A new Kubernetes cluster often needs supporting tools for certificates, monitoring, deployment and backups. Helm charts package many of those tools, but a popular package from years ago may have moved or stopped receiving updates.
This page preserves Kubedex's 2019 top-ten list. It is a historical shortlist, not a recommendation to install the same packages today. Start with the job you need done, then follow the application's maintained installation guide.
A shortlist must name its date and purpose
The original top-ten list was last updated in May 2019 and reflects the chart ecosystem and editorial choices of that period. The old stable/incubator repository is now an archive. Applications listed there may have moved to current project charts or operators; other projects have retired. In particular, its number-one choice, the community Ingress NGINX controller, retired in March 2026 with no further releases, bug fixes or security updates. Do not use the historical ranking as a new-installation shortlist.
For a new platform, select capabilities before packages: certificate management, monitoring, secret delivery, networking, recovery and deployment reconciliation. Check the exact publisher and image sources, then evaluate operational cost and failure recovery. The successor lookup guide explains how to follow an old chart safely. A ranked list without workload or maintenance evidence is not a deployment plan.
Historical Kubedex content
Preserved for context. Commands, versions, prices and results below reflect the original research.
Last Updated on May 10, 2019
Top 10 Helm Charts
What are the best helm charts to install on your shiny new Kubernetes cluster? Here’s a highly opinionated list.
| wdt_ID | No. | Name | Justification |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | ingress-nginx | The most common front end proxy in the world. Incredibly versatile and simple to setup. There may be better ingresses depending on your scenario but this covers the 99%. |
| 2 | 2 | coredns | Supercharge your DNS with the best server available on Kubernetes. Default KubeDNS is a bit crap so you should definitely switch it out. You also get to enable some cool plugins that work with other applications mentioned like Prometheus. |
| 3 | 3 | Prometheus | Everybody should be using Prometheus. It provides custom time series monitoring which will let you instrument your code and watch pretty graphs in Grafana. |
| 4 | 4 | Istio | Connect your microservices over the Istio service mesh and unlock a load of cool features. Traffic flow control, authorization and authentication, encryption and observability. |
| 5 | 5 | Kubeless | Kubeless is our favourite of all of the FaaS applications currently available. It provides Serverless Functions for Real-Time and Data-Driven Applications, so same deal as AWS Lambda except on your cluster. |
| 6 | 6 | Jaeger | Distributed tracing for your applications. Trace every api call as it passes through every micro service. We all know the biggest problem with micro-services is observability. This goes a long way towards solving that problem. |
| 7 | 7 | Fluentd | Capture and emit logs to ElasticSearch for forensically working out what went wrong with your microservice by searching the logs for errors. You'll need the Kibana chart too. |
| 8 | 8 | Anchore | Who doesn't need security nowadays. You'll need this to catch vulnerabilities and integrate with your CI/CD pipeline. |
| 9 | 9 | Jenkins | CI/CD for your containers. Everybody runs it, not many like it, but it's insanely popular and is the default until somebody installs Gitlab. |
| 10 | 10 | NATS | A cool PubSub messaging system. Not all internal communication needs to go over api's. Has some cool streaming features too. |
It was really hard narrowing down to the 10 we like the most. There are some really awesome applications that didn’t quite make it. In the end we prioritised core functionality upgrades and features that massively help developers.
Velero
Heptio Velero is a utility for managing disaster recovery, specifically for your Kubernetes cluster resources and persistent volumes.
Nobody really enjoys writing backup and restore scripts. We recommend you have a look at this application to take care of these things for you.
Gitlab
Arguably Gitlab is better than Jenkins and should be on the list instead. However, you can’t ignore that literally everyone runs Jenkins. So we sided with the popular vote this time.
Traefik and Ambassador
Another contentious entry was ingress-nginx at number 1 in the list. Plenty of people said “I would swap nginx with [ Traefik | Ambassador ].
We sided with the noobs and popularity on this one. More advanced users will ultimately move away from nginx-ingress over time and investigate these two options instead.
external-dns
We run external-dns on most of our clusters. It manages automatically updating our external DNS records.
Compared to the other items on the list it doesn’t provide as much functionality. Although arguably you’ll need to install it at some point to avoid manual config.
Magic Namespace
Magic Namespace is a helm chart for managing security between namespaces. If you’re running a multi-tenant cluster this is definitely something you should look into.
chaoskube
Everyone loves the chaos monkey.
We couldn’t justify telling people to install a chart that randomly kills pods on their cluster when starting out. Chaoskube is for those advanced enough to enjoy the sadomasochism of chaos engineering.
Kubernetes Dashboard and kube-ops-view
These dashboard applications didn’t quite make it onto the list. If you’re in the mood for some nice visual UI’s that show cluster state then kube-ops-view is great. If you prefer to click buttons then Kubernetes Dashboard may be for you.
cert manager
cert-manager is a Kubernetes application to automate the management and issuance of TLS certificates from various issuing sources.
If you’re bored of creating custom bits of automation around services like LetsEncrypt then have a look at cert manager.
Envoy
This one is a bit of a tragedy. Envoy is an absolutely awesome edge and service proxy that nobody really uses directly as a helm chart. It’s bundled up in some of the charts in the Top10 like Istio. So I’m giving it a shout out here anyway as that’s only fair.
Spinnaker
Spinnaker is a really popular CI/CD platform open sourced by Netflix. It didn’t make the top10 list this time because it’s a bit of a beast. It requires a lot of planning to setup and then it’s really configurable and encompasses a lot of the stuff that would usually be done in Terraform. Check it out if you have a team of people, complex application and need a really powerful solution to replace your hacked together Jenkins jobs.
Kong
If you expose API’s to the outside world, which most of us running Kubernetes do, you should check out Kong. It’s an API gateway that helps you manage a whole bunch of standard stuff like authentication, routing, logging etc. It also has a plugin system that extends it with some very nice features.
If you’d like to suggest an application worthy of the top list please leave us a message below or click the contact form at the top. Thanks!
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