Amazon Lightsail vs Red Hat OpenShift comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Red Hat are both solutions in the PaaS Clouds category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #7 with an average rating of 9.0, while Red Hat is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.3. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 2.1% mindshare in PSP, compared to Red Hat’s 9.5% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Red Hat users who would recommend it.

Amazon Lightsail

Read 13 Amazon Lightsail reviews

1,089 Views
1,089 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Red Hat OpenShift

Read 64 Red Hat OpenShift reviews

10,704 Views
6,101 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Amazon Lightsail

Red Hat OpenShift

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

Red Hat OpenShift and Amazon Lightsail compete in the cloud computing and application deployment category. Red Hat OpenShift appears to have the upper hand in terms of feature richness and scalability, making it more suitable for large-scale deployments compared to the cost-effective and user-friendly Amazon Lightsail.

Features: Red Hat OpenShift offers features like fast CI/CD, strong security, and robust pod solutions, beneficial for large-scale deployments. Its integration with Docker and Kubernetes simplifies deployments. Advanced security features and ImageStream are also advantages. Amazon Lightsail is focused on simplicity and cost-effectiveness, with pre-configured instances and ease of use appealing to less tech-savvy users. It supports applications like WordPress with minimal setup.

Room for Improvement: Red Hat OpenShift could improve its documentation and accessibility of the security model, and enhance autoscaling capabilities. More intuitive templates and better support for multi-cloud integrations are needed. Amazon Lightsail could enhance disk management, auto-scaling, and network features. Improvements in documentation and support will improve user onboarding and integration.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Red Hat OpenShift provides flexibility with on-premises, private, public, and hybrid cloud deployments, though it requires skilled personnel. Its technical support is varied, with some users finding it lacking. Amazon Lightsail is simpler and easier to deploy in public cloud settings, though it might not offer comprehensive technical support for complex projects.

Pricing and ROI: Red Hat OpenShift has a higher price point justified by extensive features. It offers bundled pricing and support though some find it expensive compared to open-source Kubernetes solutions with ROI linked to operational efficiencies. Amazon Lightsail is praised for cost-effectiveness and predictable pricing, attracting startups and small businesses, with favorable ROI for straightforward applications but limited feature set compared to OpenShift for demanding environments.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon Lightsail vs. Red Hat OpenShift Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Lightsail 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:

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Lightsail

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

7th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Red Hat OpenShift

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

3rd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Server Virtualization Software (11th), Container Management (10th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (5th), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Amazon Lightsail is 2.1%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 9.5%, down from 11.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

PaaS Clouds Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Red Hat OpenShift	9.5%
Amazon Lightsail	2.1%
Other	88.4%

PaaS Clouds

Featured Reviews

VictorAugusto De Souza E Silva

Cloud Engineer at Leek Solucoes

Has simplified website migration and reduced hosting costs significantly

Amazon Lightsail should have some kind of scale service. To be more clear, if I need to scale up my instance or VPS, I need to create a snapshot and create a new instance from this snapshot with more resources, such as CPU, RAM, or disk. It would be beneficial to have a welcome instance where we can just set the instance, go there to edit and select a greater instance from large to x-large or 2x-large. I do not see the need to scale down, but it would be good too. When we are on an x-large for testing purposes and need to do a rollback to a large one, we need to scale down. We do not have this capability on Amazon Lightsail.

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Pratul Shukla

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

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

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"EC2 instances are pre-configured and upgraded, so you can simply select and instantly pay for an EC2 instance to set up WordPress, Node.js, or a server container using Docker."

"We use Amazon Lightsail for hosting security components in-house and AI modules."

"In Lightsail, they simplified to do it in as few clicks as possible. So, around ten clicks, I have a virtual machine deployed."

"Amazon Lightsail is easy to use and very cost-effective compared to other services such as Azure and Google."

"Amazon Lightsail is a virtual instance that is a service of Amazon AWS, designed to store data securely and provide applications through the cloud at an affordable cost to the SME sector."

"The intuitive management console of Amazon Lightsail is very good because it is simple; with just a few clicks, I can set a blog online, a WordPress blog online, a new e-commerce online, or just a new application with NodeJS."

"The most valuable features are the usability and customer service."

More Amazon Lightsail pros

"It is a stable platform."

"The most valuable feature is the auto scalers for all microservices. The feature allows us to place request limits and it is much cheaper than AWS."

"The developers seem to like the source-to-image feature. That makes it easy for them to deploy an application from code into containers, so they don't have to think about things. They take it straight from their code into a containerized application. If you don't have OpenShift, you have to build the container and then deploy the container to, say, EKS or something like that."

