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Azure Red Hat OpenShift vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Azure Red Hat OpenShift
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
16th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Pivotal Cloud Foundry
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
14th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Azure Red Hat OpenShift is 1.1%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is 6.2%, down from 10.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
PaaS Clouds Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Pivotal Cloud Foundry6.2%
Azure Red Hat OpenShift1.1%
Other92.7%
PaaS Clouds
 

Featured Reviews

DeepakMishra - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO, Head of Sales and Business Development at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Integrated cloud platform has streamlined app delivery and supported certified marketplace products
A potential area for improvement for Azure Red Hat OpenShift is to see managed identity support and ensure that some of the security features are not conflicting with Azure or Azure product features. I am sure in the future it will be more templatized so that we need not depend on Azure security features. Azure Red Hat OpenShift should be independent of Azure security features with respect to container scan and all that. Why would it use an Azure security feature? That is what I find. It is still yet to be GA and commonly available, but that is a strong reason for improvement.
reviewer2263239 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Engineering at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
PCF allows for fine-grained configuration, especially regarding scaling but routing limitations
Something that can be done better is canary deployment. So, right now, we're using blue-green deployment. The support for canary deployment would be nice. A few things, such as what OpenShift does better are cluster management. Like, you can manage the entire thing together. Currently, it's possible to manage all the clusters, especially when it comes to cluster management using straightforward configuration. As of now, we have to handle each application instance individually, which means servicing them one by one. It would be better if we could perform these actions as a group or in a more streamlined manner. One more downside is actually the cost of this environment. So, major downside of Pivotal, it's the cost. So, the runtime running costs are very high. Extremely high.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It supports AKS and other projects like Kubernetes or EKS."
"The functions and features in Azure Red Hat OpenShift that I have found most valuable are that it is a platform that is baked into Azure, and since it is baked into Azure, it is managed operation by Azure, which takes out the complexity of the infrastructure management and day two operations when compared with on-premise OpenShift."
"It has a feature to automatically scale up or scale down. If my application is running in peak hours, it will automatically increase."
"As a consulting company, we implement Azure Red Hat OpenShift for our clients, who appreciate its integration capabilities for enhancing cloud operations. While we handle implementation, build processes, and automation, the operational responsibility lies with the customer. The service provides basic processes and support from Red Hat and Microsoft, which benefits clients by allowing them to focus on their business rather than regular operations like cluster upgrades."
"In Kubernetes, when traffic goes out of a pod, it has to have its own IP address. Every service that's going out requires another IP. But with OpenShift, you don't have to deal with any of those IPs because they use NAT."
"Flexibility, a very well-developed interface, and ease of learning are the most valuable features of Azure Red Hat OpenShift."
"I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten."
"Technical support from Red Hat is very good."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is very easy to use compared to other cloud technologies. It has a very good performance."
"It is a scalable product...We are not facing any particular issues since most of the applications in our company are written in Java and .NET."
"It provides a set of developer-friendly tools that simplify application deployment."
"The most valuable features are the monitoring and the deployment is easier."
"PCF is open, so the applications run really smoothly and with little downtime."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is very robust, especially for building Java."
"I find the ease of deployment and management of microservices to be the most valuable features. The platform also has good auto-scaling capabilities."
"The most valuable features of Pivotal Cloud Foundry are its ease of use and the command line interface has the ability to push instances to the cloud easily."
 

Cons

"The product is expensive."
"They need to improve the core licensing model."
"One of the things to notice is that this product can be expensive."
"I would rate the technical support from Microsoft as six."
"There is room for improvement in terms of orchestration. While Azure orchestration offers valuable features, it's worth noting that it may not match the level of orchestration provided by Kubernetes itself."
"Regarding room for improvement, there's always room, but it's mainly about Azure itself rather than Azure Red Hat OpenShift. Azure is not as advanced as AWS in terms of supported services. AWS is the leader in this area. However, there's no need for service improvement in Azure Red Hat OpenShift as the service is excellent. I don't need additional features because I can customize it according to the customer's needs."
"Technically, Azure Red Hat OpenShift is fine. However, its marketing could be improved, especially when compared to the robust marketing efforts of Azure, HPE, and Nutanix."
"I would like Azure Red Hat OpenShift to be more open to new frameworks and languages. Currently, if I create a pod with Rust, it doesn't work in OpenShift, and I must create a layer of interpretation."
"It should offer more security features."
"In the next release, they should offer additional applications for the databases, and improve the deployment experience."
"The user interface should be simpler to navigate because it t can take time for users to learn it."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is not scalable, infinitely, because when you install it on a set of virtual machines it is very hard to scale. It's easy to scale on an application level, but not it is not similar to if you were using Amazon. Amazon you can scale thousands of applications."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve the documentation. They are good, but they could improve more. Additionally, it would be beneficial if there were more use case examples."
"There are no synthetic application monitoring and real-time monitoring features."
"In the next release, I would like to see easy integration with external tools."
"The Pivotal Cloud Foundry's initial setup has a learning curve for my team, but it was easy to use."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is expensive compared to a similar product."
"Azure Red Hat OpenShift is not a low-price solution; it's expensive. Pricing depends on the strategy and whether you buy it directly from Red Hat or the Azure portal. Additionally, some customers may need a complete disaster recovery solution, which requires additional licensing and software products for implementation, such as backups."
"I rate the product's price an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."
"Compared to other cloud environments like Amazon or Google, Azure Red Hat OpenShift is an expensive solution."
"Licensing is on a monthly basis and right now we pay $24/month. There are no other costs over and above that."
"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is based on the customer's requirements. However, the price is comparable to other similar solutions."
"The pricing is on the higher side and there are cheaper options available."
"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve. However, in this category of solutions, they are all expensive."
"We do pay for the licensing cost because we have opted for a private cloud setup. So, it is a cloud setup, and we have to make payments based on the cloud size. I do not consider it very costly when comparing it to the market."
"You're paying for the number of virtual machines you want to install in the installation."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Computer Software Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
36%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Insurance Company
5%
Retailer
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Large Enterprise11
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Red Hat OpenShift?
The pricing for OpenShift is similar to other solutions like Docker ( /products/docker-37146-reviews ) Studio. The plans with ARO and AWS are standard in the market. However, using OpenShift on-pre...
What needs improvement with Azure Red Hat OpenShift?
A potential area for improvement for Azure Red Hat OpenShift is to see managed identity support and ensure that some of the security features are not conflicting with Azure or Azure product feature...
What is your primary use case for Azure Red Hat OpenShift?
My use case for Azure Red Hat OpenShift is for an employee engagement application and HR, and I have also used it for an agentic bot.
Which would you recommend - Pivotal Cloud Foundry or OpenShift?
Pivotal Cloud Foundry is a cloud-native application platform to simplify app delivery. It is efficient and effective. The best feature is how easy it is to handle external services such as database...
 

Also Known As

No data available
PCF, Pivotal Application Service (PAS), Pivotal Container Service (PKS), Pivotal Function Service (PFS)
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Humana, Citibank, Mercedes Benz, Liberty Mutual, The Home Depot, GE, West Corp, Merrill Corporation, CoreLogic, Orange, Dish Network, Comcast, Bloomberg, Internal Revenue Service, Ford Motor Company, Garmin, Volkswagen, Solera, Allstate, US Air Force, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, ScotiaBank
Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Red Hat OpenShift vs. Pivotal Cloud Foundry and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.