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Istio vs VMware Tanzu Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 9, 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
21
Ranking in other categories
Build Automation (13th), PaaS Clouds (12th), Cloud Management (24th), Development Platforms (3rd), Container Management (3rd), Agile and DevOps Services (2nd)
 

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

"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 features of Istio are the traffic management and the Sidecar they inject, which greatly helps secure the application."
"We can implement load balancing to distribute traffic across multiple service instances. Istio also offers traffic routing capabilities and circuit-breaking functionality. For security, it handles authentication using mutual TLS (mTLS) between services. It can authorize services using JWT tokens. Istio also allows defining policies for rate limiting to control traffic within services."
"Istio can save you time in terms of network troubleshooting."
"What I find particularly valuable about Istio is that it is free of cost."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"What I find particularly valuable about Istio is that it is free of cost."
"Istio makes all that much easier - traffic splits, percentage traffic splits, doing some sort of chaos testing to see how it works."
"We never experienced any problems with scalability."
"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 Tanzu platform is highly available, scalable, and flexible."
"The Tanzu platform is highly available, scalable, and flexible."
"The observability platform and end-to-end service portal provided by Tanzu are the most valuable features."
"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."
"The most popular feature of VMware Tanzu Mission Control is its graphical user interface for describing network policies on the Service Mesh, which is highly integrable with other tools commonly used in supply chains such as security."
 

Cons

"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."
"Handling large-scale environments with proxies can strain resources, but horizontal scaling can improve fault tolerance."
"Reducing the latency between the control plane and the data plane would be beneficial."
"If someone doesn't understand Kubernetes, they'll have issues working with Istio."
"It would be good if the solution had more community forums."
"If you're a beginner in infrastructure management and networking, learning Istio might pose some challenges. However, if you have some knowledge of networking or service meshes, you should find it manageable. Istio's website offers documentation to guide you through learning."
"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."
"Customers have noticed a considerable price increase after VMware's acquisition by Broadcom."
"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."
"The network control and security policies must be improved."
"The solution's initial setup process was complex...The solution could benefit from improved customization and visibility for its users."
"The disaster recovery feature could be improved to provide better tracking of issues. I would also like to see the introduction of a dashboard view, for even further integration of all the areas that Mission Control looks at."
"Having a unified dashboard to manage all infrastructure, whether it involves additional IT infrastructure or modern apps, would be highly advantageous"
"Cost is always a concern. Smaller companies might find the price a bigger issue."
"I would like to see additional support for things outside of Cloud Foundry."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 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."
"The solution is bundled in with Cloud Foundry so the pricing is not independent."
"The solution is only for large or medium size enterprises because it is expensive."
"The product is not expensive, but it is not cheap."
"There are different licenses available. You have to upgrade your license if you want to scale the solution more."
"The licensing cost is expensive."
"The license for VMware Tanzu Application Service is expensive. The license should be cheaper."
"Since we were at a large data center, the price might not have been a concern for us."
"It is not the most expensive option, and I believe the capabilities align well with the value it provides."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Retailer
7%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
11%
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: April 2025.
850,671 professionals have used our research since 2012.