IBM Public Cloud vs Red Hat OpenShift comparison

IBM and Red Hat are both solutions in the PaaS Clouds category. IBM is ranked #17 with an average rating of 6.5, while Red Hat is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.3. IBM holds a 3.0% mindshare in PSP, compared to Red Hat’s 9.5% mindshare. Additionally, 83% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Red Hat users who would recommend it.

IBM Public Cloud

Read 18 IBM Public Cloud reviews

2,088 Views
1,817 Comparison Views

83% willing to recommend

Red Hat OpenShift

Read 63 Red Hat OpenShift reviews

10,704 Views
6,101 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

IBM Public Cloud

Red Hat OpenShift

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

IBM Public Cloud and Red Hat OpenShift are leading products in cloud solutions and container management. IBM Public Cloud stands out for its cost-effective pricing and strong support, while Red Hat OpenShift is preferred for its comprehensive features despite higher costs.

Features: IBM Public Cloud offers global scalability, robust data protection, and AI integration. Red Hat OpenShift features seamless Kubernetes orchestration, enhanced developer tools, and strong integration capabilities, making it a prime choice for container management.

Room for Improvement: IBM could enhance its feature set related to container orchestration and developer tools. Red Hat could work on reducing costs and expanding AI capabilities for better analytics integration.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM provides a fast scalability model and extensive customer service, making it ideal for enterprises. Red Hat OpenShift focuses on seamless integration with existing systems and offers both robust community support and professional services, excelling in container deployment.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Public Cloud offers competitive pricing with significant ROI through its AI capabilities. Red Hat OpenShift, while potentially more expensive, provides compelling ROI with efficient container management aimed at long-term operational efficiency.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Public Cloud vs. Red Hat OpenShift Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Public Cloud vs. Red Hat OpenShift

December 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 879,477 peers since 2012

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

IBM Public Cloud

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

17th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IoT Platforms (3rd)

Red Hat OpenShift

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

3rd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Server Virtualization Software (11th), Container Management (10th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (5th), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of IBM Public Cloud is 3.0%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 9.5%, down from 11.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

PaaS Clouds Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Red Hat OpenShift	9.5%
IBM Public Cloud	3.0%
Other	87.5%

PaaS Clouds

Featured Reviews

Premnath Jaganathan

Product Manager at Uop Ipl

Affordability and security improve our cloud experience while learning new systems

I'm not working with any AI features in IBM Public Cloud, but they are in the process of building it.I am very satisfied with the security that IBM Public Cloud provides. I would rate IBM Public Cloud eight out of ten, where one is worst and ten is the best.

Read full review

Pratul Shukla

Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Adopting a flexible and efficient approach with noticeable improvements in operational costs and continued challenges in job management

Currently, one of the biggest challenges we face is with services and jobs. For spawning batches, although it has crons, it is not easy to integrate with enterprise systems such as Autosys. The entire company uses Autosys, but we are not able to integrate it effectively. We need intermediate servers to run OC utility commands and initiate the cron job. We have to do a lot of modifications to ensure our batches work properly. With physical or virtual servers, even in AWS, we are able to write and manage multiple jobs. Managing batches in Red Hat OpenShift has been a significant challenge. Integrating third parties is a challenge with Red Hat OpenShift. For example, with Elasticsearch, onboarding itself was difficult, running file beats and dealing with routing issues. It is not straightforward, especially since we have some components in AWS as. AWS has many capabilities that come out of the box and are easier to work with compared to Red Hat OpenShift. Red Hat OpenShift's biggest disadvantage is they do not provide any private cloud setup where we can host on our site using their services. The main reason we went with Red Hat OpenShift was because it is a private cloud, and we have regulatory requirements that prevent us from using public 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

"What I like most in IBM Public Cloud is how easy it is to create serverless functions. They are called IBM functions, but in AWS, they are called Lambda functions. Those are pretty standard, and another thing I like the most is that you have fewer restrictions on the amount of data you can transfer across those functions. IBM Public Cloud is way more flexible than AWS. I also like that IBM Public Cloud is pretty straightforward to integrate. As long as you have all the tools IBM provides you, getting everything up and running is straightforward."

"One of the features that I really like about IBM Cloud is the flexibility where you can order your own hardware."

"The most valuable feature of IBM Public Cloud is the AI integrations."

"The initial setup was very easy. It's quite straightforward. Deployment took about fifteen minutes. Everything is well organized."

"This is a predictable and dependable service."

