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AlmaLinux vs SUSE Linux Enterprise comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 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
4.8
Switching to AlmaLinux saves costs, reduces risks, enhances communication, and eliminates vendor lock-in, ensuring enterprise compatibility.
Sentiment score
4.9
SUSE Linux Enterprise provides better ROI and cost savings for SAP deployment than Red Hat, enhancing revenue by 10-15%.
We were looking for an open source and free solution. AlmaLinux fits in our requirement.
Technical Consultant at Prodevans Technologies
The clearest measurable benefit is avoiding operating system subscription costs while maintaining enterprise Linux compatibility and stability.
Associate Systems Engineer at Dhanyaayai Enterprises Pvt Ltd
We saved approximately 70% of our budget with AlmaLinux, and the system is stable and reliable.
Systems Engineer at SARL Rajafood
I have seen a return on investment by switching our clusters from on-prem to Azure public cloud, using our same Bring Your Own Licenses, which saved costs on licensing.
Senior Cloud Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.2
AlmaLinux offers reliable support with quick responses and robust documentation, praised by users and supported by active community resources.
Sentiment score
5.6
SUSE Linux Enterprise support is generally praised for expertise, though experiences vary, with high costs for certain interactions.
AlmaLinux offers strong community support and excellent documentation.
Associate Systems Engineer at Dhanyaayai Enterprises Pvt Ltd
The best features AlmaLinux offers include its support, which is outstanding from TuxCare, as we are getting the fixes and patch sets for the OS very fast.
Cloud Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
The customer support for AlmaLinux is good.
Ingénieur Systéme at Groupe Open SA
SUSE Linux Enterprise provides a stable, secure, and well-supported platform for enterprise workloads, with powerful management tools and robust support for clustering, cloud, and containers.
Senior Lead DevOps Engineer at Kyndryl
The customer support is good; whenever we have opened a case, they have provided detailed explanations of the issues and resolutions.
Senior Cloud Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
I rate the customer service 10 out of 10 because SUSE has 24/7 availability support, extended support, security, multi-Linux distribution support, upgradation, and everything is user-friendly.
Devops MAnager at DXC Technology
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
4.6
AlmaLinux excels in scalability, supporting diverse infrastructures efficiently, praised for stable performance and high user satisfaction.
Sentiment score
6.0
SUSE Linux Enterprise is praised for its strong scalability, ease of maintenance, cloud compatibility, but faces some kernel issues.
It is very scalable and performs well both on small deployments and large-scale infrastructure with many servers.
Ingénieur Systéme at Groupe Open SA
We can scale in, scale out, horizontally, and vertically depending on the way we want.
Technical Consultant at Prodevans Technologies
AlmaLinux scales very well and can support everything from a small virtual machine to large enterprise deployments.
Associate Systems Engineer at Dhanyaayai Enterprises Pvt Ltd
Its scalability is quite good since we are using Azure, which allows us to easily scale up or down our resources as needed.
Senior Cloud Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
SUSE Linux Enterprise is widely recognized for its strong scalability, making it suitable for organizations of all sizes, from small businesses to global enterprises.
Senior Lead DevOps Engineer at Kyndryl
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.2
AlmaLinux offers stable, reliable performance with minimal failures, ideal for enterprise workloads with timely security updates and extended uptime.
Sentiment score
7.9
SUSE Linux Enterprise is praised for its stability and reliability, with occasional minor issues in newer versions and Hyper-V.
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
AlmaLinux is a reliable and stable version of Linux.
Systems Engineer at SARL Rajafood
It is designed for enterprise workloads and follows a long-term support model, making it suitable for production servers, databases, web applications, virtualization platforms, and cloud environments.
Associate Systems Engineer at Dhanyaayai Enterprises Pvt Ltd
When HANA is utilized by many applications, I notice that while utilization does increase, we have never faced lagging or server unresponsiveness.
Senior Cloud Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
I would rate stability for SUSE Linux Enterprise an eight out of ten.
Solution specialist Data and AI at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Room For Improvement

AlmaLinux needs improved host access control, documentation, hardware compatibility, support, memory management, software updates, and third-party repository integration.
SUSE Linux Enterprise requires improvements in package management, security policies, cloud integration, UI, documentation, licensing, and support services.
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.
Devops Engineer at EDAG
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
Security is a top concern, and further strengthening default security policies, simplifying compliance management, and integrating advanced vulnerability management tools would be a valuable improvement.
Senior Lead DevOps Engineer at Kyndryl
The software manager was different, making it challenging to install certain applications.
Lead Desktop Support Technician at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
The license we subscribed to should carry over within the same instance family.
IT Manager at a wellness & fitness company with 5,001-10,000 employees
 

