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Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Red Hat OpenShift comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 5, 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

Pivotal Cloud Foundry
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
16th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
15
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
76
Ranking in other categories
Server Virtualization Software (3rd), Container Management (4th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (2nd), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is 5.0%, down from 9.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 6.3%, down from 11.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
PaaS Clouds Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Red Hat OpenShift6.3%
Pivotal Cloud Foundry5.0%
Other88.7%
PaaS Clouds
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2263239 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
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

"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."
"The most valuable feature of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is the UI, it is easy to use."
"The solution is stable and resilient. In our company, we do not even see any challenges with the solution."
"The solution is stable, and we have not experienced any infrastructure issues, so it is very good and captures a few metrics, onboarding to App Dynamics."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is very easy to use compared to other cloud technologies, and it has very good performance."
"The most valuable feature of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is auto-healing and the plenty of other features that are provided."
"Stability is not a concern with this product."
"We find its stability and scalability valuable."
"OpenShift offers robust tools for monitoring application traffic, allowing us to analyze client requests and other business-related metrics."
"Two stand-out features are the security model and value-add features that don't exist in Upstream Kubernetes."
"The concept of containers and scaling on demand is a feature I appreciate the most about Red Hat OpenShift."
"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."
"There is a quick deployment of the application, and we can scale out efficiently with the help of OpenShift."
"The solution is easy to scale."
"Red Hat OpenShift has positively impacted our organization by adding significantly to our revenues because what we were doing through other vendors shows that with vanilla Kubernetes, there are many features and extra advantages in Red Hat OpenShift."
"Valuable features include time to market, avoiding vendor lock-in, and the ease of working in a multi-cloud environment."
 

Cons

"It is not straightforward to setup."
"I would prefer to use Amazon AWS or Google Cloud Platform rather than Pivotal Cloud Foundry."
"It should offer more security features."
"The user interface should be simpler to navigate because it t can take time for users to learn it."
"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."
"The initial setup was not easy, it was a bit complex."
"The Pivotal Cloud Foundry's initial setup has a learning curve for my team, but it was easy to use."
"OpenShift's storage management could be better."
"The whole area around the hybrid cloud could be improved."
"This solution could be improved by offering best practices on standardization and additional guidance on how to use this solution."
"For some reason there have been some DNS issues."
"The tool lacks some features to make it compliant with Kubernetes"
"Most of the configurations are command based. If we can have a GUI-based configuration with better flexibility then it will be great."
"Installation and setup are a bit tedious, especially in a proxy environment."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"You're paying for the number of virtual machines you want to install in the installation."
"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."
"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."
"Licensing is on a monthly basis and right now we pay $24/month. There are no other costs over and above that."
"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."
"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 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."
"My company makes payments towards the licensing costs attached to OpenShift."
"Pricing of OpenShift depends on the number of nodes and who is hosting it."
"The pricing is standard; the solution isn't particularly expensive or affordable."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
29%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Comms Service Provider
5%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise58
 

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...
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 ...
What needs improvement with OpenShift?
One area for improvement in Red Hat OpenShift is during upgrades, as there is currently no option to revert to a previous version if vulnerabilities or issues arise. I believe that providing such a...
What is your primary use case for OpenShift?
My main use case for Red Hat OpenShift is training for several products, mainly for container orchestration, and I am currently using OCP. Previously, I trained on different products such as virtua...
 

Also Known As

PCF, Pivotal Application Service (PAS), Pivotal Container Service (PKS), Pivotal Function Service (PFS)
No data available
 

Overview

 

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
Find out what your peers are saying about Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs. Red Hat OpenShift and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.