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Google Kubernetes Engine vs VMware Tanzu Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 29, 2026

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

Google Kubernetes Engine
Ranking in Container Management
11th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Tanzu Platform
Ranking in Container Management
10th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Build Automation (16th), PaaS Clouds (13th), Cloud Management (31st), Development Platforms (5th), Service Mesh (8th), Agile and DevOps Services (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Google Kubernetes Engine is 3.1%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Tanzu Platform is 7.8%, down from 13.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Container Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Tanzu Platform7.8%
Google Kubernetes Engine3.1%
Other89.1%
Container Management
 

Featured Reviews

Parthasarathy T - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Associate Dev Ops at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
Managed solutions enable efficient handling of web applications and migration projects
Google Kubernetes Engine can be improved by enabling the in-place upgrade of the machine type of an existing node pool since I currently need to destroy and recreate it. There is no feature present where I can upgrade directly, and having more than 1,000 to 2,000 workloads in one node pool makes changing the node pool name difficult for all those workloads. I choose eight out of ten mainly because of the node pool upgrade challenge I mentioned, but also because of the existence of Anthos service mesh, which is the ingress controller available only for the enterprise Kubernetes Engine. It would be beneficial if it could be offered in the normal Kubernetes Engine with any limitations.
ErmiasGirma - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at Safaricom Ethiopia plc
Has supported container-based deployments and improved infrastructure visibility through monitoring tools
Aria Operations, formerly known as VMware vRealize Operations, has been renamed to vROps. We are currently using this for monitoring purposes. For orchestration, we are using VCD to automate Telco Cloud. VCD is an automation tool, and we are also using VMware Tanzu Platform for the Kubernetes environment, alongside TKG, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. These are also other solutions for the Tanzu Kubernetes environment. For Telco Cloud, we are using it to automate our company's operations, which is for a telecom company. We are familiar with these products, especially vCenter, ESXi, VCD, vCF, and vROps. It is very easy to integrate applications when we deploy vCenter and ESXi since we can enable vSphere with Tanzu feature. We can build namespaces and provide application developers the platform to deploy their applications on pods within containerization. We can easily manage, pull results, and create containers efficiently, making it a simple way to handle applications. We provide namespace labels for application developers, and we can manage their resources along with other aspects easily. Regarding security, we use many tools such as CDX and LDAP, AD for integrating our Kubernetes cluster with the developer teams. We can manage roles and permissions simply. It is very straightforward to integrate with EDX and other third-party tools, Active Directory, to the Kubernetes cluster, allowing easy access and management.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product has valuable security features. It can connect with multiple DevOps tools."
"It's easy to manage and deploy. It's the best."
"The initial setup is very easy. We can create our cluster using the command line, or using our console."
"The solution is more user-friendly than AWS or Azure. I can also easily scale out the service in the future when the number of customers grows. GKE is the leader of Kubernetes service and it can be easily updated. I love the tool's user interfaces."
"Regarding deployment in the cloud platform, it is simple because there are pre-configured configurations."
"Google Kubernetes Engine's most valuable features are microservices and its acquisition rate, which is very useful for scaling perspective."
"Google Kubernetes Engine is helping tremendously to make the high availability of the service."
"The solution is available across AWS, GCP and Azure and is seamless."
"Tazu is a developer-friendly and highly mature product."
"The Tanzu platform is highly available, scalable, and flexible."
"Tanzu is easy to upgrade and scale, whether we're talking about horizontal or vertical scaling. It is as smooth as possible without any downtime. The platform maintenance, upgrading, and operations part is very smooth."
"The Day 2 operations support is the most vital feature"
"We feel very good about these features."
"It definitely gives the end customer a good overview and perspective of running applications in terms of overall workload footprint. TMC provides a very detailed description of your cloud-native application in the form of graphical visualization."
"VMware Tanzu Mission Control has many valuable features, such as ease of use and customization."
"Defining security metrics has proven beneficial for customers in maintaining a safe environment."
 