Setup Cost

AlmaLinux attracts enterprises with its free, open-source model and cost-effectiveness, enhancing budget management and resource allocation.
SUSE Linux Enterprise provides flexible pricing, emphasizing support over licensing, with mixed affordability perceptions but justified by scalability and support.
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.
Solution Architect at Dhanyaayai enterprise private limited
Upgrading an instance results in overlapping or double subscription fees.
IT Manager at a wellness & fitness company with 5,001-10,000 employees
I would rate pricing for SUSE Linux Enterprise considering one is a high price and ten is a low price.
Solution specialist Data and AI at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The licensing cost is a bit high.
Senior Cloud Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
 

Valuable Features

AlmaLinux delivers stability, RHEL compatibility, cost savings, and performance, making it ideal for organizations migrating from other Linux distributions.
SUSE Linux Enterprise excels in stability, security, easy administration, cost-effectiveness, and adaptability, ideal for enterprise workloads.
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 a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
SUSE Linux had a clean user interface, which was a valuable feature for me.
Lead Desktop Support Technician at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
It has a stable and reliable OS.
IT Manager at a wellness & fitness company with 5,001-10,000 employees
The LVM is very easy to configure, along with simple disk scanning compared to other systems.
Senior Cloud Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
 

Categories and Ranking

AlmaLinux
Ranking in Operating Systems (OS) for Business
13th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.2
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SUSE Linux Enterprise
Ranking in Operating Systems (OS) for Business
8th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Operating Systems (OS) for Business category, the mindshare of AlmaLinux is 4.2%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SUSE Linux Enterprise is 4.4%, down from 7.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Operating Systems (OS) for Business Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SUSE Linux Enterprise4.4%
AlmaLinux4.2%
Other91.4%
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.
MoezCHEBBI - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Lead DevOps Engineer at Kyndryl
Has delivered expert training and enabled smooth migrations using automated deployment tools
SUSE Linux Enterprise is a mature and reliable platform, but there are areas where it can be improved. Modernizing the system management tools is important as many users appreciate YaST for its centralized management, but there is a growing demand for more modern, web-based, and modular tools. The introduction of tools such as Agama, a web-based installer, and Cockpit in newer releases is a step in the right direction.SUSE has made progress with multi-Linux support, allowing organizations to manage and support not just SUSE systems but also other distributions such as Red Hat and CentOS; continuing to expand these capabilities, especially for hybrid and multi-cloud environments, will help organizations manage diverse infrastructure more effectively. Security is a top concern, and further strengthening default security policies, simplifying compliance management, and integrating advanced vulnerability management tools would be a valuable improvement.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise23
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AlmaLinux?
In AlmaLinux, I do not have experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing.
What needs improvement with AlmaLinux?
AlmaLinux could have more software options. For example, if I need some software from Windows or something similar, it is missing some tools. I would say you cannot assume AlmaLinux is so similar t...
What is your primary use case for AlmaLinux?
I use AlmaLinux to create simulations, Monte Carlo simulations using C++, and for that I need to use the terminal and put a lot of different jobs to process the code. AlmaLinux is a pretty fast sof...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SUSE Linux Enterprise?
I would rate pricing for SUSE Linux Enterprise considering one is a high price and ten is a low price.
What needs improvement with SUSE Linux Enterprise?
SUSE can make improvements to SUSE Linux Enterprise. I have suggestions about what they can add to the product to simplify users' lives. They need to intensely work on their marketing strategy.
What is your primary use case for SUSE Linux Enterprise?
I understand your point regarding my current use case for SUSE Linux Enterprise. I want to know if the purchase process is mostly directly from SUSE or through the AWS Marketplace, and what ways I ...
 

Also Known As

AlmaLinux OS 8 (x86_64), AlmaLinux OS 10 (x86_64)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications 12 SP3
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Air India, Akademicki Szpital Kliniczny (ASK), Allone, Altran, Apollo, ARCHIVA, Asia Innovatory Management School, ATLAS ELEKTRONIK GmbH, AutoData Norge AS, Baldor Electric, Business Connexion, CASIO, Ciclum Farma, Delta Lloyd, Edumate , HPE,  SAP SE,  Lenovo, BMW, T-Systems, UCX, Turners & Growers, Shenzhen Development Bank, Bosch Group, JK Tyres & Industries, IOCL, European Space Agency, Daimler AG, China Minsheng Banking Corp, Café Coffee Day, Unisys,  Petrochina Company Ltd, Fitch Ratings, ABeam Consulting Co Ltd, Tyro Payments, Rackspace, Pacific Textiles, ...
Find out what your peers are saying about AlmaLinux vs. SUSE Linux Enterprise and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.