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Portainer vs Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform comparison

 

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
18th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Red Hat OpenShift Container...
Ranking in Container Management
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
52
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Portainer is 2.8%, down from 5.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is 14.9%, down from 21.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Container Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform14.9%
Portainer2.8%
Other82.3%
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.
ST
Open Shift Lead at Al Rajhi Bank
Seamless upgrades have protected business operations and support secure, flexible deployments
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform needs some improvements, for example, in upgrade time, as normally, an extended upgrade method should be allowed, but sometimes if anyone clicks twice, it tries to upgrade the second level and gets stuck, so that area should be enhanced. The strictness of the SSD and HDD also should be aligned, because in some environments, we cannot strictly make some rules related to HDD, since Red Hat is strictly making a rule after 4.16 to adopt SSD instead of HDD, which in some environments will not allow, so some workaround should be done on that. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is the best option, but as many companies and the world are mainly looking for security purposes, the clear text format needs to be adopted instead of any third party. Red Hat has to develop its own product, as HashiCorp and CyberArk Conjur exist, but Red Hat needs to protect the clear text format because the secret should not be seen by anyone. Currently, it is a clear text method allowing anyone in the namespace to see the username and password, which should be controlled in that way. The major improvements needed are related to upgrade time and strict rule-making.

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."
"The usability and the developer experience. The platform has a centralized consultant that is easy to use for our development, operations and security teams."
"It is very lightweight and can be deployed very fast, especially when it comes to containers."
"It's easy to develop applications and it gives you the option to manage your cloud on a private platform."
"Some of the primary features we leverage in the platform have to do with how we manage the cluster configurations, the properties, and the auto-scalability. These are the features that definitely provide value in terms of reducing overhead for the developers."
"More tools are available in OpenShift Container Platform to maintain and manage the clusters."
"Openshift is a very developer-friendly product."
"I have found the ability to scale up is most valuable."
"The solution's security throughout the stack and the software supply chain is very reliable. When it was on-prem, it was by default secured by our company firewalls and security tools, and now it's in the cloud, which has its security and systems in place. This provides stability to our infrastructure."
 

Cons

"Portainer needs to be more intuitive."
"The product's setup process could be easier."
"In my experience, the issues are not always simply technical. They do stem from technical challenges, but they struggle with the topic of adoption. When you encounter all of the customer pull, there are normally several tiers of your client pop that can adopt either the fundamental features or a little more advanced ones. The majority of the time, the challenge is determining how to drive adoption, how to sell the product to the customer, and how much time they can spend to really utilize those advanced features. If we get into much more detail, but this is from my perspective as the platform engineer and not the end customer, the ability of the end user to be able to debug potential issues with their application That is arguably the most important, let's say, work throughput in my area."
"I believe OpenShift Container Platform can improve in networking, architecture, and cloud areas by reducing deployment time, lowering costs, and streamlining engineer resources"
"OpenShift Container Platform needs to work on integrations."
"Quality of support may be improved."
"We encounter difficulties while accessing the environment and managing the cluster. This particular area needs improvement."
"OpenShift with Red Hat support is pretty costly."
"The solution does not work on a route-wise NFS."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The pricing is expensive for licensing."
"It depends on who you're talking to. For a large corporation, it is acceptable, other than the significant infrastructure requirements. For a small organization, it is in no way suitable, and we'd go for Amazon's container solution."
"The product pricing is competitive and structured around vCPU subscriptions, aligning with our application requirements."
"We paid for Cloud Pak for integration. It all depends on how many VMs or how many CPUs you are using. They do the licensing based on that."
"The price is slightly on the higher side. It is something that can be worked on because most of the businesses now have margins."
"Its price is a bit high because it's a premium product, but as long as the business is ready to pay for that, it's okay."
"OpenShift Container Platform is highly-priced."
"The pricing is a bit more expensive than expected."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
University
7%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business14
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise41
 

Questions from the Community

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Which is better - OpenShift Container Platform or VMware Tanzu Mission Control?
Red Hat Openshift is ideal for organizations using microservices and cloud environments. I like that the platform is auto-scalable, which saves overhead time for developers. I think Openshift can b...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for OpenShift Container Platform?
Regarding whether Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is expensive or if the price is reasonable for my customers, to me, the services it provides should incur some costs, but based on market feed...
What needs improvement with OpenShift Container Platform?
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform needs some improvements, for example, in upgrade time, as normally, an extended upgrade method should be allowed, but sometimes if anyone clicks twice, it tries...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Edenor, BMW, Ford, Argentine Ministry of Health
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Kubernetes and others in Container Management. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.