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Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Salesforce Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

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
14th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Salesforce Platform
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
9th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
97
Ranking in other categories
Mobile Development Platforms (4th), Rapid Application Development Software (6th), Low-Code Development Platforms (6th), No-Code Development Platforms (1st), Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (14th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is 6.2%, down from 10.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Salesforce Platform is 3.3%, up from 2.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
PaaS Clouds Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Salesforce Platform3.3%
Pivotal Cloud Foundry6.2%
Other90.5%
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.
Sharmila-K - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Transformations and Infrastructure Delivery Manager at a university with 10,001+ employees
Integration processes improve but scripting requires effort
The updates, pricing part, and upgrades to the products are some of the most valuable features with the Salesforce Platform.With the Salesforce Platform, I have minimal experience of approximately one and a half years. I get minimal exposure, once every three or two months, especially during holidays. The Salesforce Platform is connected to the cloud, which is beneficial. When it is integrated with different tools such as Microsoft BI Analytics, it helps us analyze much better. Currently, the integration itself is tricky as we have to use extensive scripting. It should be more of a plug-in and use solution. That is the only issue I see, but otherwise, I appreciate it.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It supports CI/CD, and is integrated with the CI/CD very well."
"The most valuable feature of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is auto-healing and the plenty of other features that are provided."
"The most valuable feature of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is the UI, it is easy to use."
"The most valuable feature of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is auto-healing and the plenty of other features that are provided."
"PCF is open, so the applications run really smoothly and with little downtime."
"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."
"PCF is open, so the applications run really smoothly and with little downtime."
"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."
"It is a good product, and it has served us well."
"We like that the technology is very agile and flexible in the sense that there's a large partner ecosystem within Salesforce Platform. This enables us to choose from many different partners with different advantages, and all of it can be done in a plug-and-play kind of way."
"Stability of the platform is important, as are security and flexibility."
"The solution provides a preferred method of backing up data."
"What I like about the Salesforce Platform, in particular, its enterprise edition is that apart from its many features, you can have a wider view of the customers, a 360-degree view."
"The most valuable aspect is that all data is stored in one place, making it easy to find what is needed and to report on it."
"I like the reports and the dashboards. Since I'm a managing partner, I use the reports and dashboards to understand my team's contact management, opportunity management, and account management activities."
"We use this solution to track customer activities, opportunities and contact information."
 

Cons

"Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve on the technology, it is a bit complex."
"The Pivotal Cloud Foundry's initial setup has a learning curve for my team, but it was easy to use."
"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."
"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."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry doesn't have certain advanced features."
"In the next release, I would like to see easy integration with external tools."
"The user interface should be simpler to navigate because it t can take time for users to learn it."
"It is not straightforward to setup."
"There needs to be more documentation."
"Salesforce also did not integrate well with some of the other systems that we had."
"They need an easy way of getting details and then adding to it and then being able to do it in a more simplified way"
"Sometimes it would be a little bit slow, however, it's manageable."
"Salesforce is a pretty cumbersome product. It's a product that you need to spend quite a bit of time customizing to your unique business model."
"It may be slow, but that is relative."
"The solution offers upgrades at a slower pace. The solution needs to keep up with competitors."
"Simplification is something it needs. Every time you get the engineers involved, they make things a little too complicated. It might be more beneficial to simplify everything for quick and easy reference."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Licensing is on a monthly basis and right now we pay $24/month. There are no other costs over and above that."
"You're paying for the number of virtual machines you want to install in the installation."
"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve. However, in this category of solutions, they are all expensive."
"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is based on the customer's requirements. However, the price is comparable to other similar solutions."
"The pricing is on the higher side and there are cheaper options available."
"It is very expensive. Its licensing is on a monthly basis."
"Costly, but it is the top product in SaaS/PaaS. Pricing is more for large to enterprise level companies."
"The solution is fairly priced."
"The solution is a bit expensive."
"I haven't had to buy Salesforce, however, I have heard it's $1500 a user."
"It is expensive. Licensing is on an annual basis."
"I don't know anything about its cost, but I'm sure it has got a nice little price tag that goes along with it."
"For the number of people that are using Salesforce Platform in my organization, I feel the price is reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
36%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Insurance Company
5%
Computer Software Company
4%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business39
Midsize Enterprise26
Large Enterprise39
 

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 would you choose between Microsoft PowerApps and Salesforce Platform?
I think it depends on your use case. If your organization uses Microsoft Enterprise products, PowerApps will work better in your environment. Similarly, if you have a Salesforce integration in pla...
How does Salesforce Platform compare with Azure?
Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform is not easy or intuitive to deploy. The difficulty will be impacted by the type of application that you are trying to use the platform to build. Organizations tha...
Do you build applications using low-code or pro-code builders on Salesforce Platform?
At my organization, we have only used Salesforce Platform's low-code builder. The reason for this is not because we do not like the pro-code option, but because we do not see the need of using it, ...
 

Also Known As

PCF, Pivotal Application Service (PAS), Pivotal Container Service (PKS), Pivotal Function Service (PFS)
Salesforce1, Force.com, Salesforce App Cloud
 

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
ADP
Find out what your peers are saying about Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs. Salesforce Platform and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,264 professionals have used our research since 2012.