Cloud Foundry vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Red Hat OpenShift comparison

Cloud Foundry and Broadcom are both solutions in the PaaS Clouds category. Cloud Foundry is ranked #21, while Broadcom is ranked #14. Cloud Foundry holds a 2.1% mindshare in PSP, compared to Broadcom’s 6.2% mindshare. Additionally, 33% of Cloud Foundry users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

Cloud Foundry

Read 2 Cloud Foundry reviews

966 Views
937 Comparison Views

33% willing to recommend

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Read 15 Pivotal Cloud Foundry reviews

4,724 Views
4,677 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Red Hat OpenShift

Read 64 Red Hat OpenShift reviews

11,487 Views
5,973 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Cloud Foundry

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Red Hat OpenShift

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cloud Foundry, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, and Red Hat OpenShift based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Red Hat and others in PaaS Clouds.

To learn more, read our detailed PaaS Clouds Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

PaaS Clouds

March 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:

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Cloud Foundry is 2.1%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is 6.2%, down from 10.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 8.2%, down from 12.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

PaaS Clouds Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Red Hat OpenShift	8.2%
Pivotal Cloud Foundry	6.2%
Cloud Foundry	2.1%
Other	83.5%

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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reviewer2263239

Head of Engineering at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

PCF allows for fine-grained configuration, especially regarding scaling but routing limitations

Something that can be done better is canary deployment. So, right now, we're using blue-green deployment. The support for canary deployment would be nice. A few things, such as what OpenShift does better are cluster management. Like, you can manage the entire thing together. Currently, it's possible to manage all the clusters, especially when it comes to cluster management using straightforward configuration. As of now, we have to handle each application instance individually, which means servicing them one by one. It would be better if we could perform these actions as a group or in a more streamlined manner. One more downside is actually the cost of this environment. So, major downside of Pivotal, it's the cost. So, the runtime running costs are very high. Extremely high.

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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.

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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

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

"It is a scalable product...We are not facing any particular issues since most of the applications in our company are written in Java and .NET."

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

"The most valuable features are the monitoring and the deployment is easier."

"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is very robust, especially for building Java."

"The solution is stable, and we have not experienced any infrastructure issues, so it is very good and captures a few metrics, onboarding to App Dynamics."

More Pivotal Cloud Foundry pros

"The solution provides a lot of flexibility to the application team for running their applications in the container platform, without needing to monitor the entire infrastructure all the time. It automatically scales and automatically self-heals. There is also a mechanism to alert the team in case it is over-committing or overutilizing the application."

"Self-provisioning support saves a lot of time and unnecessary work from the system administrator who can use this time to run and monitor the infrastructure."

"I would recommend Red Hat OpenShift, especially for its automation capabilities."

"Security is also an important part of this solution. By default, things are running with limited privileges and securely confined to their own resources. This way, different users and projects can all use the same infrastructure."

"It seems like we're getting a pretty high return on our investment because of our ability to navigate, integrate and migrate across platforms."

"The security features of OpenShift are strong when in use of role-based access."

"Save money and get OpenShift."

"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."

More Red Hat OpenShift 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."

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

"It is not straightforward to setup."

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

"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."

"It should offer more security features."

"The user interface should be simpler to navigate because it t can take time for users to learn it."

"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is not scalable, infinitely, because when you install it on a set of virtual machines it is very hard to scale."

"Something that can be done better is canary deployment. So, right now, we're using blue-green deployment. The support for canary deployment would be nice."

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

More Pivotal Cloud Foundry cons

"Needs work on volume handling (although this is already better with GlusterFS). Security (SSSD) would also be an improvement."

"Not a ten because it's not a standard solution and the endpoint protection user has to prepare to use it with documentation or has to get training from other people."

"Installation and setup are a bit tedious, especially in a proxy environment."

"OpenShift can improve monitoring. Sometimes there are issues."

"Managing batches in Red Hat OpenShift has been a significant challenge."

"There is no orchestration platform in OpenShift."

"OpenShift can improve monitoring. Sometimes there are issues. Additionally, the solution could benefit from protective tools if something was to happen in our network."

"Autoscaling is a very unique feature, but it could be useful to have more options based on traffic statistics, for example, via Prometheus. So, there should be more ready solutions to autoscale based on specific applications."

More Red Hat OpenShift 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."

