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Kubernetes vs Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 13, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
8.6
Organizations experience various ROI benefits from Kubernetes like stability, efficiency, cost savings, and enhanced infrastructure use via containerization.
Sentiment score
2.8
Users saw up to 70% savings in costs with OpenShift, benefiting security, usability, and time savings for government organizations.
What earlier required manual coordination and took thirty to forty minutes per release is now usually completed within ten to fifteen minutes.
DevOps Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
We receive revenue and returns from its deployment due to improved services and applications.
Scholar Trainee/Project Engineer at Wipro Limited
I have seen a return on investment, and the metrics in return for the investment are very fast.
Site Reliability Engineer at Tiendanube
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.7
Kubernetes users balance self-management and community resources with vendor and third-party support for efficient issue resolution.
Sentiment score
5.2
Red Hat OpenShift support receives mixed reviews, with users citing both exceptional service and delays, resulting in varied satisfaction.
In addition to official support, Kubernetes community ecosystem is very strong.
DevOps Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
The application is stable, and I seldom require support.
Scholar Trainee/Project Engineer at Wipro Limited
They should prioritize skilled engineers for urgent issues.
Solaris UNIX Systems Engineer at Standard Bank South Africa
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Kubernetes enables seamless scalability and efficient resource management across diverse environments, supporting businesses of all sizes and workloads.
Sentiment score
6.9
Red Hat OpenShift excels in scalability and flexibility, supporting diverse environments with efficient resource management and robust support.
Overall, Kubernetes gives a lot of flexibility to handle growth and spikes without re-architecting the system.
DevOps Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Kubernetes is highly scalable, earning a rating of eight out of ten.
Scholar Trainee/Project Engineer at Wipro Limited
By using horizontal pod autoscalers, Kubernetes automatically adjusts the number of pods based on CPU, memory usage, or other metrics.
AWS DevOps Engineer at Hexaware Technologies Limited
I rate the scalability of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform as a nine, as I haven't encountered any issues with scaling a cluster or applications.
Solaris UNIX Systems Engineer at Standard Bank South Africa
Scalability is rated nine out of ten.
It Team Lead at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.4
Kubernetes is stable and reliable, with proper maintenance and best practices essential for seamless operation in managed environments.
Sentiment score
7.3
Red Hat OpenShift is stable and robust, with some bugs and dependencies on support, rated 7-9 for stability.
As long as best practices are followed, such as proper resource limits, health checks, and monitoring, Kubernetes provides a stable foundation for production workloads.
DevOps Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Our organization performs robust testing before sending changes to production, ensuring the stability of Kubernetes in live environments.
AWS DevOps Engineer at Hexaware Technologies Limited
Kubernetes offers high stability, allowing for easy scaling of ports and containers.
Scholar Trainee/Project Engineer at Wipro Limited
There haven't been any issues so far; it remains stable with no downtime or crashes, and even the upgrades are handled seamlessly without issues.
Solaris UNIX Systems Engineer at Standard Bank South Africa
 

Room For Improvement

Kubernetes users seek an intuitive dashboard, improved integration, enhanced security, better documentation, and simplified deployment and management.
Red Hat OpenShift needs better security, pricing, integration, documentation, UI, automation, and features for cloud migration and management.
Kubernetes is a very mature and reliable platform, and the benefits clearly outweigh the limitations for most production use cases.
DevOps Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Improved documentation would help in gaining scalable knowledge and making it more understandable.
Scholar Trainee/Project Engineer at Wipro Limited
After the upgrade, some pods were not up as expected, leading to downtime.
AWS DevOps Engineer at Hexaware Technologies Limited
The solution itself doesn't require a high learning curve; it is actually quite good to manage.
Infrastructure Architect & CEO at Tirzok Private Limited
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is the best option, but as many companies and the world are mainly looking for security purposes, the clear text format needs to be adopted instead of any third party.
Open Shift Lead at Al Rajhi Bank
I would like to see advanced cluster management added in future releases, such as a single pane of glass to manage multiple clusters.
Solaris UNIX Systems Engineer at Standard Bank South Africa
 

Setup Cost

Kubernetes is cost-effective at scale but pricier for smaller setups, with costs affected by cloud resources and managed services.
Red Hat OpenShift's enterprise features justify its cost for large organizations, offering flexible licensing and discounts for long-term usage.
Kubernetes itself is open source and free, so there is no licensing cost for the software.
DevOps Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Since we use Kubernetes on-premises, the costs are related to our expertise and the personnel we hire.
Head of Data Science center of excellence at Ameriabank CJSC
the setup costs are high.
Site Reliability Engineer at Tiendanube
The current licensing cost for this solution is around $23,000 per year, per month.
Solaris UNIX Systems Engineer at Standard Bank South Africa
Regarding whether Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is expensive or if the price is reasonable for my customers, to me, the services it provides should incur some costs, but based on market feedback, it is quite expensive.
Infrastructure Architect & CEO at Tirzok Private Limited
 

