Cloud Foundry vs Microsoft Azure comparison

Why PeerSpot?

Cloud Foundry and Microsoft are both solutions in the PaaS Clouds category. Cloud Foundry is ranked #19, while Microsoft is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.5. Cloud Foundry holds a 1.8% mindshare in PSP, compared to Microsoft’s 12.0% mindshare. Additionally, 33% of Cloud Foundry users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

Cloud Foundry

Read 2 Cloud Foundry reviews

1,750 Views
1,698 Comparison Views

33% willing to recommend

Microsoft Azure

Read 324 Microsoft Azure reviews

47,107 Views
24,967 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Cloud Foundry

Microsoft Azure

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

Microsoft Azure and Cloud Foundry are cloud service platforms providing different strengths. Microsoft Azure seems to have the upper hand in integration and security features, while Cloud Foundry offers greater flexibility and portability.

Features: Microsoft Azure provides a wide range of services including AI, big data analytics, and offers a comprehensive global network of data centers. Its security features are rated highly. Cloud Foundry is platform-agnostic with robust support for continuous delivery and offers high scalability.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Microsoft Azure has streamlined deployment processes with extensive documentation and strong customer support. Cloud Foundry enables fast deployment through buildpacks and strong community support. Azure’s well-integrated ecosystem makes deployment straightforward, while Cloud Foundry offers customizable deployment options.

Pricing and ROI: Microsoft Azure's flexible pricing model can be complex, often leading to higher costs for extensive infrastructure needs, though it offers good ROI due to the wide range of services. Cloud Foundry generally has fewer setup costs due to its open-source framework, offering potentially better ROI for businesses focused on portability and flexibility.

To learn more, read our detailed Cloud Foundry vs. Microsoft Azure Report (Updated: September 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Foundry vs. Microsoft Azure

September 2026

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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

Cloud Foundry

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

19th

Average Rating

5.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Microsoft Azure

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

1st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

324

Ranking in other categories

Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Cloud Foundry is 1.8%, down from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure is 12.0%, down from 18.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

PaaS Clouds Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Microsoft Azure	12.0%
Cloud Foundry	1.8%
Other	86.2%

PaaS Clouds

Featured Reviews

Carlos Bittrich

Technology Advisor at Fabrik

Quick to deploy but being deprecated by IBM and should be merged with Kubernetes

We enjoy the fast deployment. Cloud Foundry builds the runtime environment directly without requiring dependency management from the developer or administrator. The autoscaling is great. It is just a switch that needs to be turned on, and autoscaling starts working. At this moment, you begin to see different meters about usage that helps you in updating the scaling limits, which help you tune the running instances. Besides this, autoscaling can be scheduled, so in times of low activity, you can have lower limits or increase in advance for special dates. It has good logging. CF has logging events that help identify when a transaction runs and its response time which helps in monitoring execution.

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reviewer2832981

Cloud Administrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Cloud migration has reduced hardware dependency and supports secure global access to apps

The best features Microsoft Azure offers are cloud scalability, virtual machines, storage, networking, security, monitoring, and identity management. Scalability is the most valuable to our organization because Microsoft Azure allows businesses to scale resources up or down based on workload demand. This helps manage traffic spikes without buying permanent hardware. Virtual machines are also valuable as Microsoft Azure provides cloud-based Windows and Linux virtual machines to run applications, servers, and workloads. Identity and Access Management is important, as the integration with Microsoft Entra ID helps manage user authentication, role-based access, and MFA. For example, employees access business apps securely using single sign-on. Backup and disaster recovery are also important because they provide automated backups and failover options to ensure business continuity. Microsoft Azure positively impacts my organization by reducing infrastructure dependency, improving availability, and enabling remote access. Teams can access applications globally without on-premises server dependency, and in terms of cost, it is very low-cost.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"My favorite component of IBM's solution is Node-RED, which greatly shortens the amount of time required to develop, test, and deploy new applications."

