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Compare · checked 2026-10-30

KubeDrive vs Freelens

Freelens is OpenLens continued by its community after Lens went closed: the same Electron IDE with Helm, a terminal, metrics and extensions, free under MIT. If you liked Lens, you know Freelens. KubeDrive is a native app with a Go core, a fraction of the memory, and tools Lens never had: diagnosis by rules, upgrade check, rightsizing, a map and an MCP server. On our 50,000-pod clusters Freelens did not show a pod list within 150 s.

Choose Freelens if

  • You come from Lens and want the same IDE, the same extensions, for free.
  • Open source is a requirement.
  • Clusters are small and the laptop has memory to spare.

Choose KubeDrive if

  • Large clusters: 50,000 pods in 3 s, where Freelens showed none in 150 s.
  • A quarter of the memory on an ordinary cluster: 291 MB against 685 MB.
  • Why a pod fails, upgrade check, rightsizing, a map, PromQL dashboards: built in.
  • Claude Code, Codex or Cursor reading your clusters without a kubeconfig.

Speed, measured

Cold start on the same Mac and the same clusters, median of five runs. From launch to the first pod rows on screen, and memory of the whole process tree with the list open. All clients and the method

50,000 pods · 470 nodes

First rows
  • KubeDrive3.0 s
  • FreelensNo list within 150 s—
Memory
  • KubeDrive428 MB
  • Freelens530 MB

500 pods

First rows
  • KubeDrive1.5 s
  • Freelens6.1 s
Memory
  • KubeDrive291 MB
  • Freelens685 MB

On 50,000 pods Freelens showed no pod rows within 150 s in each of three runs on 470 nodes, and in two of three on 4 nodes (the third took 38.8 s). Its memory there is with an empty list.

Feature by feature

Freelens 2.0, from its site and release notes on 2026-10-30; KubeDrive as released. Tell us what we got wrong: [email protected]

KubeDriveFreelens

Clusters and tables

Live tables of every resource typeevery type, streamed liveyes
Health of all clusters on one screenClusters overviewper cluster
Protected production contextsprod contexts, from the first launchno
Logs, shell, YAML editingyesyes
Port forwarding3 on Free, unlimited in Proyes
Node shellnoyes

Troubleshooting

Why an object is unhealthy, with evidencerules first, then AI if you askno
Map of a namespacewith the links that lead nowhereno
Upgrade check for the next Kubernetes versionyesno
Rightsizing from real usagefrom the cluster's Prometheusno
Compare two objectsProyesno
History of changes made in the appProyesno

Metrics and Helm

CPU and memory from metrics-serveryesyes
Charts from the cluster's Prometheusfound in the cluster, no setupor its own Prometheus, installed by the app
PromQL, dashboards, firing alertsProqueries, dashboards, alertsno
Helm releases, values, historyreleases, values, historyyes
Install charts from repositoriesrepositories and OCI, dry run firstyes
Upgrade with a diff, roll backPromanifest diff, roll backupgrade and roll back; no diff

AI

Assistant with your own keyClaude, OpenAI or a local modelextensions exist
MCP server for Claude Code, Codex, Cursorreads free; changes wait for Allowno

Platform

ExtensionsnoOpenLens extensions, ported
Open sourcebenchmarks and extension areMIT
PriceFree; Pro $8/mofree

✓ yes – partly, or with a plugin ✕ noPro: in KubeDrive Pro, $8 a month or $79 a year

Also compared

Try it on your largest namespace.

Free for two clusters of any size. No account, no card: open KubeDrive and pick a context.

Download for macOS
brew install --cask aleksskoz/tap/kubedrive

macOS 13 or later · Apple silicon and Intel · signed and notarized by Apple

Download for Windowsx64 · Arm64

Windows 10 1809 or later, Windows 11 · not code-signed yet: More info → Run anyway

Download .debDownload .rpmArm64: .deb · .rpm
sudo apt install ./kubedrive_0.6.3_amd64.deb

Debian 13, Ubuntu 24.04, Fedora 40 and newer · GTK 4 and WebKitGTK 6.0 come as dependencies