[derfabianpeter]

author of apollo here.

I think conceptually apollo and cap rover are pretty similar in that both try to deliver some degree of abstraction to the developer when it comes to application deployments.

Where I see a great difference is that apollo doesn't imply a special deployment or release workflow. You just use plain docker tooling (or helm for k8s). We also don't provide DBs or other platform-services. With apollo, you're required to take care of your stack's needs (if you need a database, create a service in compose and add a volume).

apollo's focus is on stable day-2-operations and giving great insights to what's under the hood (like direct access to metrics and central logs). We also don't invest time in writing custom code for web-interfaces and alike. apollo includes portainer (or rancher on k3s) which you can use to manage your containers; and grafana for analytics.

Another thing we focus on is to simply support industry-standard tooling and workflows (apollo can has a CI/CD workflow based on SemVer you can use to continuously validate and deploy your clusters) - we want to avoid vendor-lock-in as much as possible.

apollo is meant to be used in production and can replace the need for a full-blown DevOps team if used correctly. Not sure if Caprover does that.