Amazon Elastic Container Service vs Red Hat OpenShift comparison

Amazon Elastic Container Service vs. Red Hat OpenShift

December 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score

3.3

Clients reduced costs significantly with AWS ECS, benefiting from efficient resource management and a pay-as-you-go model.

Sentiment score

7.4

Red Hat OpenShift boosts ROI with enhanced productivity, scalability, and security, offering efficient integration and modernization despite initial costs.

This saving is achieved since, with EC2, the entire virtual machine must be running regardless of workload, whereas Fargate eliminates this cost.

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon Elastic Container Service report

Chief Technology Officer at Looplex SA

With OpenShift combined with IBM Cloud App integration, I can spin an integration server in a second as compared to traditional methods, which could take days or weeks.

Platform Engineer & Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

Moving to OpenShift resulted in increased system stability and reduced downtime, which contributed to operational efficiency.

Jefferson Usianene

Infrastructure Manager at Appzone Group

It is always advisable to get the bare minimum that you need, and then add more when necessary.

For more quotes and insights, download the Red Hat OpenShift report

Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Customer Service

Sentiment score

7.7

Amazon Elastic Container Service support is responsive and helpful, but costly with occasional expertise gaps and limited documentation.

Sentiment score

6.8

Red Hat OpenShift support is praised for expertise and community support but criticized for delays and complex documentation.

AWS partnership provides access to their architects for guidance when needed.

ShitanshuChandra

Head of Products at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

We do not rely heavily on technical support from AWS as we have our own teams managing the infrastructure.

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon Elastic Container Service report

General Manager at Vodafone Idea Ltd.

Red Hat's technical support is responsive and effective.

Jefferson Usianene

Infrastructure Manager at Appzone Group

Customer support is really good because so far in our case, we have always received a prompt response, and they have been really helpful to us.

RiteshWalia

ML Engineer - Specialist at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

I have been pretty happy in the past with getting support from Red Hat.

For more quotes and insights, download the Red Hat OpenShift report

Manager IT Infrastructure at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score

7.2

Amazon ECS boasts strong scalability, praised for workload management, resource flexibility, yet noted for potential reactivity issues.

Sentiment score

7.4

Red Hat OpenShift efficiently scales nodes and applications, supports large operations, but some desire improved on-premise capabilities.

Amazon Elastic Container Service has a scalability rating of ten out of ten.

Chief Technology Officer at Looplex SA

Scalability becomes an inherent capability in the cloud context, and this service does well in that regard.

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon Elastic Container Service report

General Manager at Vodafone Idea Ltd.

Amazon Elastic Container Service has significant limitations regarding scalability.

Alexander Gomez

Lead Developer at Virtual Restaurant Solutions

The on-demand provisioning of pods and auto-scaling, whether horizontal or vertical, is the best part.

Manager IT Infrastructure at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

OpenShift's horizontal pod scaling is more effective and efficient than that used in Kubernetes, making it a superior choice for scalability.

Platform Engineer & Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

Red Hat OpenShift scales excellently, with a rating of ten out of ten.

For more quotes and insights, download the Red Hat OpenShift report

System Analyst at Freelancer

Stability Issues

Sentiment score

6.1

Amazon ECS is highly stable with minimal issues, though configuration adjustments may require technical expertise for optimal performance.

Sentiment score

7.7

Red Hat OpenShift is praised for high stability, efficiently handling production, with improvements minimizing external-impact issues.

The stability of Amazon Elastic Container Service is excellent.

Chief Technology Officer at Looplex SA

Amazon Elastic Container Service is mostly very stable.

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon Elastic Container Service report

General Manager at Vodafone Idea Ltd.

It provides better performance yet requires more resources compared to vanilla Kubernetes.

Platform Engineer & Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

I've had my cluster running for over four years.

Jefferson Usianene

Infrastructure Manager at Appzone Group

It performs well under load, providing the desired output.

For more quotes and insights, download the Red Hat OpenShift report

System Analyst at Freelancer

Room For Improvement

Amazon Elastic Container Service struggles with reliability, user-friendliness, integration, and cost, requiring improved security and management simplification.

Red Hat OpenShift requires improvements in documentation, security, integration, support, GUI, scalability, resource demands, and user experience.

Currently, when scaling with Amazon Elastic Container Service, I have to choose between monitoring CPU or memory usage to scale up or scale out; there is no option to monitor both simultaneously.

