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Google Kubernetes Engine vs VMware Tanzu Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 29, 2026

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
6.1
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Tanzu Platform
Ranking in Container Management
9th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Build Automation (17th), PaaS Clouds (13th), Cloud Management (33rd), Development Platforms (5th), Service Mesh (8th), Agile and DevOps Services (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Google Kubernetes Engine is 3.9%, up from 2.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Tanzu Platform is 7.2%, down from 12.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Container Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Tanzu Platform7.2%
Google Kubernetes Engine3.9%
Other88.9%
Container Management
 

Featured Reviews

ParthasarathyT - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Infrastructure Engineer 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.
ErmiasGirma - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at Safaricom Ethiopia plc
Has supported container-based deployments and improved infrastructure visibility through monitoring tools
Aria Operations, formerly known as VMware vRealize Operations, has been renamed to vROps. We are currently using this for monitoring purposes. For orchestration, we are using VCD to automate Telco Cloud. VCD is an automation tool, and we are also using VMware Tanzu Platform for the Kubernetes environment, alongside TKG, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. These are also other solutions for the Tanzu Kubernetes environment. For Telco Cloud, we are using it to automate our company's operations, which is for a telecom company. We are familiar with these products, especially vCenter, ESXi, VCD, vCF, and vROps. It is very easy to integrate applications when we deploy vCenter and ESXi since we can enable vSphere with Tanzu feature. We can build namespaces and provide application developers the platform to deploy their applications on pods within containerization. We can easily manage, pull results, and create containers efficiently, making it a simple way to handle applications. We provide namespace labels for application developers, and we can manage their resources along with other aspects easily. Regarding security, we use many tools such as CDX and LDAP, AD for integrating our Kubernetes cluster with the developer teams. We can manage roles and permissions simply. It is very straightforward to integrate with EDX and other third-party tools, Active Directory, to the Kubernetes cluster, allowing easy access and management.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"It is easy to use and deploy."
"The scalability is the best feature."
"Management and deployment of a lot of containers could be very easy."
"The most beneficial feature is the ability to separate each project and manage permissions more effectively."
"The most valuable aspect of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is its managed nature, which significantly reduces the burden on our platform team."
"Google Kubernetes Engine has positively impacted my organization in migration-based projects such as on-prem to GCP and AWS to GCP, as we migrated more than thousands, even 10,000s workload in Google Kubernetes Engine."
"The valuable feature I have found to be the management of Kubernetes clusters in a private cloud or public clouds, such as Azure or Google Cloud Platform."
"VMware Tanzu Mission Control has many valuable features, such as ease of use and customization."
"It definitely gives the end customer a good overview and perspective of running applications in terms of overall workload footprint. TMC provides a very detailed description of your cloud-native application in the form of graphical visualization."
"The multi-tenancy with the VCD is great."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the ability to check the flow of all the different variants within our applications."
"The initial setup is easy."
"The observability platform and end-to-end service portal provided by Tanzu are the most valuable features."
"We never experienced any problems with scalability."
 

Cons

"The notifications are not informative."
"The solution does not have a visual interface."
"Their documentation is a little here and there. Sometimes, the information is not clear or updated. Their documentation should be a little bit better."
"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."
"The management UI could be improved. When looking at the web interface, it feels kind of slow due to the many features involved."
"Google Kubernetes Engine solution is expensive, as are all cloud solutions in general."
"We would like to see some improvement in the ease of integration with this solution."
"I would like the solution to integrate with another Kubernetes product. I would also like it to monitor other platforms. It needs to also include scale-up container in the tool's next release."
"Cost is always a concern. Smaller companies might find the price a bigger issue."
"The implementation is not easy, it is very complex and can take a day or two to complete."
"VMware Tanzu Service Mesh could add better integration with other cloud platforms, such as vRealize Automation or VMware vCloud Director for cloud providers."
"The price is very high compared to other Kubernetes environments because Kubernetes is open source."
"The installation of VMware Tanzu Service Mesh is very complex."
"It is not easy to build a solution with containers. It has a graphical user interface, but you need to have a lot of knowledge of Linux and how to work in the command mode. Its support can also be improved. Currently, its biggest disadvantage is that it is a new product, and the clients prefer to go for a solution that has been in the market for a long time. There are not that many people who know this product."
"Having a unified dashboard to manage all infrastructure, whether it involves additional IT infrastructure or modern apps, would be highly advantageous"
"Another area of improvement is pricing."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are planning to use external support, and hire a commercial partner for it."
"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."
"The price for Google Kubernetes Engine could be lower - I'd rate its pricing at three out of five."
"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 solution's price is reasonable."
"The product is a little bit expensive."
"It is competitive, and it is not expensive. It is almost competitive with AWS and the rest of the cloud solutions. We are spending around 3K USD per month. There are four projects that are currently running, and each one is incurring a cost of around 3K USD."
"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 solution is only for large or medium size enterprises because it is expensive."
"The least expensive licensing cost for VMware is around $350 per core."
"It is not the most expensive option, and I believe the capabilities align well with the value it provides."
"The licensing cost is expensive."
"The price of VMware Tanzu Mission Control is greater than that of Red Hat's competitor solution"
"One of our Spanish customers told us that VMware Tanzu Service Mesh is a very expensive product for their data center."
"The license for VMware Tanzu Application Service is expensive. The license should be cheaper."
"The product is not expensive, but it is not cheap."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business21
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise17
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise11
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google Kubernetes Engine?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Google Kubernetes Engine is straightforward, as I previously indicated. The need for humans is reduced with GCP since there is no need for ...
What needs improvement with Google Kubernetes Engine?
The price could be a bit cheaper. I don't see anything with Google Kubernetes Engine that needs to be improved. I think they are already implementing Kubernetes itself, so they are the owners. Howe...
What is your primary use case for Google Kubernetes Engine?
I use Google Kubernetes Engine for many purposes, most notably for websites, but the websites are microservices. However, some mega projects have many machines that needed to be containerized, so w...
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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Concourse for VMware Tanzu?
The least expensive licensing cost for VMware is around $350 per core. Pricing varies based on commitment and volumetric, with discounts provided for long-term commitments. VMware sells directly or...
What needs improvement with Concourse for VMware Tanzu?
The price is very high compared to other Kubernetes environments because Kubernetes is open source. We can easily work with Docker, and when we compare it with OpenShift, the price is very high. We...
 

Also Known As

GKE, Google Kubernetes
Tanzu Application Catalog, Application Platform, Application Service, Hub, Mission Control, Service Mesh, Build Service, Concourse for VMware Tanzu
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Philips Lighting, Alpha Vertex, GroupBy, BQ
Verizon, Cerner, Zipcar, Avarteq
Find out what your peers are saying about Google Kubernetes Engine vs. VMware Tanzu Platform and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.