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

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

"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."

"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 is based on the customer's requirements. However, the price is comparable to other similar solutions."

"The product's support is expensive. I would rate the tool's pricing an eight out of ten."

"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."

"The product has reasonable pricing."

"I don't deal with the cost part, but I know that the cost is very high when compared to other products. They charge for CPU and memory, but we don't worry about it."

"This solution is fairly expensive but comes at an average cost compared to other solutions in the market."

"The model of pricing and buying licences is quite rigid. We are in the process of negotiating on demand pricing which will help us take advantage of the cloud as a whole."

"We are currently using the open version, OKD. We plan to get the enterprise version in the future."

"It's expensive. It may be cheaper to invest in building Vanilla Kubernetes, especially if security is not the number one motivation or requirement. Of course, that's difficult, and in some business areas, such as banking, that's not something you can put as a second priority. In other situations, a Vanilla Kubernetes with a sufficiently strong team can be cheaper and almost as effective."

More Red Hat OpenShift pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

19%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Energy/Utilities Company

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

36%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Insurance Company

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

23%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

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

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

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....

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How does OpenShift compare with Amazon AWS?

Open Shift makes managing infrastructure easy because of self-healing and automatic scaling. There is also a wonderfu...

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What needs improvement with OpenShift?

Areas where Red Hat OpenShift can be improved include the licensing being a bit complex and maybe expensive, as that ...

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What is your primary use case for OpenShift?

My main use case for Red Hat OpenShift is that we had several security tools that we deployed to Red Hat OpenShift pl...

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Comparisons

Amazon AWS vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 21% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 10% of the time

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 9% of the time

SAP Cloud Platform vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 7% of the time

Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud vs Cloud Foundry

Compared 5% of the time

More Cloud Foundry Competitors

Microsoft Azure vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 31% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 15% of the time

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 6% of the time

Google Cloud vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 6% of the time

Oracle Messaging Cloud Service vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 4% of the time

More Pivotal Cloud Foundry Competitors

Amazon AWS vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 7% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 7% of the time

Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 6% of the time

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 5% of the time

HashiCorp Nomad vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 3% of the time

More Red Hat OpenShift Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

PaaS Clouds

March 2026

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Buyer's Guide

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

March 2026

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Buyer's Guide

Red Hat OpenShift

March 2026

Download Red Hat OpenShift product report

Also Known As

No data available

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

No data available

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

Broadcom

Red Hat OpenShift is a comprehensive platform offering versatile container orchestration capabilities, suitable for businesses seeking robust, scalable, and secure solutions for application modernization efforts and microservices deployment.

Red Hat OpenShift combines a user-friendly interface with powerful CLI tools, ensuring rapid deployment and process automation. It seamlessly integrates with Docker and Kubernetes, providing cloud-native stacks for flexibility and compliance. Enhancing development efficiency, OpenShift includes built-in CI/CD tools and dynamic scaling features. It supports multi-cloud environments, avoiding vendor lock-in. However, documentation gaps, interface complexity, and infrastructure demands present challenges, alongside improving integration with third-party tools and monitoring capabilities. Licensing complexities and resource consumption remain areas for improvement, with user experience varying due to support response times.

What are Red Hat OpenShift's key features?

User-Friendly GUI: Offers an intuitive interface for managing containers and applications.
CLI Tools: Robust command line tools for efficient development workflows.
Scalability: Supports dynamic scaling to meet changing demands.
Integration: Seamless integration with Docker and Kubernetes.
Security: Features like role-based access control enhance security.
CI/CD Tools: Built-in tools like Jenkins streamline the development lifecycle.
Multi-Cloud Support: Enables use across different cloud providers.

What benefits should users consider in reviews?

Deployment Speed: Faster application rollouts and updates.
Automation: Reduces manual tasks, increasing operational efficiency.
Security: High-security standards for protecting applications.
Adaptability: Flexible framework suited for diverse environments.
Resource Management: Efficient allocation of resources for cost savings.

In industries embracing cloud-native architectures, Red Hat OpenShift is adept for hosting containerized applications and transitioning legacy systems. It excels in managing DevOps processes, supporting production and development in sectors such as finance, healthcare, and technology, ensuring robust hybrid on-premise and cloud operations.

Red Hat

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

UPS, Cathay Pacific, Hilton

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