SYNTASSO KRATIX ENTERPRISE
AND HUMANITEC
Humanitec focuses on helping developers deliver applications. SKE focuses on helping platform teams operate the platform those applications depend on.
Humanitec can provide a useful and opinionated delivery experience for modern application teams. But large enterprises rarely have just one delivery model. Legacy systems, regulated workloads, AI agents, operations teams, ticket-driven processes, and bespoke workflows all need to coexist. SKE is a platform orchestrator that enables platform teams to compose and coordinate all of those experiences while maintaining consistent governance, policy, and lifecycle management. Humanitec can even be one of those many experiences.
Humanitec helps developers consume platform capabilities. SKE helps platform teams produce, orchestrate, govern, and evolve those capabilities across the organisation.
tl;dr:
SKE and Humanitec
In-depth:
Why Humanitec's single platform model doesn’t fit all organisations
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One platform model doesn't fit every organisation. Humanitec is designed around an opinionated application delivery model. Large enterprises often need to support legacy systems, data platforms, AI workloads, SaaS integrations, and operational workflows alongside modern applications.
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Platform operations extend beyond application delivery. Rolling out governance changes, upgrades, and remediations across thousands of environments requires fleet-wide platform operations, not application-by-application coordination.
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Centralising trust isn't always desirable. Many organisations deliberately separate operational responsibility across business units, environments, or regions. A single control plane can become both an operational bottleneck and a concentrated point of trust.
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Platform architecture should evolve on your terms. As organisations grow, they often need to introduce new deployment models, governance processes, or infrastructure technologies. An extensible platform orchestration layer allows those changes without being constrained by a predefined application model.
Looking to learn more?
Contact us for more information or to book a demo with a Syntasso solutions architect.
Regain Control Over Your Technology Decisions
Humanitec versus Syntasso Kratix Enterprise
Humanitec provides a streamlined experience for managing applications from configuration through deployment across environments. Using Score.dev for workload definitions and the Humanitec Portal for application management, application engineers can declare infrastructure dependencies and promote applications through delivery environments.
This opinionated approach provides a consistent developer experience but is built around the Humanitec application model. With the move to version 2, Humanitec limited their focus to only supporting infrastructure provisioning through Terraform. This assumption works well for organisations with a Terraform-centric platform strategy, but many enterprises also need to manage legacy on-premises applications, data pipelines, AI inference workloads, edge infrastructure, and other non-Terraform systems. In these cases, additional tooling is typically required alongside Humanitec.
SKE sits alongside that application-centric layer by orchestrating the platform capabilities behind it. Rather than focusing on how a single application reaches production, SKE helps platform teams govern, evolve, and operate capabilities consistently across their entire technology estate.
Without a fleet-aware platform orchestration layer, organisations typically end up with:
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Environment-by-environment remediation instead of fleet-wide operations
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Platform changes that must be coordinated application by application
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Separate orchestration solutions for different infrastructure types and delivery models
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A platform architecture constrained by a single application delivery model
How do Humanitec and
Syntasso Kratix Enterprise compare?
Capability | Humanitec | SKE |
|---|---|---|
You own the control plane | ❌ | ✅ |
Air-gapped / on-prem native | Self-hosted tier only | ✅ |
Governance built into core capability | Per application pipelines | ✅ |
Flexible infrastructure provisioning | ❌ | ✅ |
Open-source core | ❌ | ✅ |
Fast time-to-value | ✅ | ✅ (with SKA) |
Comparison based on publicly available Humanitec documentation as of August 2026.
Governance affects more than
a single application
Imagine that your platform has been adopted widely, but a CVE is identified and the platform team needs to enforce a new encryption requirement across every production database in the organisation.
What happens next?
With Humanitec alone
Policy changes would need to be made to the manifests (formerly called Resource Definitions) used by the applications and environments and managed by Humanitec admins to get added to the centralised system.
Rolling the change out means working within Humanitec's proprietary runtime. First, telling each application there is an update, as there's no fleet-wide drift detection, then updating the configuration for each application and environment through their deployment pipelines.
With SKE and Humanitec
SKE treats the encryption policy as governance-as-code, applied through Promises that run on infrastructure you control.
The specialist team defines the policy once and self-manages the contribution to the platform. From there, SKE:
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Detects drift across the entire fleet, not just individually provisioned resources
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Enforces the policy consistently across clusters, clouds, and disconnected environments
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Validates changes through a Promise testing framework before they reach production
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Works with the team's automation, whether it be simple scripts or diverse IaC
The platform team defines the policy once. SKE keeps enforcing it as the fleet grows across whatever mix of infrastructure the organisation runs.
The benefits of SKE
Request More than a Deployment
Modern application development needs more than deployment to known environments.
