Solo.io vs Tigera
Who this is for
If you're weighing Solo.io against Tigera in Containers & Kubernetes, this page is for you. It puts the facts from both Techarda profiles side by side, with each company's recent stories and any community threads that name them both. It doesn't pick a winner: the questions further down come from our evaluation guide, so you can put the same ones to both.
Stories and counts cover the last 90 days, counted on 23 Oct 2026. Profiles last updated 27 Sept 2026. Want a different line-up? The interactive compare tool takes up to four companies.
The facts side by side
From each company's Techarda profile. Categories they share are marked, with each company's position in the category's leader list.
| Solo.io | Tigera | |
|---|---|---|
| Founded | 2017 | 2016 |
| Headquarters | Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA | San Francisco, California, USA |
| Categories |
|
|
| What they do | Solo.io is a cloud-native application networking company headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, founded in 2017 by Idit Levine. It sells Gloo Gateway, an Envoy-based API gateway, and Gloo Mesh, an enterprise Istio service mesh, and created open-source projects including kgateway, agentgateway and kagent for… | Tigera is a US Kubernetes networking and security company founded in 2016 and based in San Francisco. It is the creator and maintainer of Project Calico, a widely used open source networking and network policy solution for Kubernetes. Tigera's commercial offerings, Calico Enterprise and Calico Cloud, add security… |
| Official site | solo.io | tigera.io |
| Stories, last 90 days | 55 | 18 |
Recent stories from each
What each company has published in the last 90 days, newest first. Each story links to the original source.
How to choose between them
We don't score or rank these two. The questions below come from our Containers & Kubernetes evaluation guide, and they work best when you put each one to both companies and compare the answers side by side.
Upgrades and version support
A platform that makes upgrades painful leaves you on unsupported versions with known vulnerabilities.
Ask both: How long do you support each Kubernetes version, how are control plane and node upgrades run, and can we test an upgrade during the trial?
Fleet management across environments
Running many clusters by hand does not scale. You need one way to apply policy, configuration and upgrades everywhere you run.
Ask both: How do we manage policy, configuration and upgrades across clusters in different clouds and data centres from one place, and what works differently in each?
Conformance and lock-in
Distributions that add proprietary APIs make applications harder to move. Certified conformance is a baseline, not the whole answer.
Ask both: Which of your features depend on APIs outside upstream Kubernetes, and what would our applications need to change to run on another conformant distribution?
Security defaults and policy
Default settings decide how most clusters actually run. Weak defaults spread to every team that copies them.
Ask both: Which security settings are on by default, how do you enforce admission policy and image signing, and how quickly do you ship fixes for critical vulnerabilities?
Networking and storage
Many production problems in Kubernetes sit in networking and persistent storage rather than in the scheduler.
Ask both: Which network and storage plugins do you support and test, how do you handle stateful workloads, and who owns a problem that spans them?
Virtual machine support
Virtual machines moved onto the platform bring networking, storage, backup and live migration needs that containers do not.
Ask both: How do you run virtual machines on the platform today, which guest operating systems are supported, and how do backup and live migration work?
Operating effort and skills
Kubernetes rewards experienced teams and punishes thin ones. The licence is often smaller than the cost of the people who run it.
Ask both: What size of team runs a fleet like ours on your platform, what is automated, and what do you take on under support?
Pricing as you grow
Pricing by core, node, cluster or management fee changes the bill a great deal as you scale and as node sizes change.
Ask both: How is the platform priced as we add clusters and nodes, and what happens to the cost if we move to larger or smaller nodes?
The guide also lists red flags to watch for in any Containers & Kubernetes vendor, and how to build a shortlist.
Keep going
Each profile has the full detail, and the alternatives pages show who else sits in the same categories.
How this page is put together
Every fact comes from the two Techarda profiles, which our editors check against each company's own site and public records. Rows are left out when neither profile has the detail. Stories are the ones each company published in the last 90 days; review counts include published, moderated reviews only.
Something wrong or out of date? Email engage@techarda.com. Used one of them in production? A short review of Solo.io or Tigera helps the next team decide.