k3s is not intended to be a competitor, but let's say I wanted to build it out to compete with systems. Swarm excels in UX and cluster management. It is easy to run and use. But it is incomplete in features and functionality. So k3s addresses the cluster management issues and has tons of features. It makes k8s easy to run, but it still has Kubernetes UX which is quite difficult. So in the end I think it is a wash between k3s and Swarm. You either get hard to use (k3s) or incomplete (Swarm). I have a different project Rio (https://github.com/rancher/rio) that attempts to address UX (and it's built on k3s). So Rio could possibly be a system that is easy to use, powerful, and simple to run. I think Rio could be something that is better than both raw k8s and Swarm for regular users, but it's a very early.