IBM Public Cloud vs Red Hat OpenShift comparison

IBM and Red Hat are both solutions in the PaaS Clouds category. IBM is ranked #15 with an average rating of 6.7, while Red Hat is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.3. IBM holds a 3.1% mindshare in PSP, compared to Red Hat’s 11.6% mindshare. Additionally, 83% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Red Hat users who would recommend it.

IBM Public Cloud

Read 18 IBM Public Cloud reviews

2,196 Views
2,020 Comparison Views

83% willing to recommend

Red Hat OpenShift

Read 62 Red Hat OpenShift reviews

10,785 Views
6,902 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

IBM Public Cloud

Red Hat OpenShift

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

IBM Public Cloud and Red Hat OpenShift are leading products in cloud solutions and container management. IBM Public Cloud stands out for its cost-effective pricing and strong support, while Red Hat OpenShift is preferred for its comprehensive features despite higher costs.

Features: IBM Public Cloud offers global scalability, robust data protection, and AI integration. Red Hat OpenShift features seamless Kubernetes orchestration, enhanced developer tools, and strong integration capabilities, making it a prime choice for container management.

Room for Improvement: IBM could enhance its feature set related to container orchestration and developer tools. Red Hat could work on reducing costs and expanding AI capabilities for better analytics integration.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM provides a fast scalability model and extensive customer service, making it ideal for enterprises. Red Hat OpenShift focuses on seamless integration with existing systems and offers both robust community support and professional services, excelling in container deployment.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Public Cloud offers competitive pricing with significant ROI through its AI capabilities. Red Hat OpenShift, while potentially more expensive, provides compelling ROI with efficient container management aimed at long-term operational efficiency.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Public Cloud vs. Red Hat OpenShift Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Public Cloud vs. Red Hat OpenShift

September 2025

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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

IBM Public Cloud

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

15th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IoT Platforms (5th)

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 (10th), Container Management (11th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (6th), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of IBM Public Cloud is 3.1%, down from 3.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 11.6%, down from 11.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

PaaS Clouds Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Red Hat OpenShift	11.6%
IBM Public Cloud	3.1%
Other	85.3%

PaaS Clouds

Featured Reviews

Premnath Jaganathan

Product Manager at Uop Ipl

Affordability and security improve our cloud experience while learning new systems

I'm not working with any AI features in IBM Public Cloud, but they are in the process of building it.I am very satisfied with the security that IBM Public Cloud provides. I would rate IBM Public Cloud eight out of ten, where one is worst and ten is the best.

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Pratul Shukla

Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Adopting a flexible and efficient approach with noticeable improvements in operational costs and continued challenges in job management

Currently, one of the biggest challenges we face is with services and jobs. For spawning batches, although it has crons, it is not easy to integrate with enterprise systems such as Autosys. The entire company uses Autosys, but we are not able to integrate it effectively. We need intermediate servers to run OC utility commands and initiate the cron job. We have to do a lot of modifications to ensure our batches work properly. With physical or virtual servers, even in AWS, we are able to write and manage multiple jobs. Managing batches in Red Hat OpenShift has been a significant challenge. Integrating third parties is a challenge with Red Hat OpenShift. For example, with Elasticsearch, onboarding itself was difficult, running file beats and dealing with routing issues. It is not straightforward, especially since we have some components in AWS as. AWS has many capabilities that come out of the box and are easier to work with compared to Red Hat OpenShift. Red Hat OpenShift's biggest disadvantage is they do not provide any private cloud setup where we can host on our site using their services. The main reason we went with Red Hat OpenShift was because it is a private cloud, and we have regulatory requirements that prevent us from using public cloud.

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

"I am very much satisfied with the technical support team at IBM Public Cloud."

"An advantage of IBM Public Cloud is the bare metal server. We can take the bare metal server. It's not shared with anyone. We can deploy our applications without sharing them with anyone. That is an advantage of IBM Public Cloud."

"I've found the stability to be excellent. The performance is good."

"The beauty of cloud service providers, especially public cloud service providers, is that they are scalable every time when you need them because their payment model is pay-as-you-go."

"It is easy to deploy what you need for the initial setup"

"It provides robust analytics and management tools to give customers complete visibility into their environment and infrastructure."

"The initial setup was very easy. It's quite straightforward. Deployment took about fifteen minutes. Everything is well organized."

"This product is very good because it is accessible in remote locations, and anyone can deploy from any place."

More IBM Public Cloud pros

"The most valuable aspect of this solution is the great customer service and the ability for our team to get assistance when we need it."

"The scalability of OpenShift combined with Kubernetes is good. At least from the software standpoint, it becomes quite easy to handle the scalability through configuration. You need to constantly monitor the underlying infrastructure and ensure that it has adequate provisioning. If you have enough infrastructure, then managing the scalability is quite easy which is done through configuration."

"We have found the cluster management function to be very good with this product."

"Its interface is good. The other part is the seamless integration with the stack that I have. Because my stack is mostly of Red Hat, which is running on top of VMware virtualization, I have had no issues with integrating both of these and trying to install them. We had a seamless integration with the other non-Red Hat products as well."

"There is a quick deployment of the application, and we can scale out efficiently."

"It's cloud agnostic and the containerization and security features are outstanding."