Chief Technology Officer at Looplex SA

When it comes to new-age services around AI, particularly in the areas of LLMs and genomics, these services are not fully available in our region's availability domain.

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon Elastic Container Service report

General Manager at Vodafone Idea Ltd.

A lower price for Amazon Elastic Container Service would be better, but it is comparable to other offerings in the market, so it is on par in that sense.

ShitanshuChandra

Head of Products at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Learning OpenShift requires complex infrastructure, needing vCenter integration, more advanced answers, active directory, and more expensive hardware.

Platform Engineer & Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

Red Hat OpenShift's biggest disadvantage is they do not provide any private cloud setup where we can host on our site using their services.

Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

We should aim to include VMware-like capabilities to be competitive, especially considering cost factors.

For more quotes and insights, download the Red Hat OpenShift report

System Analyst at Freelancer

Setup Cost

Amazon ECS features pay-as-you-go pricing, praised for scalability but sometimes costly compared to competitors, with no license fees.

Red Hat OpenShift offers comprehensive features but is criticized for high costs, especially when upgrading to the licensed version.

Amazon Elastic Container Service is quite cheap compared to Google, particularly for hosting databases.

Chief Technology Officer at Looplex SA

Our customers often do a trade-off between requiring services at particular SLA levels and being willing to pay a premium price to us as partners.

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon Elastic Container Service report

General Manager at Vodafone Idea Ltd.

Initially, licensing was per CPU, with a memory cap, but the price has doubled, making it difficult to justify for clients with smaller compute needs.

AbdulJaleel

Senior Technical Lead at MORO

The pricing for Red Hat OpenShift is considered quite high.

reviewer2382555

Manager for Middleware at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Red Hat can improve on the pricing part by making it more flexible and possibly on the lower side.

For more quotes and insights, download the Red Hat OpenShift report

Manager IT Infrastructure at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

Valuable Features

Amazon ECS offers auto-scaling, cost-effectiveness, easy AWS integration, excellent security, and efficient resource management with Fargate support.

Red Hat OpenShift provides fast CI/CD, scalability, security, automation, and integration for seamless, secure, and flexible application deployment.

It inherently offers scalability by default, without our IT teams needing to take the extra load to make the services available for our end users.

General Manager at Vodafone Idea Ltd.

Main benefits that Amazon Elastic Container Service provides include saving maintenance costs in terms of saving time, and since it auto scales, we save on infrastructure costs by running at lower instances when it is not heavily used.

ShitanshuChandra

Head of Products at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Amazon Elastic Container Service makes horizontal scaling easy and is especially effective when working under the ECS service.

For more quotes and insights, download the Amazon Elastic Container Service report

Chief Technology Officer at Looplex SA

Because it was centrally managed in our company, many metrics that we had to write code for were available out of the box, including utilization, CPU utilization, memory, and similar metrics.

Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

The concept of containers and scaling on demand is a feature I appreciate the most about Red Hat OpenShift.

Manager IT Infrastructure at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

A valuable feature of Red Hat OpenShift is its ability to handle increased loads by automatically adding nodes.

For more quotes and insights, download the Red Hat OpenShift report

System Analyst at Freelancer

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Elastic Container Se...

Ranking in Container Management

9th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

5.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Containers as a Service (CaaS) (1st)

Red Hat OpenShift

Ranking in Container Management

10th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

PaaS Clouds (3rd), Server Virtualization Software (11th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (5th), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Amazon Elastic Container Service is 1.4%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 3.5%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Container Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Amazon Elastic Container Service	1.4%
Red Hat OpenShift	3.5%
Other	95.1%

Container Management

Featured Reviews

Alexander Gomez

Lead Developer at Virtual Restaurant Solutions

Starts strong with functionalities but reveals cost limitations

The main challenge with Amazon Elastic Container Service is the significant learning curve. Everything mentioned took months to understand. It is not for the faint of heart. Though they have graphical interfaces and numerous dashboards that help create all the services graphically, learning to use Bash can be challenging. Because these are headless servers by nature, there is no graphical interface. It is not similar to Windows where you can hit the start button and look for your program, or Mac where you can look for programs on your desktop. Instead, users must understand this new paradigm of a Linux headless server, which requires using command-based prompts for builds and development.

