Okteto consists of two products: our CLI and the Okteto Platform. We provide the Okteto Platform in two forms: SaaS (fully managed by Okteto) and Self-Hosted (installed using our Helm chart and fully managed by you). The SaaS and Self-Hosted offerings exist primarily to deliver the Okteto Platform experience and features.

The Okteto Platform

In addition to Okteto's CLI we optionally provide the Okteto Platform. This is the other half of our product experience that provides the fully managed infrastructure for your development environments. It's what interprets the Okteto Manifest to spin up a development environment and automates your workflows. One of the biggest advantages of the Okteto Platform is that we scale the underlying cluster infrastructure so you never have to worry about your development environments having insufficient resources to run even your most complex applications.

Additionally, you can use the Okteto CLI without using the Okteto Platform, but there are important considerations with that use case.

Some examples of what the Okteto Platform manages are: configuring variables, adding external resources into your development environment, and build and push container images to the Okteto Registry. For a more comprehensive list of features, check out our docs.

Important things to know

SaaS	Self-Hosted
Fully managed by Okteto and great for small teams with simpler applications and infrastructure requirements.	Great for larger teams with bigger with more complex applications and a large number of microservices.
Limited access to cluster admin features.	Full access to the kubernetes cluster and fully integrates with the rest of your kubernetes infrastructure.
Pricing includes Okteto license + infrastructure.	Pricing includes only the Okteto license.