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Google Kubernetes Engine vs Red Hat OpenShift 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
9.0
Google Kubernetes Engine offers cost-effectiveness, operational productivity, and flexibility, though competitor offerings affect ROI and challenge startups.
Sentiment score
7.8
Organizations using OpenShift gain ROI from increased productivity, scalability, reduced onboarding time, enhanced efficiency, and minimized resources.
By migrating from AWS to Google Cloud Platform, we have saved a lot of time and money.
Moving to OpenShift resulted in increased system stability and reduced downtime, which contributed to operational efficiency.
With OpenShift combined with IBM Cloud App integration, I can spin an integration server in a second as compared to traditional methods, which could take days or weeks.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.5
Google Kubernetes Engine's customer support is mixed; some users find it satisfactory, while others rely on alternative solutions.
Sentiment score
6.8
Red Hat OpenShift customer service is mixed, with some praising and others critiquing support responsiveness, documentation, and issue handling.
Red Hat's technical support is responsive and effective.
Red Hat's technical support is good, and I would rate it a nine out of ten.
I have been pretty happy in the past with getting support from Red Hat.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.5
Google Kubernetes Engine offers scalable, efficient, and flexible resource management for various applications, including machine learning on cloud platforms.
Sentiment score
7.6
Red Hat OpenShift excels in scalable, flexible deployment, effectively managing demand surges, with some preferring enterprise edition for support.
The autoscaling capabilities of Google Kubernetes Engine have significantly impacted our operations.
OpenShift is highly scalable, allowing us to manage thousands of pods effectively.
The on-demand provisioning of pods and auto-scaling, whether horizontal or vertical, is the best part.
Red Hat OpenShift scales excellently, with a rating of ten out of ten.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.3
Google Kubernetes Engine is praised for stability, frequent updates, scalability, seamless integration, and high satisfaction ratings, despite minor challenges.
Sentiment score
7.7
Red Hat OpenShift is highly stable, consistently performing well in production with users rating reliability between eight to ten.
I've had my cluster running for over four years.
It provides better performance yet requires more resources compared to vanilla Kubernetes.
It performs well under load, providing the desired output.
 

Room For Improvement

Google Kubernetes Engine needs improved security, integration, user-friendliness, monitoring, pricing, and application-level security for better user experience.
Red Hat OpenShift needs better documentation, UI, cloud support, and improved performance in security, integration, and installation processes.
When looking at the web interface, it feels kind of slow due to the many features involved.
Log observability could be made easier so someone from high school can use it without having technological expertise.
It would be helpful if I could easily find log information in a particular namespace without needing to write certain labels.
Learning OpenShift requires complex infrastructure, needing vCenter integration, more advanced answers, active directory, and more expensive hardware.
We should aim to include VMware-like capabilities to be competitive, especially considering cost factors.
The removal of Grafana and HPA from monitoring caused some issues.
 

Setup Cost

Google Kubernetes Engine offers flexible, open-source pricing based on resource usage, competitive with AWS, affecting costs for high availability.
Red Hat OpenShift's pricing is costly yet competitive for enterprises, with flexibility and negotiation opportunities available.
Google is considered cheaper compared to AWS, making it suitable for smaller to medium companies concerning cost.
The on-demand nodes are quite expensive.
Initially, licensing was per CPU, with a memory cap, but the price has doubled, making it difficult to justify for clients with smaller compute needs.
The cost of OpenShift is very high, particularly with the OpenShift Plus package, which includes many products and services.
Red Hat can improve on the pricing part by making it more flexible and possibly on the lower side.
 

Valuable Features

Google Kubernetes Engine offers easy deployment, auto-scaling, robust security, seamless cloud integration, and efficient resource and traffic management.
Red Hat OpenShift excels in security, automation, scalability, multi-cloud management, user-friendly interface, and Kubernetes compatibility.
The most valuable aspect of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is its managed nature, which significantly reduces the burden on our platform team.
What I find most valuable is the ability to focus solely on my product without worrying about the Kubernetes infrastructure itself.
GKE is easier to understand and use than Elastic Kubernetes Service.
Red Hat OpenShift stands out as a robust enterprise solution due to its superior support and documentation.
OpenShift offers an easy-to-use graphical user interface for cluster management, making it more accessible for administrators.
A valuable feature of Red Hat OpenShift is its ability to handle increased loads by automatically adding nodes.
 

Categories and Ranking

Google Kubernetes Engine
Ranking in Container Management
10th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Red Hat OpenShift
Ranking in Container Management
11th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
61
Ranking in other categories
PaaS Clouds (3rd), Server Virtualization Software (9th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (6th), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Google Kubernetes Engine is 2.1%, down from 3.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 1.6%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Container Management
 

Featured Reviews

Immánuel Fodor - PeerSpot reviewer
The auto-scaling feature ensures that we only use resources when needed
The most valuable aspect of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is its managed nature, which significantly reduces the burden on our platform team. Features like auto-scaling are highly beneficial for both handling traffic spikes and optimizing costs. Furthermore, Google's promise of good SLA availability, with the service being available in different locations, adds to its robustness.
Mikhael Ibrahim - PeerSpot reviewer
Seamlessly monitor microservices with streamlined DevOps capabilities
Most benefit from it, however, I work with Kubernetes, and installing Vanilla Kubernetes is easy. That said, it introduces many tools that need to be set up individually. OpenShift comes ready out of the box, with all tools installed and configured. Red Hat certifies and confirms that all the components are compatible with each other. OpenShift's superior dashboard is a notable strength, especially when compared to Kubernetes. The integrated DevOps capabilities, such as pipelines and the container registry, are extremely beneficial. Additionally, its capability to monitor microservices and containers with integrated tools like Prometheus is a major advantage. The horizontal pod scaling exceeds the scalability features I found in Kubernetes.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
13%
Retailer
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
31%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Insurance Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google Kubernetes Engine?
The on-demand nodes are quite expensive, so we now use spot machines.
What needs improvement with Google Kubernetes Engine?
Gemini could be more integrated with Google Kubernetes Engine ( /products/google-kubernetes-engine-reviews ). For example, it would be helpful if I could easily find log information in a particular...
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 do you like most about OpenShift?
OpenShift facilitates DevOps practices and improves CI/CD workflows in terms of stability compared to Jenkins.
 

Also Known As

GKE
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Philips Lighting, Alpha Vertex, GroupBy, BQ
UPS, Cathay Pacific, Hilton
Find out what your peers are saying about Google Kubernetes Engine vs. Red Hat OpenShift and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,236 professionals have used our research since 2012.