Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Red Hat OpenShift comparison

Broadcom and Red Hat are both solutions in the PaaS Clouds category. Broadcom is ranked #13, while Red Hat is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.3. Broadcom holds a 7.2% mindshare in PSP, compared to Red Hat’s 9.5% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Broadcom users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Red Hat users who would recommend it.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Read 15 Pivotal Cloud Foundry reviews

4,913 Views
4,864 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Red Hat OpenShift

Read 64 Red Hat OpenShift reviews

10,704 Views
6,101 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Red Hat OpenShift

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 4, 2026

Red Hat OpenShift and Pivotal Cloud Foundry compete in the cloud platform category. OpenShift appears to have the upper hand due to its broader and more developed feature set, which caters to diverse deployments.

Features: Red Hat OpenShift offers strong CI/CD capabilities, robust automation, and a scalable environment, supporting deployments with Docker containers and Kubernetes compatibility. Pivotal Cloud Foundry is valued for its ease of use, particularly with Java support, and robust integration capabilities which simplify application deployment.

Room for Improvement: Red Hat OpenShift users have identified challenges in documentation, complexity of its security model, and scalability issues, particularly with auto-scaling and monitoring. Integration with various services also needs improvement. Pivotal Cloud Foundry users suggest better documentation, enhanced security features, support for canary deployments, and cost reduction to improve its offering.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: OpenShift's deployment is versatile, supporting on-premises, hybrid, and private cloud environments, but its customer support requires better responsiveness and communication. Cloud Foundry also supports varied deployment environments and benefits from a strong community, offering accessible technical assistance, although information access could be more streamlined.

Pricing and ROI: OpenShift’s robust feature set comes with a high price, but many opt for its open-source version with paid support to control costs. It offers significant ROI in resource management and scalability, appealing to larger businesses. Pivotal Cloud Foundry's pricing is similar to other solutions, considered expensive yet valuable for its platform navigability and integration, especially for organizations bound to a single cloud infrastructure. While OpenShift's ecosystem is seen as costly but supportive, Cloud Foundry is praised for integration and simplicity at a comparable premium.

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

Buyer's Guide

Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs. Red Hat OpenShift

December 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

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

13th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

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

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Server Virtualization Software (11th), Container Management (10th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (5th), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is 7.2%, down from 9.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 9.5%, down from 11.7% 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	9.5%
Pivotal Cloud Foundry	7.2%
Other	83.3%

PaaS Clouds

Featured Reviews

reviewer2263239

Head of Engineering at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

PCF allows for fine-grained configuration, especially regarding scaling but routing limitations

Something that can be done better is canary deployment. So, right now, we're using blue-green deployment. The support for canary deployment would be nice. A few things, such as what OpenShift does better are cluster management. Like, you can manage the entire thing together. Currently, it's possible to manage all the clusters, especially when it comes to cluster management using straightforward configuration. As of now, we have to handle each application instance individually, which means servicing them one by one. It would be better if we could perform these actions as a group or in a more streamlined manner. One more downside is actually the cost of this environment. So, major downside of Pivotal, it's the cost. So, the runtime running costs are very high. Extremely high.

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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

"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is very easy to use compared to other cloud technologies. It has a very good performance."

"PCF is open, so the applications run really smoothly and with little downtime."

"The most valuable features are the monitoring and the deployment is easier."

"It provides a set of developer-friendly tools that simplify application deployment."

"The most valuable feature of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is auto-healing and the plenty of other features that are provided."

"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is very robust, especially for building Java."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is its ability to scale. The services that connect to the database are also very good."

"The most valuable features of Pivotal Cloud Foundry are its ease of use and the command line interface has the ability to push instances to the cloud easily."

More Pivotal Cloud Foundry pros

"Excellent GUI support, so one does not need to use the command line client for almost any tasks. Great support for building images directly from Git repositories with hooks."

"The solution provides a lot of flexibility to the application team for running their applications in the container platform, without needing to monitor the entire infrastructure all the time. It automatically scales and automatically self-heals. There is also a mechanism to alert the team in case it is over-committing or overutilizing the application."

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

"The most valuable feature is the auto scalers for all microservices. The feature allows us to place request limits and it is much cheaper than AWS."

"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."

"Great integration with Jenkins for constant integration and development. Supports all the major languages and environments - PHP, Java, Node.js, Ruby, etc."

"The most valuable feature of OpenShift is the security context constraint (SCC). The solution’s security throughout the stack is good. And security context constraints provide port-level security. It's a granular level of control, where you can give privileges to certain users to work on certain applications."

"OpenShift's superior dashboard is a notable strength, especially when compared to Kubernetes."