Valuable Features

Kubernetes offers scalable, automated container orchestration with features like auto-repair, high availability, and seamless cloud integration.
Red Hat OpenShift optimizes resource management with auto-scaling, user-friendly interfaces, Kubernetes integration, and robust security for enterprises.
Kubernetes also offers rollback control and auto-scaling capabilities, which are crucial for maintaining an application's availability even if nodes or pods go down.
AWS DevOps Engineer at Hexaware Technologies Limited
The feature that stands out most for me is self-healing. If a pod crashes or a node fails, Kubernetes automatically recreates the pod and maintains the desired state.
DevOps Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
For us, having fast storage classes is very important.
Head of Data Science center of excellence at Ameriabank CJSC
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform's policy-based governance has helped my organization maintain application security at scale because ACS is also there, and Red Hat is always maintaining things with hardening methods, always coming with hardened images, and we are frequently upgrading the minor and major versions, so it will be mitigated in that way.
Open Shift Lead at Al Rajhi Bank
It is important for critical systems.
It Team Lead at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
The cluster scaling features, such as the auto-scaling of cluster nodes and application replicas using horizontal and vertical pod auto-scaling, significantly impact our operations.
Solaris UNIX Systems Engineer at Standard Bank South Africa
 

Categories and Ranking

Kubernetes
Ranking in Container Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
80
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Red Hat OpenShift Container...
Ranking in Container Management
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
52
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Kubernetes is 6.9%, up from 4.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is 17.7%, down from 23.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Container Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform17.7%
Kubernetes6.9%
Other75.4%
Container Management
 

Featured Reviews

RV
DevOps Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Automated deployments and self-healing have transformed how I run reliable chat services
For improvements, I would definitely suggest some enhancements to Kubernetes. While Kubernetes is very powerful, there are still a few areas where it could be improved. Our challenge is the learning curve and operational complexity. For new team members, concepts such as networking, RBAC, Ingress, and troubleshooting distributed systems can take time to understand. Better built-in onboarding tools or simplified abstractions would help. Another pain point is debugging and observability. While kubectl provides good basic visibility, deep debugging across multiple services, pods, and nodes often requires external tooling such as Prometheus, Grafana, or centralized logging. Stronger native observability features would be very helpful. Networking and Ingress configuration can also be complex, especially when dealing with certificates, routing rules, and cloud-specific integrations. A more standardized experience across environments could reduce operational overhead. From a cost perspective, managing and optimizing resource usage at scale still requires careful monitoring and tuning. Better built-in cost visibility would be very helpful. For the needed improvements, I think that covers most of my main concerns. The biggest areas for improvement are still around simplifying operations, better native observability, and easier cost visibility. If I had to add one more point, it would be around standardization and developer experience. Sometimes different clusters, cloud providers, or tooling setups behave slightly differently, which increases maintenance efforts. More consistent defaults and opinionated best practices could help teams adopt Kubernetes faster and with fewer surprises. Overall, despite these challenges, Kubernetes is a very mature and reliable platform, and the benefits clearly outweigh the limitations for most production use cases. An additional area that could be improved is upgrade and version management. While managed services help coordinate Kubernetes version upgrades, API deprecations and compatibility with add-ons can still be time-consuming and risky for production environments. Better tooling and clearer migration automation would make upgrades safer and easier. Another improvement could be around documentation, consistency, and discoverability. Kubernetes documentation is very comprehensive, but for beginners, it can sometimes be overwhelming to navigate and identify best practice paths.
NM
Solaris UNIX Systems Engineer at Standard Bank South Africa
Consistent performance impresses users while technical support needs improvement
I definitely recommend Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to other organizations due to its high availability, security, ease of use, and all the built-in features it offers. We do no maintenance for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform since ROSA is fully managed, and that's why it is a bit more expensive than EKS. The fully managed service includes 24/7 support, scheduling, and upgrades; we only need to inform Red Hat support about upgrades, and they manage the process end to end. Overall, I rate Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform as a nine; although I would say ten, I think it's important to allow room for improvement.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business26
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise47
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business14
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise40
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Kubernetes?
There are many good features. I feel that the scale-out features, like replica sets, are very good. The number of running containers can be autoscaled.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Kubernetes?
I have had a good experience with pricing, but the setup costs are high.
What needs improvement with Kubernetes?
Kubernetes can be improved, though I cannot specify exactly how at this time.
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 OpenShift Container Platform?
Regarding whether Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is expensive or if the price is reasonable for my customers, to me, the services it provides should incur some costs, but based on market feed...
What needs improvement with OpenShift Container Platform?
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform needs some improvements, for example, in upgrade time, as normally, an extended upgrade method should be allowed, but sometimes if anyone clicks twice, it tries...
 

Also Known As

K8
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

China unicom, NetEase Cloud, Nav, AppDirect
Edenor, BMW, Ford, Argentine Ministry of Health
Find out what your peers are saying about Kubernetes vs. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,707 professionals have used our research since 2012.