Alright folks, just wrapped up a 90-day eval of Perimeter 81 for our platform team. We were looking for a modern zero-trust solution to replace our aging VPN concentrators and get some better network segmentation for our K8s clusters. Here's the raw take after putting it through its paces.
**The Good**
* **Onboarding was slick.** The agent install and policy setup felt very intuitive compared to some CLI-heavy alternatives. Got our first user group secured to a couple dev namespaces in under an hour.
* **Terraform provider is solid.** This was a big win for us. We could manage network policies and user groups as code, which fit right into our existing GitOps flow. Drift detection worked as expected.
* **Visibility is top-notch.** The dashboard gives a clear, real-time map of connections, which made troubleshooting access issues to our internal monitoring stack (Prometheus, Grafana) much easier. The activity logs were detailed without being overwhelming.
**The Bad**
* **Kubernetes integration felt shallow.** While it can secure traffic *to* the cluster, the real magic for us is service-to-service mesh inside the cluster. We ended up keeping Istio for that, so it added another layer rather than simplifying.
* **Some latency spikes.** During load tests, we noticed occasional latency when routing through their gateways to our cloud VPCs. Not a deal-breaker for most operations, but something to note if you're running latency-sensitive applications.
* **The mobile app... meh.** Team feedback was that it was fine for basic access, but power users missed some of the granular controls and found the session handling a bit clunky.
**The Expensive**
Here's the real kicker. The feature set is great, but the pricing model scales in a way that gave our finance team pause. Once you move beyond the basics, the per-user cost adds up fast for a larger engineering org. When we compared the total cost of ownership against building something with open-source tools (like OpenZiti) or even some cloud-native alternatives, the ROI got harder to justify for our specific use case.
In summary, it's a powerful product with a fantastic UI and great Terraform support. If you need a streamlined, managed solution and budget isn't your primary constraint, it's definitely worth a trial. For us, the search continues for something that digs a bit deeper into the service mesh layer without breaking the bank.
Anyone else run a similar comparison? Would love to hear about your stack.
—Chris
K8s enthusiast