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Portainer vs Red Hat OpenShift comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Portainer
Ranking in Container Management
21st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Red Hat OpenShift
Ranking in Container Management
6th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
76
Ranking in other categories
PaaS Clouds (3rd), Server Virtualization Software (5th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (4th), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Portainer is 2.4%, down from 5.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 4.9%, up from 3.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Container Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Red Hat OpenShift4.9%
Portainer2.4%
Other92.7%
Container Management
 

Featured Reviews

EB
Developer with 1-10 employees
A GUI solution that helps to administer a docker using a browser
The first time using Portainer involves a learning curve. It takes longer as you're unfamiliar with the processes and might be lazy to consult the manual. Initially, you may rely on intuition within the GUI. However, after repeating the same tasks three or four times, the process becomes much quicker.
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

"Portainer comes with the ability to take the information of docker definition. Using it, I can visually observe how the container has been created. It allows me to create networks. I can also visually generate volumes and working stacks."
"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."
"Red Hat OpenShift has positively impacted our organization by improving efficiency and collaboration, and in comparison it seems to be better than IBM Cloud."
"OpenShift offers an easy-to-use graphical user interface for cluster management, making it more accessible for administrators."
"The solution is easy to scale."
"What I appreciate from Red Hat OpenShift is the capacity to provide an integrated and secure environment that is more or less better than creating the environment from scratch or based on standard Kubernetes."
"Since deploying Red Hat OpenShift, I have seen a return on investment as it saved a lot, with very minimalistic time spent on troubleshooting issues because everything is taken care of by the containers or the new pods we have deployed, saving a lot of time and reducing resource utilization so the remaining users can focus on other tasks."
"Scaling and uptime of the applications are positives."
"Red Hat OpenShift has proven to be an intelligent product for me, being built on Kubernetes, which is widely recognized and is where many cloud providers are deploying new workloads."
 

Cons

"Portainer needs to be more intuitive."
"There is no orchestration platform in OpenShift, but we do in Kubernetes."
"For some reason there have been some DNS issues."
"OpenShift can improve monitoring. Sometimes there are issues."
"This solution could be improved by offering best practices on standardization and additional guidance on how to use this solution."
"Autoscaling is a very unique feature, but it could be useful to have more options based on traffic statistics, for example, via Prometheus. So, there should be more ready solutions to autoscale based on specific applications."
"Installation and setup are a bit tedious, especially in a proxy environment."
"The operators need a lot of improvement, with better integrations."
"The monitoring part could be better to monitor the performance."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"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."
"We use the license-free version of Red Hat Openshift but we pay for the support."
"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."
"We had a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) license for all our servers' operating systems. By having multiple Red Hat products together, you can negotiate costs and leverage on having a sort of enterprise license agreement to reduce the overall outlay or TCO."
"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."
"This solution is fairly expensive but comes at an average cost compared to other solutions in the market."
"The pricing for OpenShift includes support and licensing, which costs approximately $400."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Media Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise59
 

Questions from the Community

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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 ...
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...
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...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
UPS, Cathay Pacific, Hilton
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Web Services (AWS), Red Hat, Kubernetes and others in Container Management. Updated: October 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.