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 64 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

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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

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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

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.

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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

"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."

"The price of IBM Cloud is most valuable for us. The service is personable and gives us a good rapport. I can't say it's the best, but it was enough for our needs."

"It is a scalable product. You can scale it up and down."

"The beauty of cloud service providers, especially public cloud service providers, is that they are scalable every time when you need them because their payment model is pay-as-you-go."

"The availability is second to none. Customer support is very good."

"It is easy to deploy what you need for the initial setup"

"It's straightforward, has a good environment and is cost-effective."

"For non-complex applications, the IBM Cloud works fine and the price is much lower than the competitors."

More IBM Public Cloud pros

"It's cloud agnostic and the containerization and security features are outstanding."

"The most valuable feature is the auto scalers for all microservices. The feature allows us to place request limits and it is much cheaper than AWS."

"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 security is good."

"Self-provisioning support saves a lot of time and unnecessary work from the system administrator who can use this time to run and monitor the infrastructure. For the developer, this means less time waiting for the provisioning and excellent flexibility for development, testing, and production. Also, in such systems it is easy for developers to monitor applications even after deployment."

"OpenShift is more enterprise-oriented, offers good support, and provides integration with multiple solutions."

"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."

"In terms of implementation, OpenShift is very user-friendly, which is an advantage. We are using it along with GitLab for implementing CI/CD pipelines. That's a feature that other products also have, but in OpenShift, we find it good."

More Red Hat OpenShift pros

Cons

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

"They do not have a very good virtual network implemented, and the VPC is the most important feature that needs to be improved."

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

"Support could be improved."

"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."

"Maybe performance enhancers and reports could be better improved. If they do so, it would be better. Of all the drawbacks I saw, this would be the biggest enhancement."

"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."

"It could be more secure."

More IBM Public Cloud cons

"This is a fairly expensive solution."

"There are challenges related to additional security layers, connectivity compliance for endpoints, and integration."

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

"There is no orchestration platform in OpenShift."

"Room for improvement is around the offerings that come as a bundle with the container platform. The packaging of the platform should be done such that customers do not have to purchase additional licenses."

"The interface could be simplified a bit more."

"The tool lacks some features to make it compliant with Kubernetes"

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

More Red Hat OpenShift cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

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

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a nine out of ten."

"The licensing fees are straightforward and predictable."

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

"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."

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

More IBM Public Cloud pricing and cost advice

"OpenShift is really good when we need to start, but once we get to a certain scale, it becomes too expensive."

"The product’s pricing is expensive."

"It's expensive. It may be cheaper to invest in building Vanilla Kubernetes, especially if security is not the number one motivation or requirement. Of course, that's difficult, and in some business areas, such as banking, that's not something you can put as a second priority. In other situations, a Vanilla Kubernetes with a sufficiently strong team can be cheaper and almost as effective."

"The price depends on the type and the nature of the organizations, along with the types of projects that are of considerable range."

"The cost is quite high."

"The model of pricing and buying licences is quite rigid. We are in the process of negotiating on demand pricing which will help us take advantage of the cloud as a whole."

"The pricing for OpenShift includes support and licensing, which costs approximately $400."

"The licensing cost for OpenShift is expensive when compared to other products. RedHat also charges you additional costs apart from the standard licensing fees."

More Red Hat OpenShift pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

University

18%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

25%

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	43

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 23% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs IBM Public Cloud

Compared 23% of the time

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) vs IBM Public Cloud

Compared 19% of the time

Dell ObjectScale vs IBM Public Cloud

Compared 5% of the time

VMware Tanzu Platform 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 6% 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

January 2026

Download IBM Public Cloud product report

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat OpenShift

January 2026

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

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