Cycloid
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Compare Cycloid to Humanitec

Humanitec is a Platform Orchestrator that lets engineering teams remove bottlenecks by enabling them to build code-based golden paths for developers. It is centralized around K8S, even if there is the possibility to interact with other third party services.

Cycloid’s integrated approach

In contrast to Humanitec which comes from developers, Cycloid was built with the Ops/DevOps and Hybrid Cloud in mind and has a strong GitOps and Open Source approach. In addition to being a self-service portal, Cycloid has more commercial benefits with interconnectivity between features such as governance, control, management of the operations, FinOps and GreenOps.

Why Cycloid?

Cycloid is an engineering platform designed to improve the developer experience and operational efficiency to facilitate change management and accelerate hybrid cloud and DevOps adoption at scale. Your platform engineering team will design, build and maintain Cycloid as an internal developer platform to allow any end-users to interact with tools and cloud without the need to become an expert. You create your own platform to define the governance and the level of flexibility wanted. It’s based on your Git and is tool and cloud provider-agnostic.

Feature comparison

Installation

On-premise

Control the way critical data is stored and processed in your own secure infrastructure (bare metal, VM and Kubernetes) and comply with security requirements for your organization.

Dedicated SaaS

Host a dedicated SaaS on the cloud provider of your choice: AWS, GCP, Azure etc. 

SaaS

Enjoy the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of cloud computing and start using the platform right away.

Self-service portal & orchestration

Service Catalog

Build and deploy pre-configured services in a reproducible manner across your environments in a full GitOps approach. Use a public or private self-service catalog for your specific business needs. 

Stackforms

Create your workflow with simple user-friendly webforms to hide tools and infra complexity.

Infra Import

Automatically create an IaC service catalog from manually-deployed infrastructure and start with your automation quicker in a reproducible and controlled manner across all your environments. 

K8S integration

Build a Kubernetes project

Role Based Access Control

Grant access and permissions based on user role.

Organization Policies

Set rules to enforce best practices and security compliance at organization level.

CI/CD Pipelines

Execute process automation through workflows in your environments with a pipeline engine and interact with third party APIs. 

API & CLI

Take automation to another level and build scripts to automate any task in the “behind-the-scenes” toolbox.

Infra-as-Code & Resource Management

Quota Management

Allocate and keep track of public and private cloud resources in your organization.

Pipeline overview

Monitor the status of your pipeline jobs at a glance including per build, version of resources used, output of automation scripts and more. 

Asset Inventory

Get a 360° view of your public and private cloud resources.

Infrastructure mapping

Build graphical representations of your infrastructure and allow all relevant teams to see actively deployed resources and their connections in a simple, user-friendly way.

Events

Track actions and participants in real time

KPIs

Monitor the performance of your projects based on selected KPIs presented in a dashboard. 

FinOps & GreenOps

Cost estimation

Estimate the cloud cost of your environments before they are deployed.

Cloud cost management

Get a holistic overview of your cloud spending per cloud provider, project, region, date etc in a single place. 

Cloud Cost Optimization

View and execute recommendations for resource and cost optimization.

Reserved instances optimization

Analyse, automate and optimize your reserved instances that could also be financed

Budget Managment

Allocate a budget per organization, team or project across your cloud providers. 

Cloud carbon footprint

Carbon footprint impact on your infrastructure. 

Humanitec Pricing vs Cycloid:
What Actually Drives the Cost of Each Platform

Subscription fees are the obvious comparison point between Humanitec and Cycloid. But migration effort, ongoing maintenance, and flexibility trade-offs often account for more of the total spend.

Humanitec publishes three SaaS tiers — Teams, Pro, and Enterprise — plus a self-hosted option with custom pricing. Cycloid uses per-user pricing across SaaS and self-hosted deployments. But the subscription fee is only part of the picture. Here’s where the structural costs diverge.

CRITERIA: Migration Cost

CYCLOID

Humanitec

Workload migration

Works with your existing Terraform, Ansible, and Helm files. Stacks wrap standard IaC into reusable templates – no proprietary format, no rewrite. Infra Import can reverse-engineer live cloud resources into Terraform automatically.

Requires rewriting workloads to Score, Humanitec’s proprietary workload specification. Every application needs a score.yaml before it can be deployed through the platform.

Time to first deployment

Teams work with IaC they already know. StackForms expose configuration as UI forms on top of existing variables, so the first self-service deployment can happen within the first week of setup.

Dev teams must learn Score syntax and rewrite workload definitions before they see productivity gains. Adoption is sequential: each application needs conversion.

Vendor lock-in risk

Every asset is standard IaC stored in Git. If you leave Cycloid, you take your Terraform modules, Ansible playbooks, and Helm charts with you. The open-source tools (TerraCognita, InfraMap, TerraCost) work independently of the platform.

Score is proprietary. If you move away from Humanitec, your Score files don’t port to other platforms – you’re rewriting again.

CRITERIA: Ongoing Maintenance

CYCLOID

Humanitec

Multi-cloud & non-K8s support

Cloud-agnostic from the start. Supports AWS, Azure, GCP, bare metal, and Docker. Workers deploy anywhere – Kubernetes, VMs, or on-premises instances. No extra development for non-K8s workloads.

K8s-centric architecture. Non-Kubernetes integrations (VMs, bare metal, serverless) require custom resource definitions and driver development.

Platform team overhead

StackForms and the community Stack catalog reduce the configuration burden. Smaller teams (2-3 engineers) can operate the platform without a dedicated platform engineering squad.

Typically requires dedicated platform engineers to maintain Score definitions, resource definitions, and integration drivers as your stack evolves.

Open-source component costs

Core open-source tools (TerraCognita, InfraMap, TerraCost, MCP Server) are standalone and free. The full platform is commercial – SaaS or self-hosted – with no hidden setup costs beyond the subscription.

Score is open source, but the Platform Orchestrator is commercial. Community edition setup, plugin development, and maintenance carry real FTE costs that don’t appear on the invoice.

CRITERIA: Subscription Model

CYCLOID

Humanitec

Pricing structure

Per-user pricing across both SaaS and self-hosted.

Three SaaS tiers: Teams (5 users, 1 project), Pro (50 users, RBAC), Enterprise (custom). Self-hosted is custom-quoted. Pricing scales with users and projects.

Cost predictability

Per-user model ties cost directly to team size — no surprise jumps from project count or deployment volume. Budgeting is straightforward.

Project and environment limits on lower tiers can force upgrades as adoption grows. Enterprise pricing is opaque until you talk to sales.

Humanitec’s subscription may look competitive at first glance. Factor in the Score rewrite, the K8s-only architecture, and opaque enterprise pricing, and the gap widens. Cycloid avoids those hidden costs: standard IaC means no rewrite tax, multi-cloud support means no workaround development, and per-user pricing means the invoice tracks what you’d expect.

Want to see how Cycloid can help you achieve your goals?

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If the information above is inaccurate or outdated, please contact us at marketing@cycloid.io and we’ll set it right straight away!