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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
15th
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 February 2026, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Portainer is 4.3%, up from 2.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is 17.7%, down from 23.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Container Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform17.7%
Portainer4.3%
Other78.0%
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.
NM
Solaris UNIX Systems Engineer at Standard Bank South Africa
Consistent performance impresses users while technical support needs improvement
I definitely recommend Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to other organizations due to its high availability, security, ease of use, and all the built-in features it offers. We do no maintenance for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform since ROSA is fully managed, and that's why it is a bit more expensive than EKS. The fully managed service includes 24/7 support, scheduling, and upgrades; we only need to inform Red Hat support about upgrades, and they manage the process end to end. Overall, I rate Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform as a nine; although I would say ten, I think it's important to allow room for improvement.

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."
"It has been a good solution to deploy all containerized applications."
"The best feature is the management for the port life cycle, which automatically recycles, pulls, and scales up and down based on needs and requests."
"It automates rolling out new features, packaging the code, conducting security scans, and deploying to OpenShift."
"Autoscaling is an excellent feature that makes it very simple to scale our applications as required."
"I find the security features and use of operators in OpenShift Container Platform highly valuable."
"Technical support is good; they are fast and reliable."
"The stack in the software supply chain is one of the main reasons that we use OpenShift. When I came to this company, we bought hardware from IBM named Bluemix, and they used ICP, which stands for IBM Cloud Private."
"OpenShift provides tools that tell me everything I have on a container, and I can make it on-premise or on a cloud infrastructure."
 

Cons

"Portainer needs to be more intuitive."
"I believe OpenShift Container Platform can improve in networking, architecture, and cloud areas by reducing deployment time, lowering costs, and streamlining engineer resources"
"My impression is that this solution is pretty expensive so I think the pricing plan could improve."
"Another thing that bugs me is that they removed the software in NFS storage. I don't understand why because this is a common type of storage. I am having problems with that, so I wish they would put it back."
"The interface has numerous UI bugs that need addressing."
"Metrics monitoring feature needs improvement."
"The solution needs to introduce open ID connect integration for role-based access control."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The pricing is expensive for licensing."
"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."
"The pricing is a bit more expensive than expected."
"The pricing and licensing are handled on an upper management level, and I'm not involved in that, but I understand the solution to be somewhat pricey."
"OpenShift with Red Hat support is pretty costly. We have done a comparison between AWS EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Services) which provides fully managed services from AWS. It's built on open-source-based Kubernetes clusters and it is much cheaper compared to Red Hat, but it is a little expensive compared to ECS provided by AWS."
"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."
"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."
"We currently have an annual license renewal."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
University
7%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business14
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise40
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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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: January 2026.
881,665 professionals have used our research since 2012.