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Flatcar Container Linux vs Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Flatcar Container Linux
Ranking in Operating Systems (OS) for Business
18th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (R...
Ranking in Operating Systems (OS) for Business
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
327
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Operating Systems (OS) for Business category, the mindshare of Flatcar Container Linux is 0.6%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is 9.1%, down from 12.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Operating Systems (OS) for Business
 

Featured Reviews

YD
The solution is stable and allows us to make needed changes
The development teams could sharpen their skills.  They should offer applications on the net I have eight years of experience with Flatcar Container Linux. The version of Flatcar Container Linux that I am using is stable. The scalability of this product is fine. It allows us to make the needed…
Bruce Lundberg - PeerSpot reviewer
Reliable patch management, high uptime, and incredible knowledge base
In terms of security, it does a lot of things that most people still turn off. SELinux is turned on by default. They have pretty good firewall rules in their defaults. The audit rules always take tweaking, but, overall, it comes out of the box not too bad. I used to write scripts to harden them from there. There are multiple ways to provision and patch. You have everything from local repositories to doing it by hand. Their knowledge base is incredible. There is so much information out there. It has never taken me longer than 30 minutes to find an answer to anything, even very tough ones. One company I worked for was a security company, and we did a lot of patching on everything. It was designed around security and email hosting, and uptime was pretty much whatever we wanted it to be. I have had a couple of times when the uptime was bad, but it was caused by a third-party solution. In fact, the Norton antivirus was definitely the worst. Red Hat had nothing to do with it.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Flatcar's support is good. The version I am using is stable and allows us to make needed changes."
"The most valuable thing about Red Hat is its stability, uptime, and support for various hardware vendors. Linux servers, in general, are relatively secure and they are more secure than Windows and other products."
"SELinux is valuable for security purposes. SELinux is very good because we can give the correct permissions to the employees."
"The number one thing we like is that it is a very reliable platform. It is a very consistent platform. There is very little that we cannot do with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and there is very little that we worry about when we are running a Red Hat distribution."
"The updates are the most valuable feature."
"The knowledge base offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux is good. It is easy to parse through all of the knowledge base."
"I like RHEL's clustering capabilities and high-level architecture. It has high availability, built-in disaster recovery, SSH features, and scripting."
"I see so many features in Red Hat Enterprise Linux that I do not see in other Linux operating systems, such as Ubuntu. That is why Red Hat is very popular"
"The solution has good availability and is easy to use."
 

Cons

"The development teams could sharpen their skills. They should offer applications on the net."
"It also has a steep learning curve for employees unfamiliar with Linux, and it demands a skilled team or a dedicated service center to operate effectively."
"They could become the most sufficient solution by focusing on improving areas where there is always room for enhancement."
"Improvement is needed for supporting Kubernetes clusters because it is less supported by Red Hat according to my experience."
"The licensing cost of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is high and could be improved."
"Their biggest complaint is, 'I need two workstations to do my container work and one to collaborate.'"
"I'm also using IBM AIX, which supports a tool called Smitty. You just put Smitty, and you can do anything. At the backend, the command will run automatically. It is not exactly like a GUI, but you just give the input and it will give you the output. That is something that Red Hat should work on. That would be an added advantage with Red Hat."
"Currently, there is a gap in the file system management. I want to be able to expand the file system in a simpler way and have the application or the database use that expansion without any downtime."
"Red Hat Enterprise Linux's ability to run containerized applications is not optimized and has room for improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Our management chain is not satisfied with the current pricing model."
"Red Hat Enterprise Linux is expensive, particularly for governments operating with limited budgets."
"The price is reasonable."
"We have moved to the Simple Content Access (SCA) model. It is much easier to do renewals and see how I am using my licenses. I used to have to do it all by hand. It would take me a good couple of hours every few months to make sure that we were up to snuff on everything. However, with the new model that they have, this is very easy. I just go to cloud.redhat.com to look and see how I am utilizing my licenses. If I am running out of bounds, I can find out why. If it is simply that we have images that need to be removed, we remove those images. If we need to buy more licenses, then we can start the process of purchasing more licenses."
"We are an educational institution and as such, what we pay is less than the average company."
"The licensing makes perfect sense for the amount of stuff you get with the operating system."
"I am not involved in the budgetary aspect, but from what I understand, the pricing is competitive, similar to what we paid for SUSE."
"We purchased our license from ITM, our local provider."
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Comparison Review

it_user281973 - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 24, 2017
It's improved our company's system environments that run Oracle databases.
Red Hat is mission critical to our environment Red Hat has improved the mission critical environments running Oracle databases, while CentOS has improved our web environment and MySQL. Oracle and SAP Environment and all HPC environments. 10 years No issues Very stable i don´t find any problem…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
26%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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Which would you choose - RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) or CentOS?
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is fantastic. It is an inexpensive solution that has excellent security, performance, and stability, and also lots of features. I specifically like that the solution has fe...
What do you like most about Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)?
It is open source. We can customize it as per our requirements.
 

Also Known As

No data available
Red Hat Enterprise Linux, RHEL
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CISCO, mettle, Microsoft, Upguard, GMX
Travel Channel, Mohawk Industries, Hilti, Molecular Health, Exolgan, Hotelplan Group, Emory University, BlueCross BlueShield of North Carolina, HCA Healthcare, Paychex, UPS, Intermountain Healthcare, Brinker International, TransUnion, Union Bank, CA Technologies
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat, Canonical, Oracle and others in Operating Systems (OS) for Business. Updated: June 2025.
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