Google Kubernetes Engine vs Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform comparison

Google and Red Hat are both solutions in the Container Management category. Google is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.1, while Red Hat is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.3. Google holds a 2.3% mindshare in CM, compared to Red Hat’s 20.0% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Google users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Red Hat users who would recommend it.

Google Kubernetes Engine

Read 39 Google Kubernetes Engine reviews

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840 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Red Hat OpenShift Container...

Read 50 Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform reviews

6,602 Views
6,536 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Google Kubernetes Engine

Red Hat OpenShift Container...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 13, 2024

Google Kubernetes Engine and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform compete in container management systems. GKE seems to have the upper hand with its integration and ease of use, while OpenShift excels in security and advanced management features.

Features: GKE is renowned for its seamless integration with Google Cloud, offering strong machine learning capabilities, automatic updates, and excellent microservices support. Its autoscaling features allow efficient resource management. OpenShift emphasizes security, offers extensive DevOps tools, and advanced cluster management. It supports complex deployments and provides detailed control over deployments along with strong security and compliance features.

Room for Improvement: GKE needs improvement in backup systems, configuration simplicity, and enhanced application-level security. Users have called for better application security and a reliable backup system. OpenShift could improve in documentation, platform integration, and pricing. Its setup complexity and resource demands have been seen as a barrier to simple applications.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: GKE is noted for ease of deployment on public clouds, fitting for environments leveraging Google's infrastructure. It eases hybrid and multi-cloud deployments but could offer better technical support. OpenShift offers deployment flexibility across on-premises and cloud environments, supports hybrid models, but its customer service and complex setup can be challenging.

Pricing and ROI: GKE provides competitive pricing but can be expensive when addressing high availability. It uses a pay-as-you-go model with no initial licensing cost, suitable for startups and businesses. OpenShift’s premium pricing reflects its enterprise-ready capabilities, which can be costly for smaller organizations. Yet, it offers considerable value for larger enterprises due to its comprehensive features.

To learn more, read our detailed Google Kubernetes Engine vs. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Google Kubernetes Engine vs. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

July 2025

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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 Kubernetes Engine

Ranking in Container Management

11th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Red Hat OpenShift Container...

Ranking in Container Management

1st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Google Kubernetes Engine is 2.3%, down from 2.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is 20.0%, down from 21.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Container Management

Featured Reviews

Parthasarathy T

Cloud Associate DevOps at Publicis Sapient

Managed solutions enable efficient handling of web applications and migration projects

Google Kubernetes Engine can be improved by enabling the in-place upgrade of the machine type of an existing node pool since I currently need to destroy and recreate it. There is no feature present where I can upgrade directly, and having more than 1,000 to 2,000 workloads in one node pool makes changing the node pool name difficult for all those workloads. I choose eight out of ten mainly because of the node pool upgrade challenge I mentioned, but also because of the existence of Anthos service mesh, which is the ingress controller available only for the enterprise Kubernetes Engine. It would be beneficial if it could be offered in the normal Kubernetes Engine with any limitations.

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Prasad Gupta

Software Engineer at IBM Software Labs

Efficient deployment with resource optimization and multi-region stability

There are several areas where OpenShift could improve. The interface has numerous UI bugs that need addressing. Furthermore, the latest version has deprecated the deployment config, which has its own advantages compared to the deployment container. Lastly, there is no built-in auto-scaling plugin at the OpenShift level; this needs to be addressed as it's available at the cloud provider level, like IBM Cloud.

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

"The main advantage of GKE is that it is a managed service. This means that Google is responsible for managing the master node in the Kubernetes cluster system. As a result, we can focus on deploying applications to the slaves, while Google handles any updates and security patches. The fact that GKE is fully integrated into the Google ecosystem, including solutions such as BigQuery and VertexAI. This makes it easier for us to integrate these tools into our process. This integration ultimately speeds up our time to market and reduces the time and effort spent on managing infrastructure. The managed aspect of GKE allows us to simply deploy and utilize it without having to worry about the technicalities of infrastructure management."

"Regarding deployment in the cloud platform, it is simple because there are pre-configured configurations."

"The most valuable aspect of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is its managed nature, which significantly reduces the burden on our platform team."

"The scalability is the best feature."

"GKE is easier to understand and use than Elastic Kubernetes Service."

"Before using this solution, it was a lot of manual tasks and a lot of people participated in the process."

"The initial setup process is simpler and more user-friendly than other cloud providers."

"I am satisfied with the stability offered by the solution."

More Google Kubernetes Engine pros

"OpenShift integrates seamlessly with our CI/CD pipelines, offering robust automation and deployment capabilities."

"The platform is easy to scale as it supports Windows worker node."

"The console or the GUI of OpenShift is awesome. You can do a lot of things from there. You can perform administration tasks as well as development tasks."

"Technical support is good; they are fast and reliable."

"The software is user-friendly and straightforward to use, which is favorable to a developer."

"The architecture is the best. The solution is scalable if you are on a container-based solution."

"The stack in the software supply chain is one of the main reasons that we use OpenShift. When I came to this company, we bought hardware from IBM named Bluemix, and they used ICP, which stands for IBM Cloud Private."

"It is easy to expand."

More Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform pros

Cons

"The product’s visible allocation feature needs improvement."

"It needs to support load balancing."

"The user interface could be improved."

"The user interface is a bit confusing sometimes. You need to navigate between the various consoles we have. It's hard to figure out where things are. It's frustrating. The documentation could be a bit better."

"The notifications are not informative."

"One of the things I missed a bit is the visibility and availability of solutions. If I compare it to a different solution, it is a bit behind."

"Google Kubernetes Engine is less stable in some highly complex deployments with many nodes."

