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Istio vs VMware Tanzu Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 15, 2025

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

Istio
Ranking in Service Mesh
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Tanzu Platform
Ranking in Service Mesh
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Build Automation (13th), PaaS Clouds (13th), Cloud Management (25th), Development Platforms (3rd), Container Management (3rd), Agile and DevOps Services (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Service Mesh category, the mindshare of Istio is 21.8%, up from 21.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Tanzu Platform is 2.6%, down from 5.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Service Mesh
 

Featured Reviews

JETTI DINESH REDDY - PeerSpot reviewer
Enhanced microservice security and advanced traffic management and good authentification
When our developers are building the microservices, instead of imposing additional burdens or additional thinking on them, especially as part of network features such as traffic management, security, or observability, we deploy something from the infrastructure side, so developers need only focus…
DarshanChaudhari - PeerSpot reviewer
Empowers seamless connectivity and integration through APIs while offering robust auto-scaling
I am involved in IT services and we provide a solution to customers. We work with VMware, Nutanix, OpenShift, and Microsoft Hyper-V The Tanzu platform is highly available, scalable, and flexible. It offers native services for autoscaling and integrations through APIs, allowing seamless…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Istio's best feature is that it's easy to use."
"Istio makes all that much easier - traffic splits, percentage traffic splits, doing some sort of chaos testing to see how it works."
"Istio provides tremendous value, particularly in offering TLS and authentication over microservice-to-microservice communication."
"The most valuable features of Istio are the traffic management and the Sidecar they inject, which greatly helps secure the application."
"The security feature with mutual TLS authentication, which is identity-based, and the traffic management using cloud load balancers are very valuable."
"The load balancing, service application, and monitoring of the life of the service are valuable features. We use it for authentication of call services, load balancing the calls among the service providers on service instances, and monitoring the health of the services."
"What I find particularly valuable about Istio is that it is free of cost."
"The tool's mutual TLS stands out. It provides secure communication between services within the cluster. Additionally, Istio offers built-in telemetry and tracing with tools like Jaeger, which aids monitoring and troubleshooting."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the ability to check the flow of all the different variants within our applications."
"There are a lot of services available in VMware Tanzu Application Service, such as databases and application servers. You have everything you need in one application and you do not need to search outside of the solution."
"The multi-tenancy with the VCD is great."
"The initial setup is easy."
"The observability platform and end-to-end service portal provided by Tanzu are the most valuable features."
"Tanzu is easy to upgrade and scale, whether we're talking about horizontal or vertical scaling. It is as smooth as possible without any downtime. The platform maintenance, upgrading, and operations part is very smooth."
"A feature we find valuable is that other products can also be integrated with Mission Control. This means that we can see the status of specific clusters, as well as view the monitoring application logs all from one point."
"Tanzu Mission Control has quite a set of rich features when compared to OpenShift."
 

Cons

"For our use case that we applied it to, there were graph queues and the calls that were coming in. There were the things that we couldn't apply at the time, but it kind of worked."
"I've seen applications where they had such strict time constraints, they couldn't use Istio because it was too much overhead."
"Istio's documentation is basic and would benefit from more examples."
"It would be beneficial if Istio offered paid support options, similar to AWS's enterprise support, to quickly resolve issues that might affect production."
"Based on my experience, the solution could be improved. They could simplify the learning process so that users can understand how its features work together, especially with components like Kibana. Learning about the different components is necessary. For instance, you need to understand the traffic flow, potential bottlenecks, and the architecture within Istio."
"It would be good if the solution had more community forums."
"Reducing the latency between the control plane and the data plane would be beneficial."
"Handling large-scale environments with proxies can strain resources, but horizontal scaling can improve fault tolerance."
"Addressing the high upfront costs could improve the product. Implementing a subscription-based model with tiered service options could make it more accessible to a broader range of customers."
"Customers have noticed a considerable price increase after VMware's acquisition by Broadcom."
"The implementation is not easy, it is very complex and can take a day or two to complete."
"Customers have noticed a considerable price increase after VMware's acquisition by Broadcom."
"The infrastructure is quite challenging."
"Cost is always a concern. Smaller companies might find the price a bigger issue."
"This product doesn't have a GUI. In order to use it properly, I need to connect it to a new GUI or build a GUI to manage it — it's pretty difficult."
"I would like to see additional support for things outside of Cloud Foundry."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is on the less expensive side. It provides a significant saving for us in terms of cost and other things. It is open-source. We just download it from the open-source framework and use it."
"We use the tool's open-source version, so there are no hidden fees or additional costs associated with it."
"You can deploy Istio free of cost and don't need to pay for it."
"It is not the most expensive option, and I believe the capabilities align well with the value it provides."
"The product is not expensive, but it is not cheap."
"VMware Tanzu Mission Control is cheaper than Red Hat OpenShift."
"The solution is only for large or medium size enterprises because it is expensive."
"One of our Spanish customers told us that VMware Tanzu Service Mesh is a very expensive product for their data center."
"I would recommend that businesses look into the full price for their requirements. The price is high, but there are some open-source add-ons that can be used for customization while keeping costs down, although these might not be suitable for everyone."
"The licensing cost is expensive."
"Since we were at a large data center, the price might not have been a concern for us."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Retailer
7%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Istio?
Istio provides a significant saving for us in terms of costs since it is open source. However, Istio can still come at a price. It has a steep learning curve and might require more manpower hours ...
What do you like most about Istio?
We use Istio for Service Discovery and routing traffic.
What needs improvement with Istio?
I do not see much room for improvement in Istio for my project as it currently fits my needs perfectly. It would be beneficial if Istio offered paid support options, similar to AWS's enterprise sup...
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 VMware Tanzu Mission Control?
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 ap...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware Tanzu Mission Control?
The price of VMware Tanzu Mission Control is greater than that of Red Hat's competitor solution. I would rate the pricing of VMware Tanzu Mission Control as four out of ten.
 

Also Known As

No data available
Tanzu Application Catalog, Application Platform, Application Service, Hub, Mission Control, Service Mesh, Build Service, Concourse for VMware Tanzu
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Verizon, Cerner, Zipcar, Avarteq
Find out what your peers are saying about Istio vs. VMware Tanzu Platform and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.