"By moving to IBM Cloud Foundry, we reduced our project time by a factor of two and decreased costs by a factor of four because it was a PoC."

"Cloud Foundry builds the runtime environment directly without requiring dependency management from the user."

"IBM is the only vendor to offer integration with blockchain for smart contract development."

"One feature I like in Microsoft Azure is its ability to host and run applications on virtual machines. It is a basic yet crucial capability for our team."

"The product is highly stable."

"Some months ago, we started using Power BI embedded, which helped optimize the number of licenses for our company."

"In terms of managing and configuring infrastructures, Azure is fairly good."

"The most valuable feature is the virtual machine."

"Compute (App service, and virtual machine scale sets): The ability to manage Windows and Linus virtual machines."

"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Azure is the Area feature. Additionally, the SQL Server DB as a serverless pool is useful, storage-wide external tables are helpful, and PolyBase is very good at reading external data. The capacity of Synapse to analyze in analytics is very good and it supports a range of data."

"The initial setup is straightforward."

More Microsoft Azure pros

Cons

"After the initial excitement period with Node-RED is over, you crave the need of additional integrations to third-party services."

"In IBM Cloud, the product has been deprecated in favor of Kubernetes, which is a more complicated infrastructure to manage."

"The pricing of the solution could be reduced."

"There is a need to be better on-premise solutions that are more helpful. However, I don't think that is the goal of Microsoft Azure. They want the solution to be secure cloud solutions with cloud applications. This is their main goal at the moment."

"When we are doing transfers of records in large amounts, for example, petabytes of data or few long datasets, the performance should not degrade as it does."

"The response time and stability of Microsoft Azure need to be improved."

"You don't get support from Microsoft very easily as compared to other solutions. The Microsoft Azure team does not [respond quickly]."

"The product is not user-friendly."

"Microsoft Azure could improve by being more user-friendly and the interface could be better."

"There was a time when the solution was updated on their side and all of our functions stopped working."

More Microsoft Azure cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"You are allocated a minimum amount of resources in the free tier. This seems fair and highly scalable, as you pay per usage as per cloud pricing schemes."

"The pricing models should be reworked to the needs of a wider range of companies. Some customers will not be able to afford it until quite a few years into production, even after good PoC results and a successful launch."

"IBM has a free tier and payment option depending on the products selected."

"This is an expensive product."

"Microsoft always provides the entry-level solution with a cheap license. Once you start to like the product, then you have to pay for the full package, which is more expensive than the entry-level solution. Every feature comes with a license and a cost. Some licenses have multiple features, and some features require a specific license."

"Microsoft Azure is expensive."

"Make use of Azure pricing calculator and you will find out that Azure Is still more reasonable that the competition and do your research, when unclear speak with your MS support."

"The solution does not offer very many free services which can become expensive. We are on an annual license."

"The pricing is cheap."

"The pricing model can be improved because we find that Azure pricing is a bit high."

"We are on a monthly subscription for Microsoft Azure and the cost is more expensive than some of the competitors, such as Amazon AWS. They should be more competitive with other solutions."

More Microsoft Azure pricing and cost advice

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it_user8586

Engineer at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

Aug 14, 2013

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

19%

Manufacturing Company

13%

Energy/Utilities Company

Comms Service Provider

Outsourcing Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Construction Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	141
Midsize Enterprise	54
Large Enterprise	153

Questions from the Community

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How does Microsoft Azure compare to Google Firebase?

I would recommend Google Firebase instead of Microsoft Azure, simply for the array of features that it has to offer. In particular, the Firebase library grants you access to a shared data structure...

