Cloud Foundry vs Google App Engine comparison

Cloud Foundry and Google are both solutions in the PaaS Clouds category. Cloud Foundry is ranked #21, while Google is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.4. Cloud Foundry holds a 2.1% mindshare in PSP, compared to Google’s 2.5% mindshare. Additionally, 33% of Cloud Foundry users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Google users who would recommend it.

Cloud Foundry

Read 2 Cloud Foundry reviews

966 Views
937 Comparison Views

33% willing to recommend

Google App Engine

Read 36 Google App Engine reviews

1,885 Views
1,715 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Cloud Foundry

Google App Engine

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

Google App Engine and Cloud Foundry compete in the Platform as a Service (PaaS) market, providing environments for developing and deploying applications. Google App Engine seems to hold an advantage in integration with other Google services, while Cloud Foundry's open nature and flexibility in language support offer more versatility.

Features: Google App Engine offers automatic scaling, seamless integration with Google Cloud services, and robust support for multiple programming languages. Cloud Foundry provides multi-cloud compatibility, strong support for CI/CD, and extensive language support, enhancing its flexibility.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cloud Foundry has a straightforward deployment model, emphasizing its multicloud environment support. Google App Engine streamlines deployment through integration with Google Cloud services. Google's customer support is highly rated and may provide an edge over Cloud Foundry's community-driven support model. While Cloud Foundry provides versatility, Google App Engine offers simplicity with strong support.

Pricing and ROI: Google App Engine uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model, potentially leading to predictable costs for growing applications and increasing ROI as usage scales. Cloud Foundry’s open-source nature and enterprise versions entail potentially higher initial setup costs but offer comprehensive control over deployments. Google App Engine's model may be suitable for smaller projects seeking scalability, whereas Cloud Foundry can be cost-effective for larger enterprises seeking extensive customization.

To learn more, read our detailed Cloud Foundry vs. Google App Engine Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Foundry vs. Google App Engine

March 2026

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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

Cloud Foundry

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

21st

Average Rating

5.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Google App Engine

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

5th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Cloud Foundry is 2.1%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Google App Engine is 2.5%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

PaaS Clouds Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Google App Engine	2.5%
Cloud Foundry	2.1%
Other	95.4%

PaaS Clouds

Featured Reviews

Carlos Bittrich

Technology Advisor at Fabrik

Quick to deploy but being deprecated by IBM and should be merged with Kubernetes

We enjoy the fast deployment. Cloud Foundry builds the runtime environment directly without requiring dependency management from the developer or administrator. The autoscaling is great. It is just a switch that needs to be turned on, and autoscaling starts working. At this moment, you begin to see different meters about usage that helps you in updating the scaling limits, which help you tune the running instances. Besides this, autoscaling can be scheduled, so in times of low activity, you can have lower limits or increase in advance for special dates. It has good logging. CF has logging events that help identify when a transaction runs and its response time which helps in monitoring execution.

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Rajesh Kadyan

Senior Engineer at Brillio

Have managed resources seamlessly thanks to robust platform capabilities

The areas of Google App Engine that I would to improve or enhance include its allowance for complete end-to-end deployment and scalability; however, it is manageable only for a few languages. For instance, it doesn't support languages C and C++, only basic support for Node.js, Java, and Ruby. It's not a comprehensive solution for all scenarios. Moreover, the security feature is based on IAM roles, but it should ideally be based on Active Directory (AD) roles. For IAM-based roles, we need to add the proper users and provide all security permissions manually. In an AD-based model, we would simply add users to a specific group, and all permissions would be inherited.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cloud Foundry builds the runtime environment directly without requiring dependency management from the user."

"IBM is the only vendor to offer integration with blockchain for smart contract development."

"My favorite component of IBM's solution is Node-RED, which greatly shortens the amount of time required to develop, test, and deploy new applications."

"The WhatApp feature is the most valuable."

"I've found that all of the features are valuable, especially the shared drive and the ability for multiple people to use their documents at the same time."

"The functions and features of Google App Engine that I have found most valuable are that it is serverless, and the learning curve is easy to follow."

"What I find most beneficial about Google App Engine is that we do not need to manage it since it's a fully managed serverless platform, allowing us to spend more time on development rather than managing and maintaining configurations."

"The features of Google App Engine that I have found most valuable for my use cases include its easy deployment process, where there is minimal configuration required, allowing a few details in a configuration file before pushing it to Google App Engine, which auto-scales and requires less maintenance with no downtime over three years."

"The integration with Google's suite allows me to offer a comprehensive service to my enterprise clients."

