A developer tool and a platform, built for different jobs
Both help developers test against real Kubernetes. The real question is whether you need a faster local loop, or governed environments and delivery for the whole team.
Telepresence is an open-source CNCF project, created by Ambassador Labs, that connects your workstation to a Kubernetes cluster. You can intercept, replace or wiretap a service's traffic and run it locally with the cluster's DNS, environment and volumes.
It is single-purpose by design: it speeds up the inner loop for one developer at a time. Building, deploying, promoting, provisioning and shared environments are outside its scope.
- Single-purpose local dev tool
- No CI/CD or deployment governance
- No per-PR shared environments
- Set up on each developer's machine
Atmosly is an internal developer platform for Kubernetes. It gives every pull request its own preview environment with policies inherited from prod, ships code with visual CI/CD and GitOps, and provisions clusters and cloud resources through guardrails.
Reviewers and QA get a running environment per PR without anyone setting up a local tool. It is fully managed, and SquareOps can implement and run it for you.
- Preview environment per pull request
- Environment cloning for full stacks
- Visual CI/CD and native GitOps
- Fully managed, zero upgrade toil
Telepresence speeds up one developer. Atmosly speeds up the team.
Keep Telepresence for local debugging if your developers like it. Atmosly gives the whole team environments, pipelines and infrastructure without a ticket.
An environment per PR, for everyone who reviews it
Telepresence helps one developer test locally. Atmosly gives every pull request its own governed environment in the cluster, with policies inherited from prod, so reviewers and QA see the change running.
- Preview environment per PR, auto-expires on merge
- Clone services, config and datastores in one step
- Curated Helm marketplace with pinned versions
From a working branch to production
Once the change works, Atmosly ships it: build and test, deploy to staging, verify, then promote to production with approval gates and one-click rollback.
- Visual editor or YAML, same engine
- Multi-stage promotion with approvals and audit
- Coexists with ArgoCD, Jenkins and GitHub Actions
The cluster and its dependencies, from a catalog
Telepresence needs a cluster that someone else built. Atmosly creates the EKS, GKE or AKS cluster, node groups, add-ons and databases from a catalog, through the guardrails you set.
- Create or import any cluster, public or private
- Cost caps, region and instance allow-lists on every request
- Auto-approve under threshold, one-click revert
Telepresence vs Atmosly, capability by capability
We kept Telepresence's genuine wins in the table. They're marked so you can see them at a glance.
Telepresence is excellent at one job, and it is free and open source. It is not really a substitute for a delivery platform; Atmosly's case is environments, pipelines and infrastructure for the whole team, fully managed.
Which one is right for your team?
It depends on scope, and on who you want running the platform.
- Fast local-to-cluster debugging is the need
- Developers want their own IDE and debugger
- You need to test against real cluster traffic
- Delivery and environments are covered elsewhere
- A free, open-source CLI is a requirement
- Every PR should get its own environment
- Reviewers and QA need environments without local setup
- You want delivery and provisioning on one platform
- Guardrails and one audit trail matter across clusters
- You'd like a partner (SquareOps) to implement and run it
Telepresence is great at one job: fast local development against a real cluster, and it pairs well with Atmosly. If you want per-PR environments, pipelines and governed infrastructure for the whole team, that's Atmosly.
Connect a cluster freeFrom Telepresence to Atmosly in an afternoon
Nothing to rip out. Keep Telepresence on developer laptops, connect Atmosly read-only, and turn on preview environments when you are ready.
Rather not do it yourself? The SquareOps services team can run the migration and day-2 operations for you.
Managed Kubernetes servicesWhat teams comparing Telepresence ask
Not covered? An engineer replies within one business day.
consult@squareops.comNot directly. Telepresence connects one developer's machine to a remote cluster for local development and debugging. Atmosly is an internal developer platform that gives teams preview environments, CI/CD, GitOps and governed provisioning, and many teams can use both.
Telepresence routes cluster traffic to a service running on your laptop, so you can debug against real dependencies. A preview environment is a full, running copy of the change in the cluster for each pull request, which reviewers and QA can use without any local setup.
Yes. Telepresence works against standard Kubernetes, so developers can keep using it on clusters that Atmosly manages while Atmosly handles environments and delivery.
Telepresence is an open-source CNCF sandbox project, licensed under Apache 2.0, originally built by Ambassador Labs. Ambassador Labs was acquired by Gravitee in 2025.
There is nothing to migrate, because Telepresence holds no shared state. Connect a cluster read-only, switch on preview environments, then ship one workload through an Atmosly pipeline. The SquareOps services team can help.
Any conformant Kubernetes cluster: EKS, GKE, AKS, on-prem or bare-metal, public or private. You import the cluster you already run, read-only, in minutes.
No. It runs on your own clusters on standard Kubernetes, Helm and Git, so what you build stays portable.
It is fully managed and agent-based, so there is no control plane for you to host and nothing to install on laptops. The Enterprise tier can run the control plane inside your own VPC if you need that.