Deep Dive into the On-Prem Distribution Landscape: Why Omnistrate Is the Only Comprehensive Platform

Delivering software into on-premises enterprise environments is a challenge many vendors are still struggling to solve. As IT leaders look for seamless distribution, effortless operations, and robust customer experiences, they quickly discover that most solutions in the market are limited to one-off packaging or manual deployment tooling. Tools like Replicated help wrap your Kubernetes manifests with licensing and delivery metadata, allowing customers to manually install and update their apps — but this manual process leaves too many operational gaps for both vendors and end-users.

Omnistrate changes this landscape by offering a full-stack distribution platform. It goes beyond basic packaging and licensing to deliver unified experiences across on-prem, BYOC, and Hosted deployments. With dynamic deployment templates, automated tenant-aware delivery, integrated billing, robust lifecycle management, real-time observability, and a zero-trust security model, Omnistrate is the only platform that truly addresses every stage of software distribution, deployment, and ongoing operations — all from a single control plane.

The following table breaks down Omnistrate and Replicated head-to-head across the core requirements for modern on-prem and BYOC distribution solutions:

Category	Replicated	Omnistrate
Core Purpose	Replicated wraps your existing Helm or Kubernetes manifests with licensing, configuration, and delivery metadata so enterprises can install and update your app manually in their own environments	Full distribution platform from packaging, deployments, infrastructure, billing, operations, multi-tenancy, third-party integrations.
Deployment Model	Only OnPrem (offline) model support. No BYOC support — customer can manually pull new image updates	Unified seamless customer experience for OnPrem (offline), BYOC and Hosted deployments with tenant-aware deployments across clouds, accounts, regions and environments.
Deployment templates	Static Parameters (in KOTS) where vendors can expose parameters (like CPU limits, image tags, ports) so that your customers can manually fill out before deploying.	Dynamic deployment templates that define infra, app config, and lifecycle — reusable across tenants.
Architecture Requirements	Vendors must adapt architecture to Replicated’s model (e.g., separate app vs. cluster upgrades).	With BYOC, you have full control over the K8s control plane versions allowing you to unify app and cluster version management with consistent, reproducible environments across your customers.
Licensing System	Static license files/keys; no rotation, renewal, or revocation automation.	Dynamic license and entitlement system with auto-rotation, expiration, and usage enforcement with BYOC
Upgrade Management	Customer-driven “pull” model only.	In addition to the customer-driven model, it also supports automated tenant-aware continuous delivery (CD) with health checks, phased rollouts, and rollback with BYOC
Entitlements (Feature & Usage Control)	Basic seat-based limits; vendors often build custom logic.	Built-in entitlement engine that defines features, limits, and pricing per plan — integrated with AWS Marketplace.
Billing & Metering	No native metering or billing integrations.	Integrated billing, metering, and Marketplace transactions (chargeback and revenue reporting) for non-AirGapped distribution channels
Observability & Health Monitoring	None. Vendors rely on customers' own infra to debug issues.	Full observability stack for BYOC deployments: logs, metrics, alerts, K8s events, E2E health monitoring, and app telemetry — from one control plane
Day-2 Operations	Limited to publishing version updates. No lifecycle management after install.	Full Day-2 automation for BYOC: upgrades, backups, restores, scaling, cost controls and drift detection.
Security Model	Requires opening firewall for live deployments	Zero-trust agent model, encrypted outbound-ONLY communication, access isolation, and policy-driven control.
MCP Server	None	Day-1 and Day-2 can be managed through MCP tools with Claude / Github CoPilot
Scaling	None	Auto-scaling with auto-stop with BYOC
Bare metal support	Replicated can bundle your helm chart that you can run on bare metal using an Embedded k8s cluster but requires you to adhere to their architecture pattern limiting flexibility.	Fully managed k8s cluster for BYOC / PaaS deployments with custom K8s amenities. Requires customer-managed K8s cluster for Air-gapped deployments.