"I am impressed with the product's security features."

"The initial setup is simple, and OpenShift is open-source, so it's easy to install on any cloud platform."

"A smaller cloud running on containers enables easy deployment with the ability to scale up and scale down, and it can host multiple services on the same platform."

"It has features that enhance security, ease of deployment, and service exposure compared to Kubernetes."

"The most valuable feature of OpenShift is the containers."

More Red Hat OpenShift pros

Cons

"I don't see this solution as enterprise-ready, for bigger companies like banks."

"The main area for improvement in Lightsail is the difficulty in scaling down resources."

"Based on my limited exploration of Amazon Lightsail so far, I would like to see improvements in the console, particularly in user behavior and some cost-related aspects."

"To improve, I feel the disk management is too basic. I can't easily partition the disk for the operating system. I have to follow the main configuration that is already set up in the template. To partition the disk, I would need to deploy the operating system first and then make changes, but it's not an ideal method. I would recommend improving the disk management."

"The solution could be smoother than it is."

"When you need to add some custom rules to Amazon Lightsail, the auto scaling feature is a bit difficult."

"Amazon Lightsail should have some kind of scale service. To be more clear, if I need to scale up my instance or VPS, I need to create a snapshot and create a new instance from this snapshot with more resources, such as CPU, RAM, or disk."

"Amazon Lightsail needs more security in the networking because hackers can attack in application layers three and four."

More Amazon Lightsail cons

"I had to frequently upgrade my cluster due to OpenShift's rolling updates every six months, which I found to be excessive."

"Room for improvement is around the offerings that come as a bundle with the container platform. The packaging of the platform should be done such that customers do not have to purchase additional licenses."

"We experienced issues around desktop security, that stopped us implementing a new feature that had been developed."

"This is a fairly expensive solution."

"OpenShift could improve by providing the ability to integrate with public cloud platforms. This way we can easily use the services that these platforms offer. For instance, Amazon AWS. However, all the three major hyper-scalers solutions offer excellent DevOps and CI/CD tooling. If there was an easy way to integrate with them it would be beneficial. We need a way to easily integrate with the monitoring and dashboard services that they provide."

"The metrics in OpenShift can use improvement."

"Its virtual upgrades are time-consuming."

More Red Hat OpenShift cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Lightsail is available at an affordable cost starting from five dollars per month."

"The services that it provides are good for the price."

"It's very cheap."

"The prices are better than EC2 machines, for instance, because they are simplified management, but it works well, and I am able to run everything that I need on it."

"Amazon Lightsail is a bit cheaper than Amazon EC2."

"A few months ago, Lightsail's pricing increased, likely due to the addition of the new VPC feature."

"The affordability of starting at five dollars makes it an attractive option for startups and medium-sized companies, aligning with budget considerations while offering essential cloud services."

"The solution is cost-effective."

"The cost is quite high."

"The licensing cost for OpenShift is expensive when compared to other products. RedHat also charges you additional costs apart from the standard licensing fees."

"It's important to start small because the solution is scalable. We can build our cluster and look at the bundle option, not the external subscriptions. Talking to the people at Red Hat can save us money."

"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."

"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 price depends on the type and the nature of the organizations, along with the types of projects that are of considerable range."

"The pricing is standard; the solution isn't particularly expensive or affordable."

More Red Hat OpenShift pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

14%

University

14%

Computer Software Company

12%

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	6
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	4

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 Lightsail?

In Lightsail, they simplified to do it in as few clicks as possible. So, around ten clicks, I have a virtual machine deployed.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Lightsail?

Lightsail is available at an affordable cost starting from five dollars per month. This cost may increase with additional features like a static IP.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon Lightsail?

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about OpenShift?

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

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Azure vs Amazon Lightsail

Compared 28% of the time

Google Cloud vs Amazon Lightsail

Compared 24% of the time

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) vs Amazon Lightsail

Compared 10% of the time

Render vs Amazon Lightsail

Compared 10% of the time

Google App Engine vs Amazon Lightsail

Compared 8% of the time

More Amazon Lightsail 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

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Lightsail

January 2026

Download Amazon Lightsail product report

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat OpenShift

January 2026

Download Red Hat OpenShift product report

Overview

Lightsail is ideal for simpler workloads, quick deployments, and getting started on AWS. It’s designed to help you start small, and then scale as you grow.

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

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers

UPS, Cathay Pacific, Hilton

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Lightsail vs. Red Hat OpenShift

December 2025

Free Report: Amazon Lightsail vs. Red Hat OpenShift

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