Cons

"The notifications are not informative."
"The product's stability is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The management UI could be improved. When looking at the web interface, it feels kind of slow due to the many features involved."
"While the GKE cluster is secure, application-level security is an essential aspect that needs to be addressed. The security provided by GKE includes the security of communication between nodes within the cluster and the basic features of Kubernetes security. However, these features may not be sufficient for the security needs of an enterprise. Additional security measures must be added to ensure adequate protection. It has become a common practice to deploy security tools within a Kubernetes cluster. It would be ideal if these tools were included as part of the package, as this is a standard requirement in the industry. Thus, application-level security should be integrated into GKE for improved security measures."
"There are some security issues, but it might just be because we are not up to speed yet as much as we should be and so we haven't found it in the documentation yet. That's why I don't want to confuse this. Still, it could be a little bit easier to understand and implement."
"I think that security is an important point, and there should be additional features for the evaluation of data in containers that will create a more secure environment for usage in multi-parent models."
"It needs to support load balancing."
"The tool's configuration features need improvement."
"The product should support integration with Google Cloud Platform (GCP)"
"The infrastructure is quite challenging."
"The installation of VMware Tanzu Service Mesh is very complex."
"The implementation is not easy, it is very complex and can take a day or two to complete."
"The disaster recovery feature could be improved to provide better tracking of issues. I would also like to see the introduction of a dashboard view, for even further integration of all the areas that Mission Control looks at."
"Tanzu could provide more granular control over whatever networking is being done on the containers."
"The solution is currently focused on VMware infrastructure and I would like to see more options made available."
"It is not easy to build a solution with containers. It has a graphical user interface, but you need to have a lot of knowledge of Linux and how to work in the command mode. Its support can also be improved. Currently, its biggest disadvantage is that it is a new product, and the clients prefer to go for a solution that has been in the market for a long time. There are not that many people who know this product."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Initially, Google Kubernetes Engine was a little bit cheaper, but now its prices have been increased compared to the pricing model and the features that are made available by its competitors."
"I rate the product's price a six on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price. The product is competitively priced."
"The tool's licensing costs are yearly."
"The product is a little bit expensive."
"Currently, it costs around $1000 per month which sorted our deployment. So once we get more clients, having a huge suffix, costs can go up."
"This is an open source solution, so there is no pricing or licensing."
"The pricing for GKE is dependent on the type of machine or virtual machine (VM) that is selected for the nodes in the cluster. There is a degree of flexibility in choosing the specifications of the machine, such as the number of CPUs, GPUs, and so on. Google provides a variety of options, allowing the user to create the desired cluster composition. However, the cost can be quite steep when it comes to regional clusters, which are necessary for high availability and failover. This redundancy is crucial for businesses and is required to handle an increase in requests in case of any issues in one region, such as jumping to a different region in case of a failure in the Toronto region. While it may be tempting to choose the cheapest type of machines, this may result in a limited capacity and user numbers, requiring over-provisioning to handle additional requests, such as those for a web application."
"The price for Google Kubernetes Engine could be lower - I'd rate its pricing at three out of five."
"VMware Tanzu Mission Control is cheaper than Red Hat OpenShift."
"There are different licenses available. You have to upgrade your license if you want to scale the solution more."
"The product is not expensive, but it is not cheap."
"The least expensive licensing cost for VMware is around $350 per core."
"The solution is bundled in with Cloud Foundry so the pricing is not independent."
"The price of VMware Tanzu Mission Control is greater than that of Red Hat's competitor solution"
"One of our Spanish customers told us that VMware Tanzu Service Mesh is a very expensive product for their data center."
"The license for VMware Tanzu Application Service is expensive. The license should be cheaper."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business21
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise16
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise11
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google Kubernetes Engine?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Google Kubernetes Engine is straightforward, as I previously indicated. The need for humans is reduced with GCP since there is no need for ...
What needs improvement with Google Kubernetes Engine?
The price could be a bit cheaper. I don't see anything with Google Kubernetes Engine that needs to be improved. I think they are already implementing Kubernetes itself, so they are the owners. Howe...
What is your primary use case for Google Kubernetes Engine?
I use Google Kubernetes Engine for many purposes, most notably for websites, but the websites are microservices. However, some mega projects have many machines that needed to be containerized, so w...
Which is better - OpenShift Container Platform or VMware Tanzu Mission Control?
Red Hat Openshift is ideal for organizations using microservices and cloud environments. I like that the platform is auto-scalable, which saves overhead time for developers. I think Openshift can b...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware Tanzu Mission Control?
The price of VMware Tanzu Mission Control is greater than that of Red Hat's competitor solution. I would rate the pricing of VMware Tanzu Mission Control as four out of ten.
What needs improvement with VMware Tanzu Mission Control?
The product should support integration with Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The tool's flexibility in onboarding different clusters needs to improve, it's presently limited to a few clusters on the li...
 

Also Known As

GKE, Google Kubernetes
Tanzu Application Catalog, Application Platform, Application Service, Hub, Mission Control, Service Mesh, Build Service, Concourse for VMware Tanzu
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Philips Lighting, Alpha Vertex, GroupBy, BQ
Verizon, Cerner, Zipcar, Avarteq
Find out what your peers are saying about Google Kubernetes Engine vs. VMware Tanzu Platform and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.