Cloud Foundry vs Red Hat OpenShift comparison

Cloud Foundry and Red Hat are both solutions in the PaaS Clouds category. Cloud Foundry is ranked #22, while Red Hat is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.6. Cloud Foundry holds a 1.5% mindshare in PSP, compared to Red Hat’s 12.1% mindshare. Additionally, 33% of Cloud Foundry users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Red Hat users who would recommend it.

Cloud Foundry

Read 2 Cloud Foundry reviews

707 Views
570 Comparison Views

33% willing to recommend

Red Hat OpenShift

Read 61 Red Hat OpenShift reviews

10,368 Views
8,526 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Cloud Foundry

Red Hat OpenShift

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

Red Hat OpenShift and Cloud Foundry are competitors in cloud platform solutions. Red Hat OpenShift has an edge in data comparisons due to its support and integration capabilities, while Cloud Foundry has advantages in scalability and flexibility.

Features: Red Hat OpenShift offers enterprise-grade security, integrated development tools, and extensive Kubernetes support. Cloud Foundry provides multi-cloud support, a developer-centric approach, and efficient application deployment.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cloud Foundry supports an easy deployment model with strong community support, simplifying setup and troubleshooting. OpenShift is more complex but includes dedicated customer support for enterprises.

Pricing and ROI: Red Hat OpenShift shows a higher setup cost due to its enterprise features, delivering significant ROI with its services and security. Cloud Foundry generally offers a lower initial setup cost, with effective ROI from resource efficiency and scalability.

To learn more, read our detailed Cloud Foundry vs. Red Hat OpenShift Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Foundry vs. Red Hat OpenShift

March 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 845,406 peers since 2012

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

22nd

Average Rating

5.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Red Hat OpenShift

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

3rd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Server Virtualization Software (9th), Container Management (12th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (7th), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Cloud Foundry is 1.5%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 12.1%, up from 11.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

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.

Read full review

Mikhael Ibrahim

Platform Engineer & Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

Seamlessly monitor microservices with streamlined DevOps capabilities

Most benefit from it, however, I work with Kubernetes, and installing Vanilla Kubernetes is easy. That said, it introduces many tools that need to be set up individually. OpenShift comes ready out of the box, with all tools installed and configured. Red Hat certifies and confirms that all the components are compatible with each other. OpenShift's superior dashboard is a notable strength, especially when compared to Kubernetes. The integrated DevOps capabilities, such as pipelines and the container registry, are extremely beneficial. Additionally, its capability to monitor microservices and containers with integrated tools like Prometheus is a major advantage. The horizontal pod scaling exceeds the scalability features I found in Kubernetes.

Read full review

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."

"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."

"I have seen a return on investment, and it depends upon the types and the nature of some of the most critical applications that have been hosted on the OpenShift infrastructure."

"The company had a product called device financing, where the company worked as a partner with Google. It allowed customers to take mobile phones on loan or via credit. When we migrated those services to OpenShift in February last year, we were able to sell over 100,000 devices in a single day, which was very good."

"Provides support throughout the whole platform."

"This solution helps us to account for peak seasons involving higher demand than usual. It also gives us confidence in the security of our overall systems."

"Two stand-out features are the security model and value-add features that don't exist in Upstream Kubernetes."

"Key features are WildFly, because it standardizes infrastructure and the git repository and docker. Git is essential for source code and Docker for infrastructure."

"Its security is most valuable. It's by default secure, which is very important."

"Self-provisioning support saves a lot of time and unnecessary work from the system administrator who can use this time to run and monitor the infrastructure. For the developer, this means less time waiting for the provisioning and excellent flexibility for development, testing, and production. Also, in such systems it is easy for developers to monitor applications even after deployment."

More Red Hat OpenShift pros

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."

"Documentation and technical support could be improved. The product is good, but when we raise a case with support—say we are having an image issue—the support is not really up to the mark. It is difficult to get support... When we raise a case, their support people will hesitate to get on a call or a screen-sharing session. That is a major drawback when it comes to OpenShift."

"I think that OpenShift has too many commands for running services from the CLI, and the configuration files are a little complicated."

"An enhancement to consider for the future might involve incorporating a comprehensive solution for CI/CD tailored specifically for OpenShift."

"They could work on the pricing model, making it more flexible and possibly lower."

