software distribution platforms that help software vendors deliver their applications to complex and many times restricted self-managed environments. While both platforms are firmly placed in the same product category, it makes sense to understand how they differ and how each platform approaches modern software distribution.

1. Distr is the latest Software Delivery Platform built by Glasskube that helps software vendors serve a wide variety of use-cases. Distr is Open Source and easily self-hostable. It's built for software vendors that want to cover a wide variety of use-cases. Distr provides agents for guided Docker, Kubernetes, VPC, BYOC and self-managed installations, as well as a secure OCI registry for storing and distributing software artifacts, managing licenses and collecting support insights.
2. Replicated is a mature software distribution platform that facilitates the delivery of applications to self-managed, VPC, and air gapped environments by wrapping your software in an installer vendors can repackage their software. Replicated also provides license management capabilities, pre-flight checks, and compatibility testing.

Software Distribution Platform Users: Software vendors vs. End Customers

Before diving deeper into software distribution platform parlance, it's important to clarify some key terms to avoid confusion.

Who do these platforms serve?

Software distribution platforms primarily serve vendors who want to distribute their software to end-customers. While the vendors are the direct users of these platforms, the ultimate goal is to bridge the gap between them and their end-customers. The best software distribution platforms make this connection as smooth and frictionless as possible, keeping both parties' needs in mind.

• Software vendors: These are the primary users of software distribution platforms. They leverage the platform's tools and features to package, distribute, and manage their software in complex environments.
• End-Customers: In the context of self-managed software distribution, they are the party which software is distributed to. They interact with software distribution platforms indirectly and if done well, they mightn't even know they are interacting with one at all.

Distr as Replicated alternative

Distr is an open source alternative to Replicated, offering a modern and flexible approach to software distribution.

1. Distr provides one platform for self-managed, shared-responsibility, and self-service software distribution.
2. Distr starts with a free plan and can be self-hosted.
3. Distr includes an OCI container registry where you can explicitly grant access to specific tags to specific users.
4. Distr is built for modern Software and AI companies. Helping them scale from their first self-managed customers to many. Shipping the features they ask for, and shipping them fast.

Distr vs Replicated: Feature comparison table

Even though both platforms largely deliver similar features and serve overlapping users, the way both tools approach software deliver differs, as the "devil" "deployment" is always in the details.

Feature	Distr	Replicated
Deployment Method	Pull and Push	Pull
Application Bundles	Docker Compose and Helm	Only Helm
Vendor Platform for Application Management	✅	✅
Customer Portal for Deployment Management	✅	✅
Vendor & Customer CI/CD Integration	✅	✅
Docker Support	✅	✅
Helm Support	✅	✅
White Label Branding	✅	✅
Self-managed Support	✅	❌
BYOC Support	✅	❌
Pricing starts at	Free	2000$ per Month
Compatibility Matrix	❌	✅
Embedded K8s clusters	❌	✅
Image Registry	✅	✅
Open Source	✅	❌
Personal Onboarding Sessions For All Plans	✅	❌

Deployment Methods

While Replicated is limited to serving images to end-customer which are then only pulled by the end-customer, Distr has the capacity to push to target environments where the software vendors and end-customer have shared-responsibility over the target environment. This allows Distr to act as a control plane for your BYOC offering. Distr also supports distributing Docker Compose and Helm bundles, where Replicated only supports Helm Charts.

Vendor Platform & Customer Portal

Both platforms offer a vendor platform and customer portal. Distr's vendor platform is part of the Distr Hub to administrate end customers and licenses. It is also used to manage deployments as the deployment agents connect to the Hub, and therefore it can be used to orchestrate deployments. Replicated's vendor platform is mostly used to administrate end customers, applications, and software licenses. Both customer portals guide the end-customer through the deployment process, either by providing registry login credentials (Distr & Replicated) or directly allow one-click deployments with supported agents (Distr).

Self-managed Support

Distr is designed to be easily self-hosted. It is written in go and can be deployed as a single binary / docker container or as a helm chart. It only has a dependency on a PostgreSQL database. As our hosted Solution (distr.sh) uses the same docker containers, it has multi tenancy support and migrations between our SaaS and a self-hosted can be achieved by the Distr team.

Replicated, on the other hand, only offers a SaaS solution with no self-hosted support.

