Skip to content
Percona Operators Documentation

Rate this page
☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Thanks for your feedback
Thank you! The feedback has been submitted.

Get free database assistance or contact our experts for personalized support.

Get help from Percona

Compare various solutions to deploy PostgreSQL in Kubernetes

There are multiple ways to deploy and manage PostgreSQL in Kubernetes. Here we will focus on comparing the following open source solutions:

Generic

Feature/Product Percona Operator for PostgreSQL Stackgres CrunchyData CloudNativePG Zalando
Open-source license Apache 2.0 AGPL 3 Apache 2.0, but images are under Developer Program Apache 2.0 MIT
PostgreSQL versions 13 - 18 14 - 18 14 - 18 14 - 18 14 - 18
Kubernetes conformance Various versions are tested Various versions are tested Various versions are tested Various versions are tested AWS EKS
Helm ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
Web-based GUI Percona Everest Admin UI 🚫 🚫 Postgres Operator UI

Maintenance

Feature/Product Percona Operator for PostgreSQL Stackgres CrunchyData CloudNativePG Zalando
Operator upgrade ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
Database upgrade Automated Automated Automated Automated Automated
Storage scaling Automatic (auto-grow) Manual Automatic (auto-grow) Manual Manual (live resize)1

PostgreSQL topologies

Feature/Product Percona Operator for PostgreSQL Stackgres CrunchyData CloudNativePG Zalando
Warm standby ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
Hot standby ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
Connection pooling ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
Delayed replica 🚫 🚫 🚫 ✅ 🚫

Backups

Feature/Product Percona Operator for PostgreSQL Stackgres CrunchyData CloudNativePG Zalando
Scheduled backups ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
WAL archiving ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
PITR ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
GCS ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
S3 ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
Azure ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
Snapshot-based backups ✅ (tech preview) ✅ ✅ (feature-gated) ✅ 🚫

Monitoring

Feature/Product Percona Operator for PostgreSQL Stackgres CrunchyData CloudNativePG Zalando
Solution Percona Monitoring and Management and sidecars Exposing metrics in Prometheus format Prometheus stack and pgMonitor Prometheus metrics & Grafana dashboard Sidecars

Security & Authentication

Feature/Product Percona Operator for PostgreSQL Stackgres CrunchyData CloudNativePG Zalando
Transport encryption ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
Data-at-rest encryption Through storage class, or native TDE (pg_tde)2 Through storage class Through storage class Through storage class Through storage class
Create users/roles ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ limited
LDAP authentication Simple bind / search+bind 🚫 TLS-enabled LDAP (custom pg_hba) Simple bind / search+bind (dedicated ldap field) 🚫
Certificate (mTLS) authentication ✅ (cert-manager) Partial (CA not passed to PgBouncer — client verification broken) 3 ✅ (MFA/SSO with cert-manager) ✅ (auto-issued via cnpg plugin) ✅ (custom spec.tls)

Extensibility & Customization

Feature/Product Percona Operator for PostgreSQL Stackgres CrunchyData CloudNativePG Zalando
Customize PostgreSQL configuration ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
Sidecar containers for customization ✅ 🚫 ✅ 🚫 ✅
Extension installation (without rebuilding image) ✅ (tar archive) ✅ (extension repository) 🚫 (custom image required) ✅ (Image Volumes, PG 18+ / K8s 1.33+ only) 🚫 (custom image required)

  1. Live EBS resize (no pod restart) via direct AWS API integration; other clouds use standard K8s PVC resize. ↩

  2. Percona’s pg_tde provides table/tablespace-level encryption with KMS integration (HashiCorp Vault). ↩

  3. Reported against StackGres 1.17.1 in gitlab.com/ongresinc/stackgres#3056 — no CA secret selector exists for PgBouncer, so client_tls_ca_file never gets set and TLS handshakes fail under sslmode=require/prefer. Open/unresolved as of this writing; re-check before relying on this if you’re on a newer version. ↩

Last update: August 6, 2026
Created: October 6, 2022