More Red Hat OpenShift pros

Cons

"Regarding the setup phase, every step is a hurdle. With Pivotal Cloud Foundry, I won't get any proper resources for that. Even if I Google it, there is no proper solution for Pivotal Cloud Foundry."

"There is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the future of Pivotal Cloud Foundry."

"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is not scalable, infinitely, because when you install it on a set of virtual machines it is very hard to scale. It's easy to scale on an application level, but not it is not similar to if you were using Amazon. Amazon you can scale thousands of applications."

"Something that can be done better is canary deployment. So, right now, we're using blue-green deployment. The support for canary deployment would be nice."

"Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve on the technology it is a bit complex."

"Pivotal Cloud Foundry doesn't have certain advanced features."

"I'd like to see a larger service offering."

"Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve the documentation. They are good, but they could improve more. Additionally, it would be beneficial if there were more use case examples."

More Pivotal Cloud Foundry cons

"The GUI could have more capabilities, particularly around virtualization. Some features are missing, such as storage migrations, when compared with VMware."

"The metrics in OpenShift can use improvement."

"The whole area around the hybrid cloud could be improved. I would like to deploy a Red Hat OpenShift cluster on-premise and on the cloud, then have Red Hat do the entire hybrid cloud management."

"Areas where Red Hat OpenShift can be improved include the licensing being a bit complex and maybe expensive, as that is something in the hands of the organization's higher management, especially when those licensing agreements are done, and I think Red Hat OpenShift is quite resource-heavy because the control plane and default monitoring stack consume significant resources, meaning for small clusters, a large percentage of compute goes just to running Red Hat OpenShift itself, not our apps."

"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 latest 4.0 version of OpenShift disabled a few of the features we previously made use of, although this wasn't a huge deal."

"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."

"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."

More Red Hat OpenShift cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licensing is on a monthly basis and right now we pay $24/month. There are no other costs over and above that."

"The pricing is on the higher side and there are cheaper options available."

"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is based on the customer's requirements. However, the price is comparable to other similar solutions."

"You're paying for the number of virtual machines you want to install in the installation."

"We do pay for the licensing cost because we have opted for a private cloud setup. So, it is a cloud setup, and we have to make payments based on the cloud size. I do not consider it very costly when comparing it to the market."

"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve. However, in this category of solutions, they are all expensive."

"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."

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

"The product’s pricing is expensive."

"The product's support is expensive. I would rate the tool's pricing an eight out of ten."

"The cost is quite high."

"The solution is cost-effective."

"We are currently using the open version, OKD. We plan to get the enterprise version in the future."

"It's important to start small because the solution is scalable. We can build our cluster and look at the bundle option, not the external subscriptions. Talking to the people at Red Hat can save us money."

More Red Hat OpenShift pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

37%

Manufacturing Company

15%

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

25%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Large Enterprise	11

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	17
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	43

Questions from the Community

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

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

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

What needs improvement with OpenShift?

Areas where Red Hat OpenShift can be improved include the licensing being a bit complex and maybe expensive, as that is something in the hands of the organization's higher management, especially wh...

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Azure vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 35% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 14% of the time

Google Cloud vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 5% of the time

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 5% of the time

Cloud Foundry vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 4% of the time

More Pivotal Cloud Foundry Competitors

Microsoft Azure vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 9% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 8% of the time

Proxmox VE vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 6% of the time

VMware ESXi vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 5% of the time

VMware vSphere vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 5% of the time

More Red Hat OpenShift Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

January 2026

Download Pivotal Cloud Foundry product report

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat OpenShift

January 2026

Download Red Hat OpenShift product report

Also Known As

PCF, Pivotal Application Service (PAS), Pivotal Container Service (PKS), Pivotal Function Service (PFS)

No data available

Overview

Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) is the leading enterprise PaaS, powered by Cloud Foundry. PCF provides a cloud-native application platform that allows you to continuously deliver any app to every major private and public cloud with a single platform. PCF is proven to accelerate feature delivery with higher developer productivity and a 200:1 developer to operator ratio. PCF's built-in security and self-healing capabilities reduce risk in your app portfolio while maintaining high-availability at scale to keep customer facing systems online even in the most challenging circumstances. pivotal.io

Broadcom

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

Humana, Citibank, Mercedes Benz, Liberty Mutual, The Home Depot, GE, West Corp, Merrill Corporation, CoreLogic, Orange, Dish Network, Comcast, Bloomberg, Internal Revenue Service, Ford Motor Company, Garmin, Volkswagen, Solera, Allstate, US Air Force, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, ScotiaBank

UPS, Cathay Pacific, Hilton

Buyer's Guide

Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs. Red Hat OpenShift

December 2025

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