Northflank gives your engineers a platform in your own cloud. Pilae gives you the open-source estate already operated — advisories tracked, updates staged, restores drilled, logs exported.
- What they sell
- A developer platform, managed or in your own account
- Built for
- Teams deploying code they wrote
- What we sell
- Open-source applications somebody else wrote, operated
- Where it runs
- Your cloud, your datacentre, bare metal — both of us
- Who owns the upgrade
- You, on their platform. Us, on ours.
- Migration included
- Yes, at a fixed price agreed before it starts
What each one actually covers
Thirteen things an open-source estate needs done. Their column is filled in from northflank.com.
| Capability | Northflank | Pilae |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy | ||
| One-click deploy from a curated cataloguePick the app, name the users, and it is sized, provisioned and running. | No | Yes |
| Migration onto the platform, run for youYour data out of the system it is in today, rehearsed before it is cut over. | No | Yes |
| SSO and identity wired into each appKeycloak, Entra ID, Google Workspace or Okta, configured on the app itself. | Partly | Yes |
| Keep it current | ||
| Updates applied for you, not just announcedThe release is read, staged and applied. You are not the one doing it. | No | Yes |
| Per-app CVE and advisory trackingThe advisory, the affected version and the fix version, per app you run. | No | Yes |
| Changes land in a window you approvedYour timezone, your hours, agreed before anything is touched. | No | Yes |
| Staged and checked before productionThe upgrade runs somewhere safe first, and the checks have to pass. | Yes | Yes |
| Prove it | ||
| Restore drills, not just backupsThe backup is restored on a schedule, because an untested backup is a hope. | Partly | Yes |
| A record of every restoreWho restored what, from which file, into which service, and whether it worked. | No | Yes |
| A change log an auditor can readEvery action, the person who took it, the outcome, inside your perimeter. | Yes | Yes |
| See it | ||
| Monitoring and alerting on the appsNot just the host: the application, its checks, and someone who answers. | Yes | Yes |
| Logs and metrics exported to your stackOpenTelemetry, or straight into the SIEM your security team already runs. | Partly | Yes |
| Run it | ||
| An agent that operates the estate with youAsk for a change in words; it plans it, shows you, and waits for approval. | No | Yes |
Pilae vs Northflank, in words
A tick says whether something is covered. These say how.
| What is being compared | Northflank | Pilae |
|---|---|---|
| What runs on it | Your own services, built and deployed from your repository. | Open-source applications somebody else wrote, operated by us on your behalf. |
| Who reads the release notes | You do. The platform deploys whatever you tell it to deploy. | We do, per app, against its upstream advisories, and we name the CVE and the fix version. |
| When an upgrade lands | When your pipeline runs it. | In a window you approved, after a staging pass, with a restore drilled either side. |
| Getting your existing estate in | Out of scope. Bring-your-own-cloud starts once you already have something to deploy. | The largest line in the fixed price, rehearsed once before it is cut over. |
| Identity on each app | SSO to the platform. Configuring it on the app you deployed is yours. | Wired to your directory on the application itself, as part of the deployment. |
| Proving a restore works | Backups exist. Whether the restore has been exercised is your procedure. | Drilled on a schedule and recorded, per service, with the outcome written down. |
| Who you need on staff | Platform engineers. The product is leverage for them. | Nobody in particular. That is the thing being bought. |
You ask for the change. The agent does the work.
Pilae Agent runs inside your perimeter and proposes each change as a plan you read before it runs. Nothing lands without your approval, and every action goes into the same change log as ours.
“Upgrade Odoo, including the modules we did not write”
Checks each community module against the new release, stages the upgrade with your data, and lists what needs a fix before anything is applied.
“Add Nextcloud for the whole company, signed in through our directory”
Deploys it on your machines, wires sign-on and groups, sets up backups with a first restore test, and hands back a URL.
A deployment platform assumes you know what to deploy
Bring-your-own-cloud is a good category and Northflank is a good product in it. The platform lands in your own account — hyperscaler, your datacentre, bare metal — and takes no margin on compute. Your cloud bill stays in your name and your exit path stays yours.
That solves deploying software you wrote. When the service is yours, you already know why it is configured the way it is, what the last release changed, and whether the next one is safe. A platform that automates the build and the rollout is pure leverage, because the judgement was already in the building.
None of that judgement exists for Nextcloud, or Keycloak, or Odoo. Somebody has to read an upstream release note written for maintainers, work out what it means for your storage backend and your federation config, rehearse it, and be accountable when it turns out to be wrong. A deployment platform will roll out that upgrade exactly as instructed, including the one that breaks your login, because judging whether the release was safe was never its job.
What Pilae operates
Advisory tracking per application. Every app in your estate watched against its upstream security advisories, with the CVE, the affected version and the fix version named before anything is proposed.
Updates staged, approved and reversible. The upgrade runs somewhere safe first and the checks have to pass. It lands in a window in your timezone you agreed to. A restore is drilled against the snapshot either side.
Restores proven and recorded — who restored what, from which file, into which service, and whether it worked.
Migration in, at a fixed price, rehearsed before the cutover, with identity wired to your directory on the application itself rather than only at the platform edge.
Logs and metrics in your stack, exported to OpenTelemetry or into your SIEM, alongside a change log an auditor can read.
And the agent
You ask for the change in a sentence. Set a variable across the estate, ask why a service got slow this morning, stand up a new instance for a team with SSO already wired. Pilae Agent plans it, shows you the plan, and waits for approval before anything moves.
Moving from Northflank
A migration is a service, not a support article. This is the sequence we run, and it is in the fixed price.
Sort the estate in two
Code you wrote, and software you adopted. Bring-your-own-cloud is right for the first pile; this is about the second.
Inventory the adopted apps
Versions, data, integrations, and which of them anyone has upgraded in the last year.
Stand them up on your infrastructure
Your machines or a sovereign site, under a control plane nobody on your side operates.
Move data with a rehearsal
Once to learn the timings, once for real, with the old deployment live until the checks pass.
Then we run it
Advisory tracking, staged updates, windows, restore drills, exported logs and a runbook per app.
Northflank still fits when
- The software is yours, from your own repository, and your team owns its release cycle.
- You have platform engineers and want to give them leverage rather than hand the work over.
Everywhere else, Pilae
The moment the estate has to stay patched, stay proven and stay auditable without someone in your building doing it by hand, the comparison stops being close.