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Cloud Foundry vs Red Hat OpenShift comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

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
21st
Average Rating
5.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Red Hat OpenShift
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
76
Ranking in other categories
Server Virtualization Software (3rd), Container Management (4th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (2nd), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Cloud Foundry is 1.9%, down from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 6.5%, down from 12.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
PaaS Clouds Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Red Hat OpenShift6.5%
Cloud Foundry1.9%
Other91.6%
PaaS Clouds
 

Featured Reviews

Carlos Bittrich - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
AA
Operation Director at Zaintech
Platform has transformed our cloud into a secure, unified home for diverse modern applications
One of the best features of Red Hat OpenShift is that it has the catalog, the application catalog, and the operator hub, which allows us to deploy things easily and straightforward without going into a lot of hassles. This is one of the main things, in addition to having integration with ACM and ACS, where we can have the ability to manage multiple clusters and to secure them, deploy them, manage them, run GitOps and day-two operations, as well as upgrades and other functionality which is made easy using these tools. Red Hat OpenShift also provides virtualization capabilities, and I am currently working with Zain to make a project where we will convert F5 appliances to virtual machines and to manage them through Red Hat virtualization, OVE. Red Hat OpenShift is a unique platform because it provides the features for both worlds, containerization, and VMs at the same time, requiring you to learn one skillset in order to manage all of this at the same time. In the beginning, our cloud depended only on virtual machines, so I introduced this to our management to start to work with microservices and with containerization. This was adapted in our cloud, providing us the capability to sell more of these features and to reduce the hardware requirement by about thirty percent, following the trends of using containerization for all modern applications. In addition, it reduced the time to develop and to deploy a new application; all we need is using Jenkins for CI/CD. Once we commit any code, it gets triggered, and it will implement the new container in a very flexible and easy way, within seconds. This decreased the time to market and increased agility, allowing us to capture new opportunities very fast.

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."
"IBM is the only vendor to offer integration with blockchain for smart contract development."
"Cloud Foundry builds the runtime environment directly without requiring dependency management from the user."
"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."
"We have found the solution to be very scalable during our time using it, and we now have a large number of transactions passing through the product."
"What I like best about OpenShift is that it can reduce some of the costs of having multiple applications because you can just move them into small container applications. For example, applications don't need to run for twenty days, only to be used up by Monday. Through OpenShift, you can move some of the small applications into any cloud. I also find the design of OpenShift good."
"Our service order management platform was cloud-native, and when we deployed its microservices on Red Hat OpenShift, we were able to increase the capacity of order processing from 100,000 a day to at least 400,000 orders daily."
"The company had a product called device financing, where the company worked as a partner with Google. It allowed customers to take mobile phones on loan or via credit. When we migrated those services to OpenShift in February last year, we were able to sell over 100,000 devices in a single day, which was very good."
"It is an excellent product."
"The most valuable feature is the high availability for the applications."
"While a PaaS is not for everyone, OpenShift mixes the best combination of new technology with the reuse of existing technology."
"The most valuable feature of OpenShift is the containers."
 

Cons

"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."
"Latency and performance are two areas of concern in OpenShift where improvements are required."
"One area for improvement with Red Hat OpenShift is in management and cluster implementation."
"Areas where Red Hat OpenShift can be improved include the licensing being a bit complex and maybe expensive, as that is something in the hands of the organization's higher management, especially when those licensing agreements are done, and I think Red Hat OpenShift is quite resource-heavy because the control plane and default monitoring stack consume significant resources, meaning for small clusters, a large percentage of compute goes just to running Red Hat OpenShift itself, not our apps."
"There is perhaps one thing about the deployment of Red Hat OpenShift. If the deployment of Red Hat OpenShift itself can be easier and more flexible, it would be great."
"The GUI could have more capabilities, particularly around virtualization. Some features are missing, such as storage migrations, when compared with VMware."
"For some reason there have been some DNS issues."
"Most of the configurations are command based. If we can have a GUI-based configuration with better flexibility then it will be great."
"I had to frequently upgrade my cluster due to OpenShift's rolling updates every six months, which I found to be excessive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"IBM has a free tier and payment option depending on the products selected."
"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."
"The pricing is standard; the solution isn't particularly expensive or affordable."
"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."
"The product's support is expensive. I would rate the tool's pricing an eight out of ten."
"Pricing of OpenShift depends on the number of nodes and who is hosting it."
"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."
"We use the license-free version of Red Hat Openshift but we pay for the support."
"The product’s pricing is expensive."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Energy/Utilities Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
Outsourcing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise57
 

Questions from the Community

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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 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 needs improvement with OpenShift?
One area for improvement in Red Hat OpenShift is during upgrades, as there is currently no option to revert to a previous version if vulnerabilities or issues arise. I believe that providing such a...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Grape Up, c-Com, KONE, TITAN, CSAA, Bosch, Allstate, Verizon, West Corp., Telstra
UPS, Cathay Pacific, Hilton
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloud Foundry vs. Red Hat OpenShift and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.