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Adopting a flexible and efficient approach with noticeable improvements in operational costs and continued challenges in job management

Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Currently, one of the biggest challenges we face is with services and jobs. For spawning batches, although it has crons, it is not easy to integrate with enterprise systems such as Autosys. The entire company uses Autosys, but we are not able to integrate it effectively. We need intermediate servers to run OC utility commands and initiate the cron job. We have to do a lot of modifications to ensure our batches work properly. With physical or virtual servers, even in AWS, we are able to write and manage multiple jobs. Managing batches in Red Hat OpenShift has been a significant challenge. Integrating third parties is a challenge with Red Hat OpenShift. For example, with Elasticsearch, onboarding itself was difficult, running file beats and dealing with routing issues. It is not straightforward, especially since we have some components in AWS as. AWS has many capabilities that come out of the box and are easier to work with compared to Red Hat OpenShift. Red Hat OpenShift's biggest disadvantage is they do not provide any private cloud setup where we can host on our site using their services. The main reason we went with Red Hat OpenShift was because it is a private cloud, and we have regulatory requirements that prevent us from using public cloud.

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881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

16%

Government

Performing Arts

Financial Services Firm

25%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	28
Midsize Enterprise	7
Large Enterprise	18

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	17
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	43

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon Elastic Container Service?

Implementing the product has helped me monitor the parameters. I utilize tools like CloudWatch and AWS systems to track these parameters. If any issues arise, I alert our developer team to address ...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Elastic Container Service?

The product's pricing is good.

What needs improvement with Amazon Elastic Container Service?

The solution must improve backup and compatibility around OS like Windows and Mac.

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 do you like most about OpenShift?

OpenShift facilitates DevOps practices and improves CI/CD workflows in terms of stability compared to Jenkins.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform vs Amazon Elastic Container Service

Comparisons

Compared 34% of the time

HashiCorp Nomad vs Amazon Elastic Container Service

Compared 15% of the time

Microsoft Azure Container Service vs Amazon Elastic Container Service

Compared 14% of the time

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Amazon Elastic Container Service

Compared 9% of the time

Google Container Engine vs Amazon Elastic Container Service

Compared 6% of the time

More Amazon Elastic Container Service Competitors

Microsoft Azure vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 9% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 8% of the time

Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 7% of the time

Proxmox VE vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 6% of the time

VMware ESXi vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 5% of the time

More Red Hat OpenShift Competitors

Product Reports

Amazon Elastic Container Service

January 2026

Download Amazon Elastic Container Service product report

Download Red Hat OpenShift product report

Red Hat OpenShift

January 2026

Also Known As

Amazon ECS, Amazon EC2 Container Service

No data available

Overview

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a highly scalable, high-performance container orchestration service that supports Docker containers and allows you to easily run and scale containerized applications on AWS. Amazon ECS eliminates the need for you to install and operate your own container orchestration software, manage and scale a cluster of virtual machines, or schedule containers on those virtual machines.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Red Hat OpenShift offers a robust, scalable platform with strong security and automation, suitable for container orchestration, application deployment, and microservices architecture.

Designed to modernize applications by transitioning from legacy systems to cloud-native environments, Red Hat OpenShift provides powerful CI/CD integration and Kubernetes compatibility. Its security features, multi-cloud support, and source-to-image functionality enhance deployment flexibility. While the GUI offers user-friendly navigation, users benefit from its cloud-agnostic nature and efficient lifecycle management. However, improvements are needed in documentation, configuration complexity, and integration with third-party platforms. Pricing and high resource demands can also be challenging for wider adoption.

What are the key features of Red Hat OpenShift?

Security: Comprehensive security features ensure safe deployments and operations.
Scalability: Auto-scaling and monitoring capabilities cater to high-demand environments.
CI/CD Integration: Seamless integration for efficient continuous deployment processes.
Cloud Compatibility: Supports multi-cloud and on-premise solutions with ease.
GUI: Simplifies platform management and enhances usability.

What benefits and ROI should users look for?

Improved Efficiency: Streamlined operations reduce time and resource investments.
Enhanced Flexibility: Adapt quickly to changing demands and environments.
Quick Deployment: Fast application deployment supports agile project timelines.
Robust Support: Access to dependable customer support services.

Red Hat OpenShift is strategically implemented for diverse industries focusing on container orchestration and application modernization. Organizations leverage it for migrating applications to cloud-native environments and managing CI/CD pipelines. Its functionality facilitates efficient resource management and microservices architecture adoption, supporting enterprise-level DevOps practices. Users employ it across cloud and on-premises platforms to drive performance improvements.

Red Hat

Sample Customers

Ubisoft, GoPro, TIBCO, Remind

UPS, Cathay Pacific, Hilton