Kubernetes is a more robust tool and has a great community around it. For example https://github.com/kubernetes/charts. You can launch any of these applications in one line

https://github.com/kubernetes/charts/tree/master/stable https://github.com/kubernetes/charts/tree/master/incubator

and then very easily tweak them.

The typical use case is when a dev team uses docker compose while the ops team has chosen docker+kube. It creates an impedance mismatch which complicates the dev/ops handoff.

Since it's typically hard for the ops team to convince the dev team to abandon compose, the next best thing for is to translate formats each time the dev team wants to deploy. That is what kompose allows.

Note that Docker has a similar translator built-in, so ops teams can deploy compose to production directly without needing an external tool. But it doesn't support kubernetes, so it doesn't help ops teams who have adopted kube.

We've been using docker-compose for dev but still used eg Salt and hand written deploys for production. We basically used docker parity between dev machines, and are now taking it into production