Kubernetes vs Red Hat OpenShift comparison

Kubernetes and Red Hat are both solutions in the Container Management category. Kubernetes is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.2, while Red Hat is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.3. Kubernetes holds a 6.2% mindshare in CM, compared to Red Hat’s 2.9% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of Kubernetes users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Red Hat users who would recommend it.

Kubernetes

Read 78 Kubernetes reviews

2,392 Views
2,368 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Red Hat OpenShift

Read 62 Red Hat OpenShift reviews

10,785 Views
647 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Kubernetes

Red Hat OpenShift

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Container Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Kubernetes vs. Red Hat OpenShift Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Kubernetes vs. Red Hat OpenShift

September 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

Kubernetes

Ranking in Container Management

4th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Red Hat OpenShift

Ranking in Container Management

11th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

PaaS Clouds (3rd), Server Virtualization Software (10th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (6th), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Kubernetes is 6.2%, down from 6.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 2.9%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Container Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Kubernetes	6.2%
Red Hat OpenShift	2.9%
Other	90.9%

Container Management

Featured Reviews

Venu Boddu

AWS DevOps Engineer at Hexaware Technologies Limited

Manage infrastructure automation and smooth application deployment with robust auto-scaling capabilities

Kubernetes is highly valuable for its node-based setup, which allows for the running of multiple pods. This feature is essential for infrastructure automation and application deployment. Kubernetes also offers rollback control and auto-scaling capabilities, which are crucial for maintaining an application's availability even if nodes or pods go down. Additionally, Kubernetes supports load balancing to distribute traffic efficiently across multiple pods.

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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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The cloud-managed Kubernetes allow us to take care of a big system and deployment and container management without having a big operational team."

"One of the most valuable features is the thickness of the cloud platform or on-prem file, which makes the solution straightforward to shift and scale. It works well with different types of deployment strategies and networks."

"I rate Kubernetes nine out of ten."

"The most valuable feature of Kubernetes is automation. It is the best tool for automation."

"The best feature is autoscaling. It's effortless to use for scaling deployment parts, CI/CD, etc."

"Kubernetes offers a lot of great features such as scalability and great portability of applications."

"The solution is easy to use."

"The scanning and support network."

More Kubernetes pros

"The security is good."

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

"The most valuable aspect of this solution is the great customer service and the ability for our team to get assistance when we need it."

"Scaling and uptime of the applications are positives."

"OpenShift offers an easy-to-use graphical user interface for cluster management, making it more accessible for administrators."

"The product's initial setup is very easy, especially compared to AWS."

"It has features that enhance security, ease of deployment, and service exposure compared to Kubernetes."

"OpenShift offers more stability than Kubernetes."

More Red Hat OpenShift pros

Cons

"Community-based Kubernetes is quite hard to set up."

"The pricing could be improved. It would be ideal if it was a bit less."

"I'm a beginner, and I recently started working with Kubernetes. As of now, I don't see any bugs. However, it would be better if it could be deployed without coding."

"The setup and operation of the product should be simplified."

"I think that the GUI dashboard in Kubernetes is very simple and that there are no great options."

"They should update Kubernetes more regularly."

"This product should have a more advanced built-in scheduler that uses real application metrics in the scheduling strategy."

"The configuration is a bit complicated."

More Kubernetes cons

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

"We want to see better alerting, especially in critical situations requiring immediate intervention. Until we go to the dashboard, it can be challenging to quickly recognize that there's an issue for us to deal with. Therefore, a popup of the event or a tweaked GUI to catch our attention when it's alerting would be a welcome change. Everything else is good. We don't need any additional features. From the operations perspective, as an administrator, there is nothing concerning."

"The platform's documentation could be more comprehensive to cover the full spectrum of user needs. Sometimes, achieving specific goals is challenging due to a lack of detailed guidance."

"I want easier node management and more user-friendly scripts for installing master and worker nodes."

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

"Latency and performance are two areas of concern in OpenShift where improvements are required."

"It would be great if it supported Bitbucket repositories too."

"There have been some issues with security, in particular, that we had to address. At times they make it “clunky." I am quite confident these parameters will appear in the next releases. They have been reported as bugs and are actually in process."

More Red Hat OpenShift cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Kubernetes is an open-source solution that can be free. We have some distribution with licenses, such OpenShift and Tucows in Amazon. They are billing services."

"The solution is open source and has no fees."

"This is an open-source solution, so there are no licensing costs associated with its use."

"Kubernetes is open-source. Kubernetes is free, but we're charged for AWS utilization."

"There is no licensing fee."

"There is a license to use Kubernetes."

"The solution requires a license to use it."

"Kubernetes is free; it's open-source software."

More Kubernetes pricing and cost advice

"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."

"It's important to start small because the solution is scalable. We can build our cluster and look at the bundle option, not the external subscriptions. Talking to the people at Red Hat can save us money."

"Depending on the extent of the product use, licenses are available for a range of time periods, and are renewable at the end of the period."

"The product's support is expensive. I would rate the tool's pricing an eight out of ten."

"The product has reasonable pricing."

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

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

More Red Hat OpenShift pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

28%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	25
Midsize Enterprise	9
Large Enterprise	47

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	17
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	40

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Kubernetes?

There are many good features. I feel that the scale-out features, like replica sets, are very good. The number of running containers can be autoscaled.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Kubernetes?

Since we use Kubernetes on-premises, the costs are related to our expertise and the personnel we hire.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Kubernetes?

Although we face issues when migrating to new versions of Kubernetes, such as misunderstandings on using new features or integration with proxy services, these issues can be addressed with proper p...

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

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Kubernetes

Compared 33% of the time

Portainer vs Kubernetes

Compared 12% of the time

Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) vs Kubernetes

Compared 8% of the time

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform vs Kubernetes

Compared 8% of the time

HashiCorp Nomad vs Kubernetes

Compared 6% of the time

More Kubernetes Competitors

Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 13% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 11% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 8% of the time

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 8% of the time

Proxmox VE vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 7% of the time

More Red Hat OpenShift Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Kubernetes

September 2025

Download Kubernetes product report

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat OpenShift

September 2025

Download Red Hat OpenShift product report

Also Known As

No data available

Overview

Kubernetes (K8s) is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery. Kubernetes builds upon 15 years of experience of running production workloads at Google, combined with best-of-breed ideas and practices from the community.

Kubernetes

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

China unicom, NetEase Cloud, Nav, AppDirect

UPS, Cathay Pacific, Hilton

Buyer's Guide

Kubernetes vs. Red Hat OpenShift

September 2025

Free Report: Kubernetes vs. Red Hat OpenShift

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