Spot (Flexera) vs ZopNight: Compute Automation Compared
Spot's products decide what capacity to run and how to pay for it. ZopNight decides what should be on at all, across more than compute.
What Spot does
Ownership. Flexera completed its acquisition of Spot from NetApp on 3 March 2025 (Flexera press release). spot.io now redirects to flexera.com, and the product docs moved to Flexera’s docs site. Where that site blocked automated reading, we used Spot’s public docs repository.
Products. The portfolio named in the release is Eco, Ocean, Elastigroup and CloudCheckr. Eco manages “reserved instances, savings plans or committed usage discounts across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform”. Ocean is Kubernetes infrastructure management for ECS, EKS, AKS and GKE (Ocean docs).
Scheduling. Spot does schedule, contrary to an earlier version of this page. Ocean’s Shutdown Hours feature sets weekly running hours, and outside them the “underlying instances of the cluster’s nodes are scaled down to zero”. The docs recommend it for non-production environments (running hours). Elastigroup has a “cron-based scheduling tool”, which the docs suggest for things like “terminating development environments over weekends” (Elastigroup scheduling).
Pricing. We found no public pricing.
Capacity engine versus estate-wide control
Spot is at its strongest inside the compute layer. Ocean autoscales container infrastructure and blends spot, reserved and on-demand capacity underneath your clusters. Eco then optimizes the commitment portfolio. Both scheduling features belong to the capacity products: they turn an Ocean cluster or an Elastigroup down on a timetable.
ZopNight’s schedules are not tied to one capacity product. One schedule, in one timezone, can cover EC2 instances, RDS and Cloud SQL databases, EKS, GKE and AKS clusters, Kubernetes namespaces, ECS services and Databricks. Put those in a resource group and they start in order with per-resource delays. ZopNight does not replace Spot’s spot-instance brokering. If spot capacity is your main lever, Ocean does work ZopNight does not.
| Capability | ZopNight | Spot by Flexera |
|---|---|---|
| Scheduled shutdown | Cron schedules on VMs, databases, clusters, namespaces | Ocean Shutdown Hours; Elastigroup cron scheduling |
| Spot/on-demand capacity blending | Not part of ZopNight’s feature set | Core to Ocean and Elastigroup |
| Commitment management | Advisory RI/CUD recommendations | Eco across AWS, Azure, GCP |
| Container platforms | EKS, GKE, AKS | ECS, EKS, AKS, GKE |
Choose Spot if…
- Compute is most of your bill, and you want an engine that picks and blends spot, reserved and on-demand capacity for your clusters.
- You want commitments across all three clouds bought and managed for you.
- You are consolidating on Flexera’s wider FinOps and IT asset tooling.
Choose ZopNight if…
- Your idle spend is spread across many resource types, not just cluster nodes, and you want one schedule model for all of them.
- You want databases on a schedule. For RDS, see how RDS scheduling handles the service’s automatic restart after seven days stopped.
- You want showback, budgets, anomaly root-cause analysis and gated remediation alongside the scheduler.
Questions we get a lot.
If yours isn't here, email us and we'll answer directly.
Who owns Spot.io now?
Flexera. Flexera announced it had completed the acquisition of Spot from NetApp on 3 March 2025, and spot.io now redirects to flexera.com.
Can Spot Ocean shut clusters down at night?
Yes. Ocean's Shutdown Hours scales a cluster's nodes to zero outside the running hours you set, and Elastigroup has cron-based scheduling. ZopNight's difference is breadth: the same schedule can also cover databases, namespaces and non-Kubernetes resources.
Does ZopNight buy spot instances?
No. Spot capacity brokering is not part of ZopNight's feature set, and its commitment recommendations are advisory rather than purchases. It does track purchase type, including spot, when billing data is connected.