"There is a limitation for our infrastructure. It's very complex to see in one dashboard all the components and all the behavior on performance. I am looking for some additional tools for that. If I want to check the disk or file storage, it gets complex. There should be an integrated dashboard so that we can manage everything through a single pane."

More Google Kubernetes Engine cons

"It is difficult to deploy the OpenShift cluster in a bare-metal environment."

"We encounter difficulties while accessing the environment and managing the cluster. This particular area needs improvement."

"Things are there and the documentation is there, however, there still needs to be quick guides available."

"The solution does not work on a route-wise NFS."

"Metrics monitoring feature needs improvement."

"The product monitoring tool does not work for us."

"OpenShift Container Platform needs to work on integrations."

"Quality of support may be improved."

More Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is a little bit expensive."

"Its pricing is good. They bill us only per user. That's nice."

"The pricing for GKE is dependent on the type of machine or virtual machine (VM) that is selected for the nodes in the cluster. There is a degree of flexibility in choosing the specifications of the machine, such as the number of CPUs, GPUs, and so on. Google provides a variety of options, allowing the user to create the desired cluster composition. However, the cost can be quite steep when it comes to regional clusters, which are necessary for high availability and failover. This redundancy is crucial for businesses and is required to handle an increase in requests in case of any issues in one region, such as jumping to a different region in case of a failure in the Toronto region. While it may be tempting to choose the cheapest type of machines, this may result in a limited capacity and user numbers, requiring over-provisioning to handle additional requests, such as those for a web application."

"The price for Google Kubernetes Engine could be lower - I'd rate its pricing at three out of five."

"Pricing is a bit expensive compared to some other products, but it's acceptable."

"I would rate Kubernetes' pricing four out of five."

"This is an open source solution, so there is no pricing or licensing."

"I would rate the solution's pricing a nine out of ten. The tool costs around 3000 dollars per month. There are no additional costs apart from these."

More Google Kubernetes Engine pricing and cost advice

"I'm not familiar with pricing or financial aspects. In terms of effort versus benefit, it's worth it."

"OpenShift with Red Hat support is pretty costly. We have done a comparison between AWS EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Services) which provides fully managed services from AWS. It's built on open-source-based Kubernetes clusters and it is much cheaper compared to Red Hat, but it is a little expensive compared to ECS provided by AWS."

"The pricing is a bit more expensive than expected."

"The license to use the OpenShift Container Platform is free. If you are capable with Java you can modify it."

"It largely depends on how much money they earn from the application being deployed; you don't normally deploy an app just for the purpose of having it. You must constantly look into your revenue and how much you spend every container, minute, or hour of how much it is working."

"The pricing and licensing are handled on an upper management level, and I'm not involved in that, but I understand the solution to be somewhat pricey."

"Its price is a bit high because it's a premium product, but as long as the business is ready to pay for that, it's okay."

"Its licensing is completely incomprehensible. We have special people within our company. They discuss with Red Hat subscription managers. It is too complex, and I do not understand it. We are from the government, and we are trying to be as cheap as possible. Sometimes, I am just amazed at the amount of money that we have to pay. It is crazy."

More Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

23%

Computer Software Company

10%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

11%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Google Kubernetes Engine?

The product has no downtime.

See all answers

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

Google Kubernetes Engine solution is expensive, as are all cloud solutions in general. On a scale of one to ten for pricing, I would rate it between seven and eight.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Google Kubernetes Engine?

I have no comment about the learning curve of Google Kubernetes Engine. Regarding AI integration and features in Google Kubernetes Engine, there are currently none available. I would appreciate see...

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Which is better - OpenShift Container Platform or VMware Tanzu Mission Control?

Red Hat Openshift is ideal for organizations using microservices and cloud environments. I like that the platform is auto-scalable, which saves overhead time for developers. I think Openshift can b...

See all answers

What do you like most about OpenShift Container Platform?

The tool's most valuable features include high availability, scalability, and security. Other features like advanced cluster management, advanced cluster security, and Red Hat Quay make it powerful...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for OpenShift Container Platform?

The current licensing cost for this solution is around $23,000 per year, per month. Regarding the current licensing cost, I would rate my satisfaction around seven or seven and a half; there's alwa...

See all answers

Comparisons

Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode) vs Google Kubernetes Engine

Compared 17% of the time

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Google Kubernetes Engine

Compared 13% of the time

Docker vs Google Kubernetes Engine

Compared 13% of the time

Rancher Labs vs Google Kubernetes Engine

Compared 11% of the time

Kubernetes vs Google Kubernetes Engine

Compared 10% of the time

More Google Kubernetes Engine Competitors

Amazon EKS vs Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

Compared 47% of the time

Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE vs Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

Compared 13% of the time

Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) vs Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

Compared 9% of the time

HashiCorp Nomad vs Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

Compared 5% of the time

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

Compared 3% of the time

More Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Google Kubernetes Engine

August 2025

Download Google Kubernetes Engine product report

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

August 2025

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform report

Download Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform product report

Also Known As

GKE

No data available

Overview

Kubernetes Engine is a managed, production-ready environment for deploying containerized applications. It brings our latest innovations in developer productivity, resource efficiency, automated operations, and open source flexibility to accelerate your time to market.

Google

Red Hat® OpenShift® offers a consistent hybrid cloud foundation for building and scaling containerized applications. Benefit from streamlined platform installation and upgrades from one of the enterprise Kubernetes leaders.

Red Hat

Sample Customers

Philips Lighting, Alpha Vertex, GroupBy, BQ

Edenor, BMW, Ford, Argentine Ministry of Health

Buyer's Guide

Google Kubernetes Engine vs. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

July 2025

Free Report: Google Kubernetes Engine vs. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

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