About Zapkube

What Zapkube is

Zapkube is a desktop client for Kubernetes. You point it at the kubeconfig you already have, and it gives you a real UI for the clusters in it — resources, logs, events, port-forwards, exec — without the round trip through a terminal history you no longer remember.

It is native and compiled: a single Go binary with a Wails front-end, not a browser pretending to be an app. It starts instantly, holds a few dozen megabytes of memory, and stays responsive while streaming logs from a hundred pods. That is the first half of "fastest".

The second half is the keyboard. Every navigation and every action in Zapkube has a shortcut, and anything you have not memorized is one command palette away. You can drive the entire application without touching the mouse — not as an accessibility afterthought, but as the primary way it is meant to be used.

Why it exists

Kubernetes tooling splits into two camps. On one side, terminal tools that are fast and scriptable but make you hold the whole object graph in your head. On the other, dashboards that show you everything and take a second and a half to render a pod list.

Zapkube is the third option: the speed and muscle memory of the command line, with the clarity of a real interface. Multi-cluster views, split panes, aggregated logs — the things that are genuinely hard to do in a terminal — presented in a UI you never have to point at.

It started as a tool built to scratch a personal itch during on-call rotations, and it stayed opinionated on purpose. Zapkube does not try to be every Kubernetes tool. It tries to be the one you keep open all day.

Who builds it

Zapkube is built and operated by Matthieu Moquet, an independent software developer based in France. There is no company behind it, no funding round, and no sales team — which is why there is no "request a demo" button anywhere on this site.

Development happens in the open in the sense that matters: releases are public on GitHub, the changelog explains what changed and why, bugs are filed and triaged in a public issue tracker, and the roadmap is visible on the home page. Feature decisions get argued about in Discord before they get built.

Where the project stands

Zapkube is in public beta. It is used daily against production clusters, and it ships a signed release every few weeks. The parts that are still moving — Windows builds, GitOps integrations, topology graphs — are listed on the home page rather than hidden, so you can tell before downloading whether the thing you need is in.

It is free to download and use during the beta, with no account, no sign-up, and no email required. A capable free tier will stay free after the beta. If a paid tier arrives, it will be announced in the changelog before it exists, not after.

What Zapkube never does

Zapkube talks to your clusters from your machine, with the official Kubernetes client-go library. There is no relay, no proxy, and no backend of ours in that path — because there is no backend of ours at all.

Nothing from your kubeconfig and nothing from the Kubernetes API ever leaves your machine: not context names, not cluster URLs, not resource names, not logs, not secrets — not even hashed. The app reports a small, fixed set of anonymous telemetry (version, OS, feature counts, crashes) keyed to a random install id, and you can turn all of it off with one switch or one environment variable. The privacy policy spells out the complete list.

Getting in touch

Bugs and feature requests belong in the issue tracker at https://github.com/zapkube/zapkube/issues, where they get triaged in public. Questions, ideas and keybinding arguments go to Discord: https://discord.gg/qZ5bq7EKHY.

Security reports, press, licensing and anything that should not be public have their own addresses on the contact page.