I think the confusion is also because it's a comparison of Community Self-Hosted (CE) vs the pure Open Source CLI - the latter is what works without license key

I'll see if I can help with clarifying this in the table!

(I'm a Renovate maintainer and employee at Mend)

Renovate lets you configure most things in each repos individual config file.

I can only imagine a set of intersecting edge cases where operator pattern is the most logical solution…

Edit: good answers here. https://old.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1r1u7um/renovat...

There's several benefits we had in mind when building this (after using self-hosted Renovate ourselves): k8s-native approach: It uses CRDs, so that Renovate configs are Kubernetes resources. You can manage them more easily/granular with Argo/Flux/kubectl as part of existing workflows instead of a Cronjob. Job isolation: The operator spawns individual jobs per repo instead of one run. If a repo is stuck it doesn't block everything else. Webhook support: repos get updated immediately, not just on the next cron cycle. Visibility: There's a light-weight, built-in UI showing repos, job status, and progress.

There's more on the Github repo, we added a full list of features and benefits to the readme.

Of course, in the end it comes down to individual preferences :) Not saying one way is better than the other. We just felt that for us, the operator-based approach would work better and we're happy if the project is benefitial for others as well!