"The auto-scaling feature helped us significantly in our fast-paced environment where the number of users was increasing rapidly."

"The seamless integration of Google App Engine with other Google Cloud services has enhanced my application capabilities by allowing us to trigger Cloud Jobs from App Engine and some cloud functions, as handling messages through Pub/Sub."

More Google App Engine pros

Cons

"After the initial excitement period with Node-RED is over, you crave the need of additional integrations to third-party services."

"In IBM Cloud, the product has been deprecated in favor of Kubernetes, which is a more complicated infrastructure to manage."

"One drawback is that the app needs to be written to be compatible with Google App Engine, making it not cloud agnostic, hindering straightforward migration to other platforms such as AWS."

"Some features of runtime don't work well in App Engine."

"The areas of Google App Engine that I would to improve or enhance include its allowance for complete end-to-end deployment and scalability; however, it is manageable only for a few languages."

"The areas of Google App Engine I would to see improved or enhanced in the future include expanding inbuilt support for more programming languages than the current limited options such as Python, Go, and Node, ideally adding support for languages such as Java."

"The support for the Indian region is not as good as compared to the support that is offered to the regions in Europe."

"Google Cloud support for Google App Engine is very poor, with unresponsive and unaware agents. It took them almost a month to inform me that SSH is not possible with private instances."

"Some clients don't use it because Google is very unstable with their products. Google has terminated many promising products in the past, and some clients have stated, 'This is from Google, we don't trust it because Google can change their mind any day.'"

"There needs to be more directions in terms of how to use the solution."

More Google App Engine cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"You are allocated a minimum amount of resources in the free tier. This seems fair and highly scalable, as you pay per usage as per cloud pricing schemes."

"The pricing models should be reworked to the needs of a wider range of companies. Some customers will not be able to afford it until quite a few years into production, even after good PoC results and a successful launch."

"IBM has a free tier and payment option depending on the products selected."

"If we don't know how to work with the tool, we might have some spikes in price."

"I would like to have more free application with it. Some of the applications, I am paying more for them. I think that they must be free."

"We pay the license yearly. It's about $6 a month, which is $72 a year per person, so it's about $500."

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it_user8586

Engineer at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

Aug 14, 2013

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

20%

Manufacturing Company

15%

Energy/Utilities Company

Government

Educational Organization

11%

University

10%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	15
Midsize Enterprise	7
Large Enterprise	13

Questions from the Community

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What do you like most about Google App Engine?

The product's setup and deployment phases are easy.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google App Engine?

I believe it is reasonably priced. I've never heard anyone express that the licenses are too expensive.

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What needs improvement with Google App Engine?

The error logging system in Google App Engine could be enhanced. While there are troubleshooting documents with Google-defined error logs, identifying the exact root cause can be challenging. Often...

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Comparisons

Amazon AWS vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 23% of the time

Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 15% of the time

Red Hat OpenShift vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 14% of the time

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 10% of the time

Salesforce Platform vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 4% of the time

More Cloud Foundry Competitors

Microsoft Azure vs Google App Engine

Compared 20% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Google App Engine

Compared 17% of the time

Heroku vs Google App Engine

Compared 11% of the time

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Google App Engine

Compared 9% of the time

Amazon Lightsail vs Google App Engine

Compared 7% of the time

More Google App Engine Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

PaaS Clouds

March 2026

Download Cloud Foundry product report

Buyer's Guide

Google App Engine

March 2026

Download Google App Engine product report

Overview

Cloud Foundry, home of the open source application development technologies CF Application Runtime and CF Container Runtime, is more than a platform. It’s a flexible way of embracing digital transformation that helps businesses evolve in the face of constant change. To put it another way, with Cloud Foundry, companies can rest assured they will have the right tool for the right job.

Cloud Foundry

Google App Engine is a Platform-as-a-Service (Paas) provider that equips web application developers with all the resources and tools that they need to develop, test, and run their applications on Google's infrastructure. Everything is built into the kit, so with one download of the SDK, you'll be well on your way to first-rate apps.

Google

Sample Customers

Grape Up, c-Com, KONE, TITAN, CSAA, Bosch, Allstate, Verizon, West Corp., Telstra

Khan Academy, Best Buy, Gigya, MetOffice, Getaround, Mimiboard, NewsLimited, WebFilings, and CloudLock.

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Foundry vs. Google App Engine

March 2026

Free Report: Cloud Foundry vs. Google App Engine

Find out what your peers are saying about Cloud Foundry vs. Google App Engine and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.

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