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Cloud Foundry vs Red Hat OpenShift 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
21st
Average Rating
5.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Red Hat OpenShift
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
75
Ranking in other categories
Server Virtualization Software (4th), Container Management (5th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (4th), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Cloud Foundry is 1.9%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 7.0%, down from 12.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
PaaS Clouds Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Red Hat OpenShift7.0%
Cloud Foundry1.9%
Other91.1%
PaaS Clouds
 

Featured Reviews

Carlos Bittrich - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
AA
Operation Director at Zaintech
Platform has transformed our cloud into a secure, unified home for diverse modern applications
One of the best features of Red Hat OpenShift is that it has the catalog, the application catalog, and the operator hub, which allows us to deploy things easily and straightforward without going into a lot of hassles. This is one of the main things, in addition to having integration with ACM and ACS, where we can have the ability to manage multiple clusters and to secure them, deploy them, manage them, run GitOps and day-two operations, as well as upgrades and other functionality which is made easy using these tools. Red Hat OpenShift also provides virtualization capabilities, and I am currently working with Zain to make a project where we will convert F5 appliances to virtual machines and to manage them through Red Hat virtualization, OVE. Red Hat OpenShift is a unique platform because it provides the features for both worlds, containerization, and VMs at the same time, requiring you to learn one skillset in order to manage all of this at the same time. In the beginning, our cloud depended only on virtual machines, so I introduced this to our management to start to work with microservices and with containerization. This was adapted in our cloud, providing us the capability to sell more of these features and to reduce the hardware requirement by about thirty percent, following the trends of using containerization for all modern applications. In addition, it reduced the time to develop and to deploy a new application; all we need is using Jenkins for CI/CD. Once we commit any code, it gets triggered, and it will implement the new container in a very flexible and easy way, within seconds. This decreased the time to market and increased agility, allowing us to capture new opportunities very fast.

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."
"Cloud Foundry builds the runtime environment directly without requiring dependency management from the user."
"By moving to IBM Cloud Foundry, we reduced our project time by a factor of two and decreased costs by a factor of four because it was a PoC."
"IBM is the only vendor to offer integration with blockchain for smart contract development."
"OpenShift has 100% compatibility with Kubernetes."
"In my experience, the best feature Red Hat OpenShift offers is that the environment is easy to use, meaning that it is easy for the configuration and the management in the different environments and provides easy visibility that allows me to watch the reports for the leadership in the company."
"There is a quick deployment of the application, and we can scale out efficiently with the help of OpenShift."
"It seems like we're getting a pretty high return on our investment because of our ability to navigate, integrate and migrate across platforms."
"We have found RedHat OpenShift to provide the best solution and ease of use."
"Our small team developed and rolled out everything to production in a short time, mostly thanks to OpenShift."
"This solution is providing a platform with OOTB features that are difficult to build from scratch."
"The stability has been good."
 

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."
"My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing shows that Red Hat OpenShift comes out as an expensive solution compared to having AKS, GKE, or EKS."
"They could provide a template for application deployment and building services and routes so it can all be promoted as a bundle if needed."
"One of the features that I've observed in Tanzu Mission Control is that I can manage multiple Kubernetes environments. For instance, one of my lines of business is using OpenShift OKD; another one wants to use Google Anthos, and somebody else wants to use VMware Tanzu. If I have to manage all these, Tanzu Mission Control is giving me the opportunity to completely manage all of my Kubernetes clusters, whereas, with OpenShift, I can only manage a particular area. I can't manage other Kubernetes clusters. I would like to have the option to manage all Kubernetes clusters with OpenShift."
"Autoscaling is a very unique feature, but it could be useful to have more options based on traffic statistics, for example, via Prometheus. So, there should be more ready solutions to autoscale based on specific applications."
"The operators need a lot of improvement, with better integrations."
"OpenShift could improve by providing the ability to integrate with public cloud platforms. This way we can easily use the services that these platforms offer. For instance, Amazon AWS. However, all the three major hyper-scalers solutions offer excellent DevOps and CI/CD tooling. If there was an easy way to integrate with them it would be beneficial. We need a way to easily integrate with the monitoring and dashboard services that they provide."
"Room for improvement is around the offerings that come as a bundle with the container platform. The packaging of the platform should be done such that customers do not have to purchase additional licenses."
"It would be great if it supported Bitbucket repositories too."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"IBM has a free tier and payment option depending on the products selected."
"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."
"The solution is cost-effective."
"The product's support is expensive. I would rate the tool's pricing an eight out of ten."
"The licensing cost for OpenShift is expensive when compared to other products. RedHat also charges you additional costs apart from the standard licensing fees."
"The model of pricing and buying licences is quite rigid. We are in the process of negotiating on demand pricing which will help us take advantage of the cloud as a whole."
"We had a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) license for all our servers' operating systems. By having multiple Red Hat products together, you can negotiate costs and leverage on having a sort of enterprise license agreement to reduce the overall outlay or TCO."
"Depending on the extent of the product use, licenses are available for a range of time periods, and are renewable at the end of the period."
"The pricing for OpenShift includes support and licensing, which costs approximately $400."
"The cost is quite high."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Energy/Utilities Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise56
 

Questions from the Community

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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 ...
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...
What needs improvement with OpenShift?
I hope that the interface and dashboard can become more user-friendly to assist in creating clusters and managing network interfaces easily, as opposed to relying heavily on command lines, which co...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Grape Up, c-Com, KONE, TITAN, CSAA, Bosch, Allstate, Verizon, West Corp., Telstra
UPS, Cathay Pacific, Hilton
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloud Foundry vs. Red Hat OpenShift and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.