"An advantage of IBM Public Cloud is the bare metal server. We can take the bare metal server. It's not shared with anyone. We can deploy our applications without sharing them with anyone. That is an advantage of IBM Public Cloud."

"It provides robust analytics and management tools to give customers complete visibility into their environment and infrastructure."

"I've found the stability to be excellent. The performance is good."

More IBM Public Cloud pros

"I love to automate everything and OpenShift was been born for that. It takes care of the network layer itself and I don't need to dive into it; I can work on a top level. Our project has numerous services designed to run in Docker containers, and we have run almost all pieces in OpenShift."

"OpenShift's superior dashboard is a notable strength, especially when compared to Kubernetes."

"What I like best about OpenShift is that it can reduce some of the costs of having multiple applications because you can just move them into small container applications. For example, applications don't need to run for twenty days, only to be used up by Monday. Through OpenShift, you can move some of the small applications into any cloud. I also find the design of OpenShift good."

"This solution is providing a platform with OOTB features that are difficult to build from scratch."

"There is a quick deployment of the application, and we can scale out efficiently."

"We are able to operate client’s platform without downtime during security patch management each month and provide a good SLA (as scalability for applications is processed during heavy client website load, automatically)."

"The scalability of OpenShift combined with Kubernetes is good. At least from the software standpoint, it becomes quite easy to handle the scalability through configuration. You need to constantly monitor the underlying infrastructure and ensure that it has adequate provisioning. If you have enough infrastructure, then managing the scalability is quite easy which is done through configuration."

"I like OCP, and the management UI is better than the open-source ones."

More Red Hat OpenShift pros

Cons

"It will be challenging to implement if you do not have any experience."

"The solution’s pricing could be improved."

"Normally, for any cloud, we get a lot of information on the web, but that is missing in the case of IBM Public Cloud. We need some technical support documents. That is the only thing missing in IBM Public Cloud."

"I would like to see a more user-friendly deployment process in the next release of this solution."

"Recently, we just faced some issues with the operating system due to the end of life of CentOS 6...So, then the client wanted to try it out under AWS instead of IBM. In short, it has some complexities."

"The connectivity and speed of IBM Public Cloud are much lower compared to the competition."

"An area for improvement in IBM Public Cloud is getting up-to-date information on how to set up everything. It's hard to find new documentation."

"While they have about 99% of what we need, the only exception, perhaps, was the push notification feature that was discontinued. They delayed the replacement product."

More IBM Public Cloud cons

"OpenShift can improve monitoring. Sometimes there are issues. Additionally, the solution could benefit from protective tools if something was to happen in our network."

"OpenShift's storage management could be better."

"One glaring flaw is how OpenShift handles operators. Sometimes operators are forced to go into a particular namespace. When you do that, OpenShift creates an installation plan for everything in that namespace. These operators may be completely separate from each other and have nothing to do with each other, but now they are tied at the hip. You can't upgrade one without upgrading all of them. That's a huge mistake and highly problematic."

"Autoscaling is a very unique feature, but it could be useful to have more options based on traffic statistics, for example, via Prometheus. So, there should be more ready solutions to autoscale based on specific applications."

"I had to frequently upgrade my cluster due to OpenShift's rolling updates every six months, which I found to be excessive."

"This solution could be improved by offering best practices on standardization and additional guidance on how to use this solution."

"If we can have a GUI-based configuration with better flexibility then it will be great."

More Red Hat OpenShift cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the trial version of this solution, so we have not paid anything."

"The licensing fees are straightforward and predictable."

"Pricing is not as fair as Amazon or Azure."

"IBM Public Cloud is pretty cheap. They have an ongoing free tier that basically won't expire, so as long as your solution is small enough, you can have a test set that you can use for demos, which will cost you almost nothing."

"The price of IBM Cloud is very cheap compared to competitors AWS and Azure."

"It pretty much has a standard price. There is no hidden price with IBM Public Cloud."

"In order to be competitive, you have to commit to a contract for at least one year, but you pay a fixed monthly fee."

"IBM has a lesser price compared to other cloud service providers like Azure and AWS."

More IBM Public Cloud pricing and cost advice

"We use the license-free version of Red Hat Openshift but we pay for the support."

"Pricing of OpenShift depends on the number of nodes and who is hosting it."

"We had a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) license for all our servers' operating systems. By having multiple Red Hat products together, you can negotiate costs and leverage on having a sort of enterprise license agreement to reduce the overall outlay or TCO."