Distr vs Replicated: Pricing

Distr being open source has a much more approachable pricing model—starting for free. First Pro features can be purchased for the hosted Distr version. Also, SlAs and enterprise plans are available for self-hosted and hosted versions of Distr. Replicated on the other starts at 2000$/month on the builders' plans and 3000$ on the business plan. For more detailed information on Replicates pricing tiers, visit their official site at replicated.com

Compatibility Matrix

As Replicated only supports the distribution of Helm-based application bundles, the target environment needs to be a Kubernetes cluster. As Kubernetes has multiple versions and distributions, Replicated offers a compatibility matrix to ensure that vendors can test their applications in different Kubernetes environments. Although Distr does not offer a compatibility matrix, its agents can spot potential issues in the target environment and report them back to the vendor, allowing quick iterations.

Embedded K8s clusters

If the end customer is not Kubernetes-native, Replicated offers (single node) embedded clusters to enable Helm-based applications to also run on VMs or bare metal machines. Distr does not offer embedded clusters, but it does offer a Docker Compose agent, which can be used to deploy applications to VMs or bare metal machines.

Image registry

Distr offers an artifact registry directly integrated into the Distr Hub. Software vendors can directly push their oci artifacts to the Distr registry and grant access to specific tags to specific customers. Distr not only offers to stor OCI artifacts but is also able to store SBOMs and perform periodic security scans on the stored artifacts and SBOMs.

Replicated also offers a dedicated registry and also a proxy registry where vendors can use a registry proxy to perform the registry authentication before pulling the artifacts from the source registry.

Open Source

Distr is an Open Source platform, meaning its core functionality and all the agents are freely available to everyone. Anyone can fork, modify, and adapt Distr to fit their needs, and we actively welcome feedback and contributions from the open source community.

Custom onboarding session for all plans

Whether you are a free plan user or have an enterprise vendor account, Distr provides tailored onboarding support to make sure your application is ready to be self-managed. So you are in a position to make the most out of the platform as soon as possible.

This has been particularly valuable for the early AI companies we've worked with. While these companies excel at AI and ML, they often need guidance with operational aspects like creating Helm charts or optimizing Docker Compose files. Regardless of the time it takes to get each customer up and running, our custom onboarding makes sure that their solutions are easily self-manageable by end customers from day one.

FAQs

How much does Distr cost?

Distr is an Open Source platform with a generous free tier. Paid plans are available for Distr users who require additional features such as application licenses or custom artifact security scanning policies. Access the full pricing page here.

How much does Replicated cost?

With different plans starting from the builder plan coming in at 2k$. Access the full pricing page here.

Does Distr work for startups, mid-market and enterprise companies?

Yes, regardless of the industry and companies' size, Distr aims to enable software vendors to deliver software to end-users out of all types of industries, sizes, and levels of software delivery sophistication. If Software and AI companies distributing with Distr have end-customers who do not want to manage the software deployments themselves, they can push, monitor, and manage software directly from the Distr platform itself.

On the other hand, Distr users serving sophisticated enterprise end-customers who might have their own well-defined internal deployment processes and might only want access to secure vendor images, taking care of the rest themselves. Distr has features to serve these use cases too.

How long does it take to implement Distr?

The time it takes to implement Distr depends largely on how prepared your software is to be deployed in a self-managed way. In the best-case scenario, where your software is already containerized, not dependent on non-portable services, and all components ready for delivery, onboarding can be completed in just a couple of minutes.

However, if your software isn't quite "self-managed ready", it may take longer to realize the full benefits of Distr. In these cases, we offer hands-on onboarding support and can collaborate with you to improve your overall self-managed readiness.

To help in this process, we've published a whitepaper, which you can download for free, outlining the key building blocks for packaging software that's truly ready to be distributed to end-customer target environments.

Does Distr have access to customer offsite data?

Distr doesn't access any offsite data beyond deployment status logs and health metrics.

Why choose Distr over Replicated?

Here's how Distr stands out

• Empowering End Customers: When serving self-managed customers who want full control over their environments, you can automatically push new software versions to Distr and let end customers decide when to pull updates, keeping them firmly in control, while offering Distr users rich and useful usage and uptime metrics.
• Shared Responsibility for Target Environments: If you share responsibility for managing customer or edge environments, Distr lets you push software directly into those environments, making software updates and rollbacks a breeze.
• Artifact Management-Only Mode: Not interested in using Distr as a management layer? You can use Distr solely as an artifact management registry with built-in vulnerability scanning, and distribute specific tags to specific customers.
• Proven track record with AI companies: Distr has grown alongside numerous AI startups, helping them transition from cloud-only to hybrid deployment models. Our experience with ML-focused companies has shaped our platform to address the unique challenges of distributing AI solutions, from managing large model files to handling specialized hardware requirements.

Distr isn't about prescribing a single "right" way to handle self-managed software delivery. Instead, it offers a suite of features that address a wide range of modern challenges, giving software vendors the freedom to choose what fits their specific needs. The Open Source model gives you transparency and into the Distr Hub and all used components.