Teams need access to the newest AI models, on-demand infrastructure for experiments, and integrations with approved third-party tools.
SKE delivers a durable platform API layer that is decoupled from the end-user experience, allowing it to serve today's use cases and adapt to tomorrow's. This means your platform grows with your developers instead of constraining them.
Support Any User Flow, with Any Compliance
Modern organizations do more than deploy web apps to Kubernetes. They run data, AI, and edge workloads across hardware, clouds, and SaaS products. Rather than forcing every deployment through one direct path, SKE's scheduling architecture separates placement decisions from delivery mechanisms.
What this enables:
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Air-gapped and disconnected environments
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Multi-cluster and multi-cloud deployments
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Sovereign and regulated infrastructure
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Mainframe, edge, and remote deployments
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Large-scale fleet operations
Clear Ownership Boundaries
Deploying an application is often the most visible step in the platform team workflow, but it is only a small part in the overall SDLC.
Platform teams also need to:
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Roll out updates in batches
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Coordinate upgrades across environments
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Apply governance controls at speed
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Manage dependencies
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Schedule changes
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Reduce operational risk
SKE helps platform teams manage capabilities throughout their lifecycle without relying on end-user pipelines or tasks.
SKE & Humanitec FAQ
Q. How is Kratix / SKE different from Humanitec?
Humanitec is a commercial Internal Developer Platform that provides application and environment orchestration through a managed control plane. Kratix is an open framework for building an Internal Developer Platform that you run yourself. Rather than prescribing how your platform should work, Kratix provides extensible building blocks for defining platform capabilities, governance, workflows and multi-cluster delivery enhanced by SKE's flexible integrations and secure delivery.
Q. We already use Score. Can we still adopt Kratix / SKE?
Yes. Score is a CNCF open source project that describes an application’s deployment requirements, while a Kratix Promise defines the complete platform capability behind that application, including infrastructure provisioning, governance, workflows and lifecycle management. Existing Score-based automation can be supported by Promises rather than being replaced.
Q. Can I use SKE with Humanitec?
Yes. Humanitec and SKE solve different problems and can be used together. Humanitec provides a developer experience for deploying applications, while SKE orchestrates the platform capabilities behind that experience, including governance, lifecycle management, fleet operations, and multi-destination delivery. This allows platform teams to extend and evolve their platform without replacing successful developer workflows.
Q. Can I run Kratix in environments where a managed control plane isn’t an option?
Many organisations need to operate platforms in regulated, air-gapped, sovereign or on-premises environments. SKE is built enterprise-first with first-class self-hosting. This allows platform teams to choose where the control plane runs while maintaining the same platform abstractions across environments, including running multiple instances to adapt to different use cases.
Q. How do I implement approvals, governance and compliance in a platform?
Humanitec codifies governance and approvals into one-off delivery pipelines similar to GitHub Actions. Kratix treats governance as a first-class platform concern rather than something bolted onto individual delivery pipelines. Approval steps, policy checks and compliance workflows can be defined once and reused across every platform capability, while integrations with tools such as Slack, Jira or ServiceNow allow approvals to happen where teams already work.
Q. How does Kratix handle multi-cluster and multi-environment platforms?
Kratix was designed for platforms that span many clusters, clouds and regions. It separates where work should happen from how that work is delivered, allowing platform capabilities to be scheduled and reconciled across distributed environments without coupling everything to a single deployment target. This enables both scale and resilience as the centralised control plane is not a limit to deployments.
Q. When is Humanitec a good fit for a platform team?
Humanitec is well suited to organisations looking for a commercial, managed Internal Developer Platform with opinionated workflows and minimal operational overhead. Kratix is a stronger fit when you need to own the control plane, build custom platform abstractions, operate across regulated or disconnected environments, or avoid being tied to a managed platform architecture.
Q. Can Kratix / SKE replace Humanitec as my platform grows?
Yes. Many organisations start with a managed Internal Developer Platform and later need more flexibility around governance, deployment models or multi-environment operation. Kratix provides an open framework that allows platform teams to evolve their platform architecture over time without being constrained by a managed control plane or fixed extension model.
Q. Does Kratix have an equivalent to Humanitec Resource Definitions/Manifests and Resource Classes/Types?
Yes. In Kratix, Promises define the platform capability exposed to developers, while the Promise implementation is entirely programmable. This allows platform teams to encapsulate infrastructure, workflows, policies and operational logic behind a stable self-service API without constraining how those capabilities are implemented. In practice, a Promise is equivalent to a Resource Definition, which you can then abstract into any number of different Resource Classes.
The bottom line...
Humanitec operates an opinionated platform control plane for you.
SKE gives you complete ownership of the platform control plane.
Use Humanitec to adopt their platform opinions. Use SKE to define your own.