September 2022

This article details my findings when comparing ArgoCD and Flux. As a heavy Flux user at Hopin the motivation behind this assessment was to understand if ArgoCD could replace Flux, thus I’m going to set Flux as the baseline.

First time I heard of GitOps I shrugged and thought to myself: What’s the big deal, my infra is in code and I already use github actions to deploy. I’m ahead of my time. 🤡

Like any self-centered thought it lacked context and a bit of research. Back then I wasn’t using Kubernetes, not even containers. Puppet or Ansible would take care of maintaining the state of my VM’s. It worked and we were happy to have IaC, CaC and automation.

However according to the industry: CaC + automation ≠ GitOps

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Flux v2

When it comes to GitOps, the first thing that usually comes up is Kubernetes and operators. In 2017 a blogpost coined the term GitOps. It also named the first GitOps operator: Flux. Eventually this was completely rewritten as Flux v2.

This said Flux came first 🥇 and that’s possible the reason your company uses it.

How to install

Concepts


ArgoCD

ArgoCD offers an alternative to Flux. It belongs to the Argo project, which just like Flux was accepted to CNCF incubator phase. It was created in 2018 and since then managed to get 10k stars in github while Flux v2 has 4k 🥵 It’s not a popularity contest but a quick look at last month commits shows a bigger activity in ArgoCD.