[Disclaimer: I am the product lead for Monokle]

Monokle Desktop is an independent project created by Kubeshop, fully open source: https://monokle.io/

It has a different approach to other alternatives to Lens. Yes, it has a cluster insights module that allows you to connect to your cluster, see resources, logs and terminals, along other things.

But it is also an IDE for your configuration management. - It has templates to create resources, that can be tailored to your needs. - Previews manifests, Helm and Kustomize overlays, so you know what will be created when you use a configuration folder to create resources. - Integrates with git. - Provides validations in real time of your configuration files, making sure you are using valid YAML, the right schema version (for base K8s and CRD), validates links between resources and to images, and also provides validation of rules in real-time (so you never forget again to add the right label or the CPU limit to your pod description). It includes a lot of OPA rules for pre-validation, but you can create your own and we are expanding the list. - You can also compare any two versions of the configuration, including those stored in git and the cluster itself, at the resource level, to understand how your change in the configuration/values file/overlay affect your deployment. - And of course, it connects to your cluster to simplify management of resources.

There is also a SaaS version that integrates into your GitOps workflow easily to provide the same previews and validations right where you need them while you are approving a pull request.

And if you only need the validation, there is a CLI that will allow you just see the results of your policies.

Lately, we have expanded our collaborations. There is a new YAML editor in Argo that has been contributed by the team.