Cloud Foundry vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry comparison

Cloud Foundry and VMware are both solutions in the PaaS Clouds category. Cloud Foundry is ranked #20, while VMware is ranked #11 with an average rating of 7.5. Cloud Foundry holds a 2.0% mindshare in PSP, compared to VMware’s 9.2% mindshare. Additionally, 33% of Cloud Foundry users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of VMware users who would recommend it.

Cloud Foundry

Read 2 Cloud Foundry reviews

786 Views
762 Comparison Views

33% willing to recommend

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Read 15 Pivotal Cloud Foundry reviews

5,723 Views
5,666 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Cloud Foundry

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

Pivotal Cloud Foundry and Cloud Foundry are key players in the cloud computing platform-as-a-service space. Pivotal Cloud Foundry leads with superior support and integration, while Cloud Foundry offers flexibility and cost-effectiveness.

Features: Pivotal Cloud Foundry is distinguished by its enterprise-ready capabilities such as robust security, extensive compliance, and seamless integration. Cloud Foundry provides significant flexibility, supporting a variety of development approaches and ensuring portability across different cloud services. The choice between Pivotal's enterprise focus and Cloud Foundry’s open-source flexibility is critical.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Pivotal Cloud Foundry ensures a user-friendly deployment process and offers extensive customer service options to facilitate easy installation. In contrast, Cloud Foundry operates with an open-source model, focusing on community-driven support, which may demand technical expertise during deployment. Pivotal’s organized deployment and professional support give it a notable advantage.

Pricing and ROI: Pivotal Cloud Foundry involves higher initial investment due to its extensive enterprise offerings, yet promises substantial ROI through its advanced features and integration advantages. Cloud Foundry serves as a cost-effective choice with minimal initial costs, benefiting from its open-source framework that quickly yields ROI. Budget-conscious entities may gravitate towards Cloud Foundry, while Pivotal appeals to those seeking robust features and long-term returns.

To learn more, read our detailed Cloud Foundry vs. Pivotal Cloud Foundry Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Foundry vs. Pivotal Cloud Foundry

September 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

Cloud Foundry

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

20th

Average Rating

5.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

11th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Cloud Foundry is 2.0%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is 9.2%, up from 8.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

PaaS Clouds Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Pivotal Cloud Foundry	9.2%
Cloud Foundry	2.0%
Other	88.8%

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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Stephen Hack

Web App developer at FDIC

Easy to use, simple to sign-in, but lacking graphical interface

Pivotal Cloud Foundry is used as a cloud platform Pivotal Cloud Foundry has helped our organization by the way we've set it up, it's easy to sign in, bind services, push services, and create YAML files. The most valuable features of Pivotal Cloud Foundry are its ease of use and the command line…

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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."

"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."

"The most valuable feature of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is auto-healing and the plenty of other features that are provided."

"It provides a set of developer-friendly tools that simplify application deployment."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is its ability to scale. The services that connect to the database are also very good."

"Stability is not a concern with this product."

"The solution is stable and resilient. In our company, we do not even see any challenges with the solution."

"The most valuable feature of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is the UI, it is easy to use."

"It supports CI/CD, and is integrated with the CI/CD very well."

"The most valuable features of Pivotal Cloud Foundry are its ease of use and the command line interface has the ability to push instances to the cloud easily."

More Pivotal Cloud Foundry 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."

"There are no synthetic application monitoring and real-time monitoring features."

"Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve the documentation. They are good, but they could improve more. Additionally, it would be beneficial if there were more use case examples."

"In the next release, I would like to see easy integration with external tools."

"There is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the future of Pivotal Cloud Foundry."

"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is not scalable, infinitely, because when you install it on a set of virtual machines it is very hard to scale. It's easy to scale on an application level, but not it is not similar to if you were using Amazon. Amazon you can scale thousands of applications."

"The Pivotal Cloud Foundry's initial setup has a learning curve for my team, but it was easy to use."

"In the next release, they should offer additional applications for the databases, and improve the deployment experience."

"I'd like to see a larger service offering."

More Pivotal Cloud Foundry cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"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."

"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."

"You're paying for the number of virtual machines you want to install in the installation."

"The pricing is on the higher side and there are cheaper options available."

"Licensing is on a monthly basis and right now we pay $24/month. There are no other costs over and above that."

"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is based on the customer's requirements. However, the price is comparable to other similar solutions."

"We do pay for the licensing cost because we have opted for a private cloud setup. So, it is a cloud setup, and we have to make payments based on the cloud size. I do not consider it very costly when comparing it to the market."

"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve. However, in this category of solutions, they are all expensive."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

28%

Manufacturing Company

15%

Computer Software Company

14%

Energy/Utilities Company

Financial Services Firm

38%

Manufacturing Company

17%

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Large Enterprise	11

Questions from the Community

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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...

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What do you like most about Pivotal Cloud Foundry?

I find the ease of deployment and management of microservices to be the most valuable features. The platform also has good auto-scaling capabilities.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pivotal Cloud Foundry?

I would say it is around a nine out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive. Just short of Oracle. It's sort of Oracle cloud.

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Comparisons

Amazon AWS vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 38% of the time

SAP Cloud Platform vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 13% of the time

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 13% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 11% of the time

Heroku vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 5% of the time

More Cloud Foundry Competitors

Red Hat OpenShift vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 33% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 31% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 11% of the time

Google Cloud vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 7% of the time

Oracle Messaging Cloud Service vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 2% of the time

More Pivotal Cloud Foundry Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

PaaS Clouds

August 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

August 2025

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Also Known As

No data available

PCF, Pivotal Application Service (PAS), Pivotal Container Service (PKS), Pivotal Function Service (PFS)

Overview

Cloud Foundry, home of the open source application development technologies CF Application Runtime and CF Container Runtime, is more than a platform. It’s a flexible way of embracing digital transformation that helps businesses evolve in the face of constant change. To put it another way, with Cloud Foundry, companies can rest assured they will have the right tool for the right job.

Cloud Foundry

Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) is the leading enterprise PaaS, powered by Cloud Foundry. PCF provides a cloud-native application platform that allows you to continuously deliver any app to every major private and public cloud with a single platform. PCF is proven to accelerate feature delivery with higher developer productivity and a 200:1 developer to operator ratio. PCF's built-in security and self-healing capabilities reduce risk in your app portfolio while maintaining high-availability at scale to keep customer facing systems online even in the most challenging circumstances. pivotal.io

VMware

Sample Customers

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

Humana, Citibank, Mercedes Benz, Liberty Mutual, The Home Depot, GE, West Corp, Merrill Corporation, CoreLogic, Orange, Dish Network, Comcast, Bloomberg, Internal Revenue Service, Ford Motor Company, Garmin, Volkswagen, Solera, Allstate, US Air Force, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, ScotiaBank

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Foundry vs. Pivotal Cloud Foundry

September 2025

Free Report: Cloud Foundry vs. Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Find out what your peers are saying about Cloud Foundry vs. Pivotal Cloud Foundry and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.

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