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Comparisons

Amazon AWS vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 14% of the time

Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 13% of the time

Red Hat OpenShift vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 9% of the time

Google App Engine vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 6% of the time

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 5% of the time

More Cloud Foundry Competitors

Google Firebase vs Microsoft Azure

Compared 12% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Microsoft Azure

Compared 6% of the time

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) vs Microsoft Azure

Compared 5% of the time

Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Microsoft Azure

Compared 5% of the time

Alibaba Cloud vs Microsoft Azure

Compared 4% of the time

More Microsoft Azure Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

PaaS Clouds

September 2026

Download Cloud Foundry product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure

September 2026

Download Microsoft Azure product report

Also Known As

No data available

Windows Azure, Azure, MS Azure

Overview

Cloud Foundry is an open-source platform as a service (PaaS) that simplifies application deployment and management across various clouds. It enables developers to focus on coding by automating the underlying infrastructure management.

Cloud Foundry offers a robust environment where developers can build, test, deploy, and scale applications efficiently. It removes the complexity of setting up infrastructure, providing a consistent development experience across different platforms. It supports a wide range of programming languages and frameworks, which makes it versatile for developers working in diverse environments. The platform's container-based architecture helps ensure that applications can scale seamlessly while maintaining performance and reliability.

What are the standout features of Cloud Foundry?

Multi-Cloud Compatibility: Supports deployment across major cloud providers ensuring flexibility and choice.
Continuous Delivery: Integrates seamlessly with CI/CD pipelines to facilitate automated testing and deployment.
Built-in Logging and Monitoring: Offers tools for thorough monitoring and logging, ensuring application health.
Scalability: Provides easy scaling of applications to manage fluctuating workloads.
Container-Based Architecture: Utilizes containers to ensure consistent deployment and performance.

What benefits should users look for in reviews?

Cost Efficiency: Savings achieved through decreased infrastructure management costs.
Developer Productivity: Enables faster development cycles due to streamlined processes.
Operational Transparency: Enhanced monitoring and logging features that provide clear insights.
Flexibility to Innovate: Ability to quickly deploy and test new ideas without infrastructure concerns.
Robust Ecosystem Support: Peer and vendor support to enhance application development processes.

In industries such as finance, healthcare, and retail, Cloud Foundry is implemented to enhance agile development practices. Financial institutions use it for rapid prototyping, allowing them to respond swiftly to market changes. Healthcare providers leverage its security features to maintain data privacy while deploying applications. Retail businesses benefit from its scalability to manage peak shopping periods effortlessly.

Cloud Foundry

Microsoft Azure is a versatile cloud platform known for its scalability, flexibility, and ease of use, offering comprehensive solutions like virtual machines, identity management, and data storage with robust security measures and global data centers.

Azure provides a straightforward setup with dynamic scaling and seamless integration with existing tools. Its robust security, compliance with privacy laws, and global data center presence make it a trusted choice for enterprises. With features supporting DevOps, IoT, AI/ML, and hybrid cloud environments, Azure facilitates efficient cloud migration and modernization, enhancing operational efficiency.

What are some of the key features of Microsoft Azure?

Scalability: Adjust resources automatically to meet demand.
Flexibility: Support for hybrid cloud setup and smooth integration with existing tools.
Virtual Machines: Extensive support for VMs to run various workloads.
Active Directory: Robust identity and access management services.
Data Storage: Diverse storage options for different data management needs.
Security Measures: Comprehensive security protocols and compliance support.

What benefits and ROI should users consider when evaluating Microsoft Azure?

Cost Efficiency: Managed services that reduce operational costs.
Reliability: High availability with global data center coverage.
Ease of Migration: Facilitates transition from on-premises solutions to the cloud.
Operational Efficiency: User-friendly interface and extensive training resources.

Organizations primarily use Azure for infrastructure services, application hosting, and data management across industries such as finance, healthcare, and retail. Resellers deploy cloud services for clients in private, public, and hybrid clouds, supporting enterprise applications and digital transformation projects.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

Grape Up, c-Com, KONE, TITAN, CSAA, Bosch, Allstate, Verizon, West Corp., Telstra

BMW, Toyota, easyJet, NBC Sports, HarperCollins, Aviva, TalkTalk Business, Avanade, and Telenor.

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Foundry vs. Microsoft Azure

September 2026

Free Report: Cloud Foundry vs. Microsoft Azure

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