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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
20th
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
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
76
Ranking in other categories
PaaS Clouds (3rd), Server Virtualization Software (3rd), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (2nd), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Portainer is 2.3%, down from 5.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 5.0%, up from 2.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Container Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Red Hat OpenShift5.0%
Portainer2.3%
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."
"This solution is providing a platform with OOTB features that are difficult to build from scratch."
"Key features are WildFly, because it standardizes infrastructure and the git repository and docker. Git is essential for source code and Docker for infrastructure."
"The security is good."
"We are currently dealing with both local support and Red Hat support, and they have been amazing."
"OpenShift is based on Kubernetes and we try to use all the Kubernetes objects of OpenShift. We don't use features that are specific to OpenShift, except internal certificates for the services. The one feature that is missing from Kubernetes and that is really useful in OpenShift is the lifecycle of the cluster and the ease of installation. We use VMware and VMware integration internally with the OpenShift installer, which is very good. With OpenShift it's easy to spin up or scale out a cluster."
"Our go-to-market and our deployment for any application, the time is reduced perhaps by eight times, because the things that we used to do in days now take a couple of minutes to be done."
"The main reason that we chose OpenShift rather than Azure or AWS was the scalability."
"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."
 

Cons

"Portainer needs to be more intuitive."
"Possibly, the most complicated part is the configuration for an application."
"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."
"One area for improvement with Red Hat OpenShift is in management and cluster implementation."
"I had to frequently upgrade my cluster due to OpenShift's rolling updates every six months, which I found to be excessive."
"The initial setup of OpenShift is difficult; it takes a while to set it up."
"The customer support for Red Hat OpenShift is bad because the support does not respond."
"Needs work on volume handling (although this is already better with GlusterFS). Security (SSSD) would also be an 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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Depending on the extent of the product use, licenses are available for a range of time periods, and are renewable at the end of the period."
"The product has reasonable pricing."
"The pricing is standard; the solution isn't particularly expensive or affordable."
"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."
"My company makes payments towards the licensing costs attached to OpenShift."
"The cost is quite high."
"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."
"The product’s pricing is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Computer Software Company
8%
Media Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise58
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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: August 2026.
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