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AlmaLinux vs CentOS comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 5, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
4.4
Organizations using AlmaLinux benefit from cost savings, efficient management, long-term support, and positive investment sentiment despite limited metrics.
Sentiment score
6.0
CentOS offers significant ROI through cost savings on servers, time efficiency, and community support, benefiting IT budgets.
Moving over to AlmaLinux saves a lot of time because of the long-term support, meaning I do not have to support the latest version every couple of years.
The most immediate benefit has been the elimination of licensing and subscription fees compared to commercial enterprise Linux distributions or Windows.
Ingénieur Systéme at Groupe Open SA
I have seen a return on investment through significant time and money savings.
Open Shift Engineer at Dhanyaayai enterprise private limited
I have seen a return on investment, particularly in terms of money saved because I do not pay for the servers.
Technical Lead InfraOps at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
The money saved was significant, approximately fifteen percent of our IT budget.
Senior Support Engineer at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
It saved a lot of time through troubleshooting, which gives us substantial room for improvement in terms of fixing things.
Senior Technical Support Engineer at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
4.9
AlmaLinux support is praised for its helpfulness, although many users successfully rely on documentation and community resources instead.
Sentiment score
5.5
CentOS depends on community support and internet resources for issue resolution, contrasting with Red Hat's commercial support model.
The customer support for AlmaLinux is good.
Ingénieur Systéme at Groupe Open SA
I have not had a reason to communicate with the technical support of AlmaLinux because everything has been smooth for me.
Cloud Security Engineer at Andela
I have never contacted any sort of technical support regarding AlmaLinux because I do not need it.
Junior Software Test Automation Engineer at a consultancy with 51-200 employees
I would rate the customer support for CentOS a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10.
Senior Technical Support Engineer at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
I've seen many people across the globe interacting, and when users encounter issues, the community provides solutions.
Presales Engineer at Crayon AS
I would rate the documentation about eight in terms of usefulness.
Technical Operations Manager at a wholesaler/distributor with 10,001+ employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
3.9
AlmaLinux is praised for scalable performance, efficiently managing deployments from small to large, with seamless integration and consistent updates.
Sentiment score
7.1
CentOS is scalable, cost-effective, and adaptable, excelling in both small and large deployments across diverse applications.
It is very scalable and performs well both on small deployments and large-scale infrastructure with many servers.
Ingénieur Systéme at Groupe Open SA
AlmaLinux's scalability is very good because the predictable updates ensure there are no issues from that point of view.
Open Shift Engineer at Dhanyaayai enterprise private limited
CentOS is scalable and user-friendly without requiring complex configurations.
Presales Engineer at Crayon AS
It allows users to scale resources vertically for upgrading hardware and horizontally by adding more servers, making it suitable for modern web hosting and containerized applications.
IT infrastructure executive at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
CentOS's scalability for my organization has handled growth and changing needs smoothly.
Senior Technical Support Engineer at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.2
AlmaLinux is praised for its stability, reliability, efficient upgrades, timely security, and superior performance compared to Ubuntu.
Sentiment score
8.0
CentOS is highly stable and reliable, with excellent performance and continuous uptime, making it ideal for stable environments.
Its security is another highlight, providing minimal disruptions, timely security patches, bug fixes, and a reduced attack surface.
system administration | DevOps | Softrware Developer at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
I have not encountered such issues with AlmaLinux, making it very stable.
Since I started using AlmaLinux, I have not encountered any issue with kernel crashes or upgrading.
Junior Software Test Automation Engineer at a consultancy with 51-200 employees
CentOS is stable, reliable, flexible, and very useful.
IT infrastructure executive at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
CentOS's simplicity and stability make it easy to use.
Presales Engineer at Crayon AS
I believe CentOS is stable, but we are gradually moving away from it.
Technical Operations Manager at a wholesaler/distributor with 10,001+ employees
 

Room For Improvement

AlmaLinux users face challenges with support, documentation, updates, resource allocation, and integration, seeking improvements in security and package availability.
CentOS users seek better support, security, stability, and user interface due to recent changes, prompting interest in alternatives.
The AlmaLinux team can look into this and see what they can improve in terms of resource consumption and monitoring tools that can actually help the users of AlmaLinux pinpoint the exact processes or services that are causing that amount of resource consumption.
DevOps at a energy/utilities company with 501-1,000 employees
If something is added to AlmaLinux that allows for some subscription or makes it exactly equal to RHEL, it would be perfect.
Azure Dev Ops Engineer at a engineering company with 5,001-10,000 employees
If AlmaLinux could provide ten to twenty years of fixes, that would be an improvement because I do not want to update the system all the time, as it becomes more challenging for me as a system administrator to track all the patches and everything I should patch on the system.
system administration | DevOps | Softrware Developer at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
The documentation and support could be improved, along with compatibility with newer hardware as hardware continually evolves over time.
Presales Engineer at Crayon AS
Kernel parameters, sysctl config details, tuned profiles, process prioritization, optimized disk, and input scheduler choice are all points for performance optimization.
IT infrastructure executive at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
CentOS RADIUS server handles sensitive authentication data, so improving security is the priority.
Technical person at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise users find AlmaLinux cost-effective for budget management, offering free setup, support, and updates as an open-source alternative.
CentOS is seen as a cost-effective enterprise solution, due to its open-source nature, eliminating licensing fees.
In the open-source environment, I believe a Linux distribution is always free of cost.
Junior Software Test Automation Engineer at a consultancy with 51-200 employees
AlmaLinux is free, so there are no costs there.
I have no licensing cost, which means there is no burden related to licensing.
Open Shift Engineer at Dhanyaayai enterprise private limited
There was no cost in terms of deploying it or getting the license for it.
Senior Technical Support Engineer at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
Regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing for CentOS, there is no cost for licensing or setup pricing.
Azure Dev Ops Engineer at a engineering company with 5,001-10,000 employees
CentOS is a free product with free updates.
Technical Operations Manager at a wholesaler/distributor with 10,001+ employees
 