"We need some kind of a multi-cluster management solution from the Red Hat site."

"They could work on the pricing model, making it more flexible and possibly lower."

"While Red Hat OpenShift is stable, monitoring and reporting capabilities need improvement. Integration with tools like Grafana and Prometheus is necessary for capturing logs, and manually managing these aspects is time-consuming."

"The GUI could have more capabilities, particularly around virtualization."

More Red Hat OpenShift cons

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."

"This solution is fairly expensive but comes at an average cost compared to other solutions in the market."

"My company makes payments towards the licensing costs attached to OpenShift."

"The cost is quite high."

"The price depends on the type and the nature of the organizations, along with the types of projects that are of considerable range."

"We use the license-free version of Red Hat Openshift but we pay for the support."

"It's expensive. It may be cheaper to invest in building Vanilla Kubernetes, especially if security is not the number one motivation or requirement. Of course, that's difficult, and in some business areas, such as banking, that's not something you can put as a second priority. In other situations, a Vanilla Kubernetes with a sufficiently strong team can be cheaper and almost as effective."

"The product’s pricing is expensive."

"I don't deal with the cost part, but I know that the cost is very high when compared to other products. They charge for CPU and memory, but we don't worry about it."

More Red Hat OpenShift pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which PaaS Clouds solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

25%

Computer Software Company

18%

Manufacturing Company

15%

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

32%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

How does OpenShift compare with Amazon AWS?

Open Shift makes managing infrastructure easy because of self-healing and automatic scaling. There is also a wonderful dashboard mechanism to alert us in case the application is over-committing or ...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about OpenShift?

OpenShift facilitates DevOps practices and improves CI/CD workflows in terms of stability compared to Jenkins.

See all answers

Comparisons

Amazon AWS vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 34% of the time

Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 22% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 12% of the time

SAP Cloud Platform vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 11% of the time

Heroku vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 5% of the time

More Cloud Foundry Competitors

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 19% of the time

Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 17% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 14% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 10% of the time

Google Cloud vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 9% of the time

More Red Hat OpenShift Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

PaaS Clouds

March 2025

Download Cloud Foundry product report

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat OpenShift

March 2025

Download Red Hat OpenShift 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

Red Hat OpenShift offers a robust, scalable platform with strong security and automation, suitable for container orchestration, application deployment, and microservices architecture.

Designed to modernize applications by transitioning from legacy systems to cloud-native environments, Red Hat OpenShift provides powerful CI/CD integration and Kubernetes compatibility. Its security features, multi-cloud support, and source-to-image functionality enhance deployment flexibility. While the GUI offers user-friendly navigation, users benefit from its cloud-agnostic nature and efficient lifecycle management. However, improvements are needed in documentation, configuration complexity, and integration with third-party platforms. Pricing and high resource demands can also be challenging for wider adoption.

What are the key features of Red Hat OpenShift?

Security: Comprehensive security features ensure safe deployments and operations.
Scalability: Auto-scaling and monitoring capabilities cater to high-demand environments.
CI/CD Integration: Seamless integration for efficient continuous deployment processes.
Cloud Compatibility: Supports multi-cloud and on-premise solutions with ease.
GUI: Simplifies platform management and enhances usability.

What benefits and ROI should users look for?

Improved Efficiency: Streamlined operations reduce time and resource investments.
Enhanced Flexibility: Adapt quickly to changing demands and environments.
Quick Deployment: Fast application deployment supports agile project timelines.
Robust Support: Access to dependable customer support services.

Red Hat OpenShift is strategically implemented for diverse industries focusing on container orchestration and application modernization. Organizations leverage it for migrating applications to cloud-native environments and managing CI/CD pipelines. Its functionality facilitates efficient resource management and microservices architecture adoption, supporting enterprise-level DevOps practices. Users employ it across cloud and on-premises platforms to drive performance improvements.

Red Hat

Sample Customers

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

UPS, Cathay Pacific, Hilton

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Foundry vs. Red Hat OpenShift

March 2025

Free Report: Cloud Foundry vs. Red Hat OpenShift

Find out what your peers are saying about Cloud Foundry vs. Red Hat OpenShift and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Cloud Foundry vs. Red Hat OpenShift report.

See our list of best PaaS Clouds vendors.

We monitor all PaaS Clouds reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.