Google Kubernetes Engine vs Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform comparison

Google Kubernetes Engine vs. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

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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

10th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

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 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 Container Platform is 22.1%, up from 20.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Container Management

Featured Reviews

Immánuel Fodor

Product Manager at Traefik Labs

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.

Read full review

Vlado Velkovski

DevOps Architect at KIBS

Provides automation that speeds up our process by 30% and helps us achieve zero downtime

OpenShift has a pretty steep learning curve. It's not an easy tool to use. It's not only OpenShift but Kubernetes itself. The good thing is that Red Hat provides specific targeted training. There are five or six pieces of training where you can get certifications. The licenses for OpenShift are pretty expensive, so they could be cheaper because the competition isn't sleeping, and Red Hat must take that into account. There are a few versions of OpenShift. There is the normal OpenShift and an OpenShift Plus license. Red Hat could think of how to connect those two subscriptions because, with Red Hat Plus, you have one tool called ACM (Advanced Cluster Management), where you can manage multiple clusters from one place. We deployed this functionality by ourselves, but if you don't pay the license for Red Hat OpenShift Plus, you'll lack this functionality. If you have a multi-cloud environment and you have a lot of work to do, it would be a plus if the Red Had OpenShift Plus license came in a bundle with the regular solutions. This ACM tool should be available in the normal subscription, not just the Plus version. There are new versions on an almost weekly basis. I found myself that the upgrading of OpenShift clusters is not a task that will successfully finish every time. It's a simple and quick, but not reliable process. That's why we use multiple clusters. We use v4.10.3, but we want to move to v4.12.X. The upgrade process itself can fail, and we don't have backups of our OpenShift cluster because we have backups of all the Kubernetes manifests on GitHub. We destroy the cluster, bring up a new one quickly, and apply those scripts. The upgrade itself could be more resilient for us as administrators of OpenShift to be sure that it'll succeed and not occasionally fail. They can improve the reliability of their upgrade process. They also have implementations of some Red Hat-verified operators for a lot of products like Elasticsearch. They're good enough for development purposes, but some of the OpenShift operators still lack resilient production-grade configurations. Red Hat says that we have a few hundred operators, but I believe that only half of them are production-grade ready at this moment. They need to work much more on those operators to become more flexible because you can deploy all of them in development mode, but when we go to production grade and want to make specific changes to the operator and configuration, we lack those possibilities.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The logs are important for detecting problems in our clusters."

"Google Kubernetes Engine's most valuable features are microservices and its acquisition rate, which is very useful for scaling perspective."

"The features are typical Kubernetes, but Google One offers a better GUI-based deployment. It's more sophisticated and integrates well with other services, providing a better customer experience."

"I rate Google Kubernetes Engine a ten out of ten."

"The initial setup was very easy because it's like a Google platform as a service. It's just one button to set it up. The deployment took only a few minutes."

"We used automation for the initial setup. It was okay. So it wasn't too complex."

"I highly recommend it to others due to its comprehensive features and cost-effectiveness for various company sizes."

"GKE's plugin management and configuration sync are excellent features. The amount of data it provides is good, and I've been able to integrate it with the things I need."

More Google Kubernetes Engine pros

"The product is stable, reliable, and easy to use, from a well-known company, has a large volume handling capacity, and more and more organizations are moving to OpenShift."

"It has been a good solution to deploy all containerized applications."

"The auto scalability feature, which is based on smart agendas, determined from pre-prepared rules is the most valuable feature. You can also create different routes for deployment. Deployment types can be provided with an identifier, such as an ARB deployment. This really helped in rolling out releases without disrupting services for the end-users."

"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."

"More tools are available in OpenShift Container Platform to maintain and manage the clusters."

"The banking transactions, inquiries, and account opening have been the most valuable."

"The initial setup process is easy."

"The platform has significantly improved our organization by enhancing productivity and reducing the time required to deploy applications."

More Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform pros

Cons

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

"I use the Firebase tool with GKE and it would be helpful if the solution can give notifications when we reach the budget limit."

"The product could be cheaper."

"We would like to see some improvement in the ease of integration with this solution."

"The console for this solution could be improved because it is very limited."

"t is not very stable."

"Their documentation is a little here and there. Sometimes, the information is not clear or updated. Their documentation should be a little bit better."

"The user interface could be improved."

More Google Kubernetes Engine cons

"In my experience, the issues are not always simply technical. They do stem from technical challenges, but they struggle with the topic of adoption. When you encounter all of the customer pull, there are normally several tiers of your client pop that can adopt either the fundamental features or a little more advanced ones. The majority of the time, the challenge is determining how to drive adoption, how to sell the product to the customer, and how much time they can spend to really utilize those advanced features. If we get into much more detail, but this is from my perspective as the platform engineer and not the end customer, the ability of the end user to be able to debug potential issues with their application That is arguably the most important, let's say, work throughput in my area."

"One area for product improvement is the support limitations within the subscription models, particularly the restricted support hours for lower-tier subscriptions."

"Quality of support may be improved."

"We are not big customers of Red Hat, but sometimes, we have severe bugs. We are very innovative, and sometimes, we have to wait for a long time to get proper attention. Red Hat should improve on that."

"OpenShift has certain restrictions in terms of managing the cluster when it's running on a public cloud. For example, identity and access management integration with the IM of AWS is quite difficult. It requires some open-source tools to integrate. This is one area where I always see room for improvement."

"The product could benefit from additional operators and tools integrated with OpenShift."

"The solution needs to introduce open ID connect integration for role-based access control."

"OpenShift has a pretty steep learning curve. It's not an easy tool to use. It's not only OpenShift but Kubernetes itself. The good thing is that Red Hat provides specific targeted training. There are five or six pieces of training where you can get certifications. The licenses for OpenShift are pretty expensive, so they could be cheaper because the competition isn't sleeping, and Red Hat must take that into account."

More Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Initially, Google Kubernetes Engine was a little bit cheaper, but now its prices have been increased compared to the pricing model and the features that are made available by its competitors."

"Currently, it costs around $1000 per month which sorted our deployment. So once we get more clients, having a huge suffix, costs can go up."

"I rate the product's price a six on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price. The product is competitively priced."

"The tool's licensing costs are yearly."

"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."

"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."

"The product is a little bit expensive."

More Google Kubernetes Engine pricing and cost advice

"We have to pay for the license."

"The pricing is expensive for licensing."

"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."

"If you buy the product for a year or three, you get a lot of discounts...I feel that the product is worth its cost, especially since setting it up can be done with just a few clicks."

"We currently have an annual license renewal."

"It depends on who you're talking to. For a large corporation, it is acceptable, other than the significant infrastructure requirements. For a small organization, it is in no way suitable, and we'd go for Amazon's container solution."

"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."

"OpenShift pricing varies by region. For example, a simple cluster with three nodes in DAL-10 might cost around $560 to $580 per month, subject to specific configurations like memory and CPU cores."

More Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

12%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

12%

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.

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...

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...

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...

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

OpenShift pricing varies by region. For example, a simple cluster with three nodes in DAL-10 might cost around $560 to $580 per month, subject to specific configurations like memory and CPU cores.

Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode) vs Google Kubernetes Engine

Comparisons

Compared 23% of the time

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Google Kubernetes Engine

Compared 15% of the time

Rancher Labs vs Google Kubernetes Engine

Compared 12% of the time

Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE vs Google Kubernetes Engine

Compared 10% of the time

Kubernetes vs Google Kubernetes Engine

Compared 9% 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 16% of the time

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

Compared 7% of the time

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

Compared 5% of the time

Kubernetes vs Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

Compared 1% of the time

More Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Google Kubernetes Engine

Download Google Kubernetes Engine product report

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

Download Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform product report

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 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

Google Kubernetes Engine vs. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform