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Cloud Foundry 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

Cloud Foundry
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
20th
Average Rating
5.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Pivotal Cloud Foundry
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
13th
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 October 2025, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Cloud Foundry is 2.1%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is 8.9%, down from 9.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
PaaS Clouds Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Pivotal Cloud Foundry8.9%
Cloud Foundry2.1%
Other89.0%
PaaS Clouds
 

Featured Reviews

Carlos Bittrich - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Vasundhara  Joshi - PeerSpot reviewer
Seamlessly scalable since applications written in Java and .NET do not create issues for its users
Regarding the setup phase, every step is a hurdle. With Pivotal Cloud Foundry, I won't get any proper resources for that. Even if I Google it, there is no proper solution for Pivotal Cloud Foundry. However, if we go for Azure or some other cloud, we can get a lot of information. I believe there is not much information for Pivotal Cloud Foundry since it may be some license issue. If you go for Azure, the migration process is straightforward. Since we have been given 10 GB of space in the public cloud, we are utilizing it in our company. So, we are trying to deploy our application on the cloud, and for us, it is like a trial process for now. From our total application rate, I can say that only two to three percent is on Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Currently, half of the code is in the shell script, which is causing issues. Also, most people in my organization have worked on Java-related code. For most of the applications, they are using the same, that is, shell script and AUTOsist, and so we haven't migrated yet. So that is the reason that we are planning to opt for a hybrid model so that we don't have to migrate completely to Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"IBM is the only vendor to offer integration with blockchain for smart contract development."
"Cloud Foundry builds the runtime environment directly without requiring dependency management from the user."
"The solution is stable and resilient. In our company, we do not even see any challenges with the solution."
"We find its stability and scalability valuable."
"PCF is open, so the applications run really smoothly and with little downtime."
"It supports CI/CD, and is integrated with the CI/CD very well."
"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 feature of the solution is its ability to scale. The services that connect to the database are also very good."
"It provides a set of developer-friendly tools that simplify application deployment."
"Stability is not a concern with this product."
 

Cons

"In IBM Cloud, the product has been deprecated in favor of Kubernetes, which is a more complicated infrastructure to manage."
"After the initial excitement period with Node-RED is over, you crave the need of additional integrations to third-party services."
"Regarding the setup phase, every step is a hurdle. With Pivotal Cloud Foundry, I won't get any proper resources for that. Even if I Google it, there is no proper solution for Pivotal Cloud Foundry."
"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."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry doesn't have certain advanced features."
"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."
"In the next release, I would like to see easy integration with external tools."
"The user interface should be simpler to navigate because it t can take time for users to learn it."
"There are no synthetic application monitoring and real-time monitoring features."
"In the next release, they should offer additional applications for the databases, and improve the deployment experience."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"IBM has a free tier and payment option depending on the products selected."
"Licensing is on a monthly basis and right now we pay $24/month. There are no other costs over and above that."
"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."
"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."
"You're paying for the number of virtual machines you want to install in the installation."
"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is based on the customer's requirements. However, the price is comparable to other similar solutions."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
29%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Computer Software Company
13%
Energy/Utilities Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
37%
Manufacturing Company
17%
Insurance Company
6%
Computer Software Company
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Large Enterprise11
 

Questions from the Community

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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

Grape Up, c-Com, KONE, TITAN, CSAA, Bosch, Allstate, Verizon, West Corp., Telstra
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 Cloud Foundry vs. Pivotal Cloud Foundry and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
868,787 professionals have used our research since 2012.