"In terms of implementation, OpenShift is very user-friendly, which is an advantage. We are using it along with GitLab for implementing CI/CD pipelines. That's a feature that other products also have, but in OpenShift, we find it good."

"I like OCP, and the management UI is better than the open-source ones."

More Red Hat OpenShift pros

Cons

"The solution’s pricing could be improved."

"The initial setup and the pricing are areas that need improvement."

"The connectivity and speed of IBM Public Cloud are much lower compared to the competition."

"Normally, for any cloud, we get a lot of information on the web, but that is missing in the case of IBM Public Cloud. We need some technical support documents. That is the only thing missing in IBM Public Cloud."

"Recently, we just faced some issues with the operating system due to the end of life of CentOS 6...So, then the client wanted to try it out under AWS instead of IBM. In short, it has some complexities."

"Maybe performance enhancers and reports could be better improved. If they do so, it would be better. Of all the drawbacks I saw, this would be the biggest enhancement."

"An area for improvement in IBM Public Cloud is getting up-to-date information on how to set up everything. It's hard to find new documentation."

"While they have about 99% of what we need, the only exception, perhaps, was the push notification feature that was discontinued. They delayed the replacement product."

More IBM Public Cloud cons

"The tool lacks some features to make it compliant with Kubernetes"

"OpenShift can improve monitoring. Sometimes there are issues. Additionally, the solution could benefit from protective tools if something was to happen in our network."

"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."

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

"OpenShift's storage management could be better."

"One area for improvement is the documentation. They need to make it a little bit more user-friendly. Also, if you compare certain features and the installation process with Rancher, Rancher is simpler."

"One glaring flaw is how OpenShift handles operators. Sometimes operators are forced to go into a particular namespace. When you do that, OpenShift creates an installation plan for everything in that namespace. These operators may be completely separate from each other and have nothing to do with each other, but now they are tied at the hip. You can't upgrade one without upgrading all of them. That's a huge mistake and highly problematic."

"We want to see better alerting, especially in critical situations requiring immediate intervention. Until we go to the dashboard, it can be challenging to quickly recognize that there's an issue for us to deal with. Therefore, a popup of the event or a tweaked GUI to catch our attention when it's alerting would be a welcome change. Everything else is good. We don't need any additional features. From the operations perspective, as an administrator, there is nothing concerning."

More Red Hat OpenShift cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a nine out of ten."

"The price of IBM Cloud is very cheap compared to competitors AWS and Azure."

"The licensing fees are straightforward and predictable."

"IBM Public Cloud is pretty cheap. They have an ongoing free tier that basically won't expire, so as long as your solution is small enough, you can have a test set that you can use for demos, which will cost you almost nothing."

"IBM has a lesser price compared to other cloud service providers like Azure and AWS."

"We are using the trial version of this solution, so we have not paid anything."

"Pricing is not as fair as Amazon or Azure."

"It pretty much has a standard price. There is no hidden price with IBM Public Cloud."

More IBM Public Cloud pricing and cost advice

"The pricing is standard; the solution isn't particularly expensive or affordable."

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

"OpenShift is really good when we need to start, but once we get to a certain scale, it becomes too expensive."

"Pricing of OpenShift depends on the number of nodes and who is hosting it."

"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."

"The pricing for OpenShift includes support and licensing, which costs approximately $400."

More Red Hat OpenShift pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

University

15%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Financial Services Firm

28%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	13
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	4

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	17
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	40

Questions from the Community

Which is preferable - IBM Public Cloud or Microsoft Azure?

IBM Public Cloud is IBM’s Platform-as-a-Service. It aims to provide organizations with a secure cloud environment to manage data and applications. One of the features we like is the cloud activity ...

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What needs improvement with IBM Cloud?

The front end is not pervasive, so it is very difficult get the status of your current services or account from a mobile device.

See all answers

What do you like most about IBM Public Cloud?

The most valuable feature of IBM Public Cloud is the AI integrations.

See all answers

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

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) vs IBM Public Cloud

Compared 32% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs IBM Public Cloud

Compared 29% of the time

Amazon AWS vs IBM Public Cloud

Compared 21% of the time

Dell ObjectScale vs IBM Public Cloud

Compared 6% of the time

Google Cloud vs IBM Public Cloud

Compared 3% of the time

More IBM Public Cloud Competitors

Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 13% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 11% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 8% of the time

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 8% of the time

Proxmox VE vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 7% of the time

More Red Hat OpenShift Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Public Cloud

September 2025

Download IBM Public Cloud product report

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat OpenShift

September 2025

Download Red Hat OpenShift product report

Also Known As

IBM Bluemix

No data available

Overview

IBM Cloud is a full-stack cloud platform that spans public, private and hybrid environments. Build with a robust suite of advanced data and AI tools, and draw on deep industry expertise to help you on your journey to the cloud.

IBM

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

Uvionics Tech, Komsomolskaya Pravda, Alpha Modus, Inventive, Web Business Consulting, FindBrok, SilverHook Powerboats, United Way of Allegheny County

UPS, Cathay Pacific, Hilton

Buyer's Guide

IBM Public Cloud vs. Red Hat OpenShift

September 2025

Free Report: IBM Public Cloud vs. Red Hat OpenShift

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