"This solution is fairly expensive but comes at an average cost compared to other solutions in the market."

"My company makes payments towards the licensing costs attached to OpenShift."

"I don't deal with the cost part, but I know that the cost is very high when compared to other products. They charge for CPU and memory, but we don't worry about it."

"The cost is quite high."

"We are currently using the open version, OKD. We plan to get the enterprise version in the future."

More Red Hat OpenShift pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which PaaS Clouds solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

879,477 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

University

17%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

26%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	13
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	4

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	17
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	41

Questions from the Community

Which is preferable - IBM Public Cloud or Microsoft Azure?

IBM Public Cloud is IBM’s Platform-as-a-Service. It aims to provide organizations with a secure cloud environment to manage data and applications. One of the features we like is the cloud activity ...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Public Cloud?

The prices are relatively lower compared to others. It is a good option for medium-sized businesses. However, businesses should also consider other vendors to ensure they meet their specific securi...

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM Public Cloud?

The connectivity and speed of IBM Public Cloud are much lower compared to the competition.

See all answers

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 ...

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

What do you like most about OpenShift?

OpenShift facilitates DevOps practices and improves CI/CD workflows in terms of stability compared to Jenkins.

See all answers

Comparisons

Amazon AWS vs IBM Public Cloud

Compared 24% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs IBM Public Cloud

Compared 21% of the time

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) vs IBM Public Cloud

Compared 21% of the time

Dell ObjectScale vs IBM Public Cloud

Compared 6% of the time

IBM Cloud Private vs IBM Public Cloud

Compared 3% of the time

More IBM Public Cloud Competitors

Microsoft Azure vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 9% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 8% of the time

Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 7% of the time

Proxmox VE vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 7% of the time

VMware ESXi vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 5% of the time

More Red Hat OpenShift Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Public Cloud

December 2025

Download IBM Public Cloud product report

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat OpenShift

December 2025

Download Red Hat OpenShift product report

Also Known As

IBM Bluemix

No data available

Overview

IBM Cloud is a full-stack cloud platform that spans public, private and hybrid environments. Build with a robust suite of advanced data and AI tools, and draw on deep industry expertise to help you on your journey to the cloud.

IBM

Red Hat OpenShift offers a robust, scalable platform with strong security and automation, suitable for container orchestration, application deployment, and microservices architecture.

Designed to modernize applications by transitioning from legacy systems to cloud-native environments, Red Hat OpenShift provides powerful CI/CD integration and Kubernetes compatibility. Its security features, multi-cloud support, and source-to-image functionality enhance deployment flexibility. While the GUI offers user-friendly navigation, users benefit from its cloud-agnostic nature and efficient lifecycle management. However, improvements are needed in documentation, configuration complexity, and integration with third-party platforms. Pricing and high resource demands can also be challenging for wider adoption.

What are the key features of Red Hat OpenShift?

Security: Comprehensive security features ensure safe deployments and operations.
Scalability: Auto-scaling and monitoring capabilities cater to high-demand environments.
CI/CD Integration: Seamless integration for efficient continuous deployment processes.
Cloud Compatibility: Supports multi-cloud and on-premise solutions with ease.
GUI: Simplifies platform management and enhances usability.

What benefits and ROI should users look for?

Improved Efficiency: Streamlined operations reduce time and resource investments.
Enhanced Flexibility: Adapt quickly to changing demands and environments.
Quick Deployment: Fast application deployment supports agile project timelines.
Robust Support: Access to dependable customer support services.

Red Hat OpenShift is strategically implemented for diverse industries focusing on container orchestration and application modernization. Organizations leverage it for migrating applications to cloud-native environments and managing CI/CD pipelines. Its functionality facilitates efficient resource management and microservices architecture adoption, supporting enterprise-level DevOps practices. Users employ it across cloud and on-premises platforms to drive performance improvements.

Red Hat

Sample Customers

Uvionics Tech, Komsomolskaya Pravda, Alpha Modus, Inventive, Web Business Consulting, FindBrok, SilverHook Powerboats, United Way of Allegheny County

UPS, Cathay Pacific, Hilton

Buyer's Guide

IBM Public Cloud vs. Red Hat OpenShift

December 2025

Free Report: IBM Public Cloud vs. Red Hat OpenShift

Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Public Cloud vs. Red Hat OpenShift and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

879,477 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our IBM Public Cloud vs. Red Hat OpenShift report.

See our list of best PaaS Clouds vendors.

We monitor all PaaS Clouds reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.