Google App Engine vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry comparison

Google and Broadcom are both solutions in the PaaS Clouds category. Google is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.4, while Broadcom is ranked #14. Google holds a 2.5% mindshare in PSP, compared to Broadcom’s 6.2% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Google users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

Google App Engine

Read 36 Google App Engine reviews

1,885 Views
1,715 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Read 15 Pivotal Cloud Foundry reviews

4,724 Views
4,677 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Google App Engine

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

Google App Engine and Pivotal Cloud Foundry are competing in the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) category. Pivotal Cloud Foundry is often considered superior due to its robust features.

Features: Google App Engine supports automatic scaling, integrated storage, and flexible pricing. It is ideal for applications requiring automatic scalability and cost-effectiveness. Pivotal Cloud Foundry offers enterprise-grade features such as continuous integration, support for multiple development languages, and comprehensive DevOps tools. These features cater to complex projects and enterprise needs.

Room for Improvement: Google App Engine could improve its flexibility in supporting additional services beyond its standard offerings. Enhancing SQL database support and expanding its range of deployable languages could benefit users. For Pivotal Cloud Foundry, the complexity of the initial setup is an area for improvement. Simplifying the learning curve for new users and reducing setup time could make it more accessible. Improving integration with non-Java technologies would broaden its appeal.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Google App Engine is known for its simplified deployment process, making it suitable for startups or small businesses. Its exceptional customer service adds value for users seeking support. In contrast, Pivotal Cloud Foundry offers support for sophisticated deployment scenarios and enterprise-grade support, offering greater control but requiring a steeper learning curve.

Pricing and ROI: Google App Engine offers adaptable pricing and a low entry cost, providing faster ROI for small and medium-sized businesses. Its pricing model is advantageous for limited budgets. Pivotal Cloud Foundry, while having a higher initial cost, offers significant ROI for enterprises with its scalable, comprehensive features, making it more suitable for large-scale deployments.

To learn more, read our detailed Google App Engine vs. Pivotal Cloud Foundry Report (Updated: April 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Google App Engine vs. Pivotal Cloud Foundry

April 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

Google App Engine

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

5th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

14th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Google App Engine is 2.5%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is 6.2%, down from 10.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

PaaS Clouds Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Google App Engine	2.5%
Pivotal Cloud Foundry	6.2%
Other	91.3%

PaaS Clouds

Featured Reviews

Rajesh Kadyan

Senior Engineer at Brillio

Have managed resources seamlessly thanks to robust platform capabilities

The areas of Google App Engine that I would to improve or enhance include its allowance for complete end-to-end deployment and scalability; however, it is manageable only for a few languages. For instance, it doesn't support languages C and C++, only basic support for Node.js, Java, and Ruby. It's not a comprehensive solution for all scenarios. Moreover, the security feature is based on IAM roles, but it should ideally be based on Active Directory (AD) roles. For IAM-based roles, we need to add the proper users and provide all security permissions manually. In an AD-based model, we would simply add users to a specific group, and all permissions would be inherited.

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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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Administering App Engine is simple; it has intuitive UIs and a very scalable app engine."

"It is simple to use. It is much simpler than AWS. It is also very powerful."

"Google App Engine is highly scalable and can integrate easily with other applications."

"Seurity features - unauthorized individuals are unable to access certain applications."

"This solution is cheaper and more efficient compared to other similar solutions with cloud vendors."

"I have found it useful in my work and life."

"The seamless integration of Google App Engine with other Google Cloud services has enhanced my application capabilities by allowing us to trigger Cloud Jobs from App Engine and some cloud functions, as handling messages through Pub/Sub."

"Google takes care of deploying the code to the clusters, monitoring, failover, and launching application instances as and when necessary."

More Google App Engine pros

"We find its stability and scalability valuable."

"PCF is open, so the applications run really smoothly and with little downtime."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"PCF is open, so the applications run really smoothly and with little downtime."

More Pivotal Cloud Foundry pros

Cons

"The product's price is an area of concern where improvements are required."

"The only concern is that there is a number of the offerings which are built on their own proprietary technologies. With some of the offerings in Google Cloud, it's difficult to have a path to migrate to other cloud providers."

"The documentation is an area that could definitely be improved."

"When it comes to billing, I think they should include something that would give the client or user an indication of what's happening so they can be aware of how pricing is being managed."

"Need a better documentation and tech support."

"More expensive than the alternate options if a product/service has a lot of users."

"The initial setup is complex as it is customized based on different clients, and it can range from one to three years, requiring niche-specific technical resources."

"Difficult to assess how pricing is managed."

More Google App Engine cons

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

"It is not straightforward to setup."

"There are no synthetic application monitoring and real-time monitoring features and they should be included."

"Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve on the technology, it is a bit complex."

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

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

"Pivotal Cloud Foundry doesn't have certain advanced features."

"The initial setup was not easy, it was a bit complex."

More Pivotal Cloud Foundry cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We pay the license yearly. It's about $6 a month, which is $72 a year per person, so it's about $500."

"I would like to have more free application with it. Some of the applications, I am paying more for them. I think that they must be free."

"If we don't know how to work with the tool, we might have some spikes in price."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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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

Educational Organization

University

Construction Company

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

36%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Insurance Company

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	15
Midsize Enterprise	7
Large Enterprise	13

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Large Enterprise	11

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google App Engine?

I believe it is reasonably priced. I've never heard anyone express that the licenses are too expensive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Google App Engine?

The error logging system in Google App Engine could be enhanced. While there are troubleshooting documents with Google-defined error logs, identifying the exact root cause can be challenging. Often...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Google App Engine?

My primary use case for Google App Engine is within the finance industry, dealing with enterprise-scale businesses.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Azure vs Google App Engine

Compared 17% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Google App Engine

Compared 15% of the time

Heroku vs Google App Engine

Compared 11% of the time

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Google App Engine

Compared 8% of the time

Amazon Lightsail vs Google App Engine

Compared 5% of the time

More Google App Engine Competitors

Microsoft Azure vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 30% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 15% of the time

Red Hat OpenShift vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 13% of the time

Google Cloud vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 6% of the time

More Pivotal Cloud Foundry Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Google App Engine

March 2026

Download Google App Engine product report

Buyer's Guide

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

March 2026

Download Pivotal Cloud Foundry product report

Also Known As

No data available

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

Overview

Google App Engine is a Platform-as-a-Service (Paas) provider that equips web application developers with all the resources and tools that they need to develop, test, and run their applications on Google's infrastructure. Everything is built into the kit, so with one download of the SDK, you'll be well on your way to first-rate apps.

Google

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

Sample Customers

Khan Academy, Best Buy, Gigya, MetOffice, Getaround, Mimiboard, NewsLimited, WebFilings, and CloudLock.

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

Google App Engine vs. Pivotal Cloud Foundry

April 2026

Free Report: Google App Engine vs. Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Find out what your peers are saying about Google App Engine vs. Pivotal Cloud Foundry and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.

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