Valuable Features

AlmaLinux improves PHP management, ensuring stability, security, and cost efficiency with RHEL compatibility, ideal for production environments.
CentOS is favored for enterprise use due to its stability, ease of use, scalability, and strong community support.
The tooling stability for DevOps is also significant, allowing easy use of infrastructure as code with Ansible or scripting playbooks that remain valid for years, making it especially important for the CI/CD pipelines.
system administration | DevOps | Softrware Developer at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
Because AlmaLinux is binary compatible with Red Hat, it provides a very stable and reliable operating system suitable for production environments.
Ingénieur Systéme at Groupe Open SA
The prompt patching and OS updates with AlmaLinux have helped our team by improving our FedRAMP compliance and vulnerability scan reports.
Cloud Software Engineer at Coupa Software
CentOS has helped me most through its enterprise-level stability.
Technical person at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
The update cycle changed when CentOS was prioritized for updates, causing stability issues.
Technical Operations Manager at a wholesaler/distributor with 10,001+ employees
In my experience, the best feature that CentOS offers is the network configuration of a device from the command-line interface, which is exceptionally clean.
Senior Technical Support Engineer at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
 

Categories and Ranking

AlmaLinux
Ranking in Operating Systems (OS) for Business
12th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
4.9
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
CentOS
Ranking in Operating Systems (OS) for Business
7th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
78
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Operating Systems (OS) for Business category, the mindshare of AlmaLinux is 3.8%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CentOS is 4.7%, down from 5.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Operating Systems (OS) for Business Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
CentOS4.7%
AlmaLinux3.8%
Other91.5%
Operating Systems (OS) for Business
 

Featured Reviews

Naim Khan - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps Engineer at SMC Labs, LLC
Private cloud practice has become seamless and deployments run smoothly for my projects
I follow the documentation for AlmaLinux, which I believe could be more extensive for enterprise setups. My primary use case remains deploying private cloud infrastructure using OpenStack Yoga, thus suggesting improvements to cater to specific cloud instances like AWS Graviton or Azure NVMe. Driver or kernel updates for new hardware or cloud instances like AWS Graviton or Azure NVMe tend to arrive a little later in AlmaLinux than they do in the Red Hat distribution. Therefore, I suggest that faster releases of cloud-optimized images and updated hardware drivers could enhance AlmaLinux's competitiveness. Additionally, I find it sometimes difficult to find answers on forums due to the community not being as large as that of Red Hat or CentOS. My suggestion is to create an active forum or Q&A session where developers can directly address user problems, growing the community and providing optional enterprise support tiers for large organizations. Additionally, I have continued to consider improvements. For server administration and language runtime management, I encountered conflicts on production servers with older and newer versions of tools such as Python and Node.js. Simplifying the application space management would reduce the friction in multi-language development environments. Moreover, including more pre-configured or auto-remediation scripts like CIS Benchmark or STIG compliance would be immensely helpful for enterprise security hardening.
Mohammad Wasif - PeerSpot reviewer
IT infrastructure executive at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
Has supported reliable deployments and simplified issue resolution in complex environments
The most suitable feature of CentOS is its exceptional stability, security, and long-term support, which make it a popular choice for enterprise and server environments. CentOS is widely recognized for providing a stable and secure platform, especially suited for server and mission-critical workloads. Whenever we face critical work, it is easy for our team to handle. For long-term support, each CentOS release generally guarantees long-term updates, ensuring reliability for extended periods. For package management, we use YUM and DNF in the new version for flexible and efficient software management. It depends on our users' requirements for installing CentOS. Licensing for CentOS is above my management details, so I am not aware of this information. CentOS always provides good feedback, is easy to handle, and easy to troubleshoot. The experience with CentOS OS has been very good over the last two months. I rate CentOS nine out of ten.
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Comparison Review

it_user281973 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage and VMware Expert at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Aug 24, 2017
It's improved our company's system environments that run Oracle databases.
Red Hat is mission critical to our environment Red Hat has improved the mission critical environments running Oracle databases, while CentOS has improved our web environment and MySQL. Oracle and SAP Environment and all HPC environments. 10 years No issues Very stable i don´t find any problem…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
University
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business30
Midsize Enterprise22
Large Enterprise29
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AlmaLinux?
Currently, we have not experienced pricing with AlmaLinux, as I have used the free version so far. However, when we move to the production environment, I am suggesting that we implement AlmaLinux t...
What needs improvement with AlmaLinux?
In terms of how AlmaLinux can be improved, while I praise the patching part, the support provided by TuxCare needs to be more prompt and responsive. We feel they are not taking ownership of address...
What is your primary use case for AlmaLinux?
My main use case for AlmaLinux is to build a custom image on top of the AlmaLinux image provided by TuxCare. I use that custom image to supply it through all the stakeholders, for example, differen...
Which would you choose - RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) or CentOS?
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is fantastic. It is an inexpensive solution that has excellent security, performance, and stability, and also lots of features. I specifically like that the solution has fe...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CentOS?
Regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing for CentOS, there is no cost for licensing or setup pricing, so it is easy to set up and scale up the server.
What needs improvement with CentOS?
CentOS can be improved, but I have not yet faced any kind of issue or hectic problem.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

AlmaLinux OS 8 (x86_64), AlmaLinux OS 10 (x86_64)
CentOS 7 (x86_64) - with Updates HVM
 

Overview

Find out what your peers are saying about AlmaLinux vs. CentOS and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.