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Kubernetes vs VMware Tanzu Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 28, 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

Kubernetes
Ranking in Container Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
80
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Tanzu Platform
Ranking in Container Management
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Build Automation (14th), PaaS Clouds (12th), Cloud Management (25th), Development Platforms (3rd), Service Mesh (7th), Agile and DevOps Services (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Kubernetes is 6.9%, up from 4.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Tanzu Platform is 8.6%, down from 15.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Container Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Kubernetes6.9%
VMware Tanzu Platform8.6%
Other84.5%
Container Management
 

Featured Reviews

RV
DevOps Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Automated deployments and self-healing have transformed how I run reliable chat services
For improvements, I would definitely suggest some enhancements to Kubernetes. While Kubernetes is very powerful, there are still a few areas where it could be improved. Our challenge is the learning curve and operational complexity. For new team members, concepts such as networking, RBAC, Ingress, and troubleshooting distributed systems can take time to understand. Better built-in onboarding tools or simplified abstractions would help. Another pain point is debugging and observability. While kubectl provides good basic visibility, deep debugging across multiple services, pods, and nodes often requires external tooling such as Prometheus, Grafana, or centralized logging. Stronger native observability features would be very helpful. Networking and Ingress configuration can also be complex, especially when dealing with certificates, routing rules, and cloud-specific integrations. A more standardized experience across environments could reduce operational overhead. From a cost perspective, managing and optimizing resource usage at scale still requires careful monitoring and tuning. Better built-in cost visibility would be very helpful. For the needed improvements, I think that covers most of my main concerns. The biggest areas for improvement are still around simplifying operations, better native observability, and easier cost visibility. If I had to add one more point, it would be around standardization and developer experience. Sometimes different clusters, cloud providers, or tooling setups behave slightly differently, which increases maintenance efforts. More consistent defaults and opinionated best practices could help teams adopt Kubernetes faster and with fewer surprises. Overall, despite these challenges, Kubernetes is a very mature and reliable platform, and the benefits clearly outweigh the limitations for most production use cases. An additional area that could be improved is upgrade and version management. While managed services help coordinate Kubernetes version upgrades, API deprecations and compatibility with add-ons can still be time-consuming and risky for production environments. Better tooling and clearer migration automation would make upgrades safer and easier. Another improvement could be around documentation, consistency, and discoverability. Kubernetes documentation is very comprehensive, but for beginners, it can sometimes be overwhelming to navigate and identify best practice paths.
ErmiasGirma - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at Safaricom Ethiopia plc
Has supported container-based deployments and improved infrastructure visibility through monitoring tools
Aria Operations, formerly known as VMware vRealize Operations, has been renamed to vROps. We are currently using this for monitoring purposes. For orchestration, we are using VCD to automate Telco Cloud. VCD is an automation tool, and we are also using VMware Tanzu Platform for the Kubernetes environment, alongside TKG, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. These are also other solutions for the Tanzu Kubernetes environment. For Telco Cloud, we are using it to automate our company's operations, which is for a telecom company. We are familiar with these products, especially vCenter, ESXi, VCD, vCF, and vROps. It is very easy to integrate applications when we deploy vCenter and ESXi since we can enable vSphere with Tanzu feature. We can build namespaces and provide application developers the platform to deploy their applications on pods within containerization. We can easily manage, pull results, and create containers efficiently, making it a simple way to handle applications. We provide namespace labels for application developers, and we can manage their resources along with other aspects easily. Regarding security, we use many tools such as CDX and LDAP, AD for integrating our Kubernetes cluster with the developer teams. We can manage roles and permissions simply. It is very straightforward to integrate with EDX and other third-party tools, Active Directory, to the Kubernetes cluster, allowing easy access and management.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Kubernetes is scalable and the elasticity is sustainable."
"The most valuable feature of Kubernetes is the integration with other solutions, such as Formative and Grafana."
"The best feature is autoscaling. It's effortless to use for scaling deployment parts, CI/CD, etc."
"The most valuable aspect of the solution is the scalability."
"If you're switching from VMs to Kubernetes, you will see a return because you can pack more into the Kubernetes architecture using containers rather than VMs. You'll see some more savings on your infrastructure, as well."
"It is a stable and scalable product."
"It's scalable."
"The deployment is one of the most valuable feature."
"The valuable feature I have found to be the management of Kubernetes clusters in a private cloud or public clouds, such as Azure or Google Cloud Platform."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the ability to check the flow of all the different variants within our applications."
"The most important thing about the solution is its flexibility."
"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."
"The solution is integrated very well with a lot of other systems. Also, its GUI is very good."
"The initial setup is easy."
 

Cons

"The solution does not work with third-party tools, or alternative cloud providers, which limits the extent that we can utilize it to."
"Our challenge is the learning curve and operational complexity."
"The tool needs to improve its UI. The tool is very complex and basic."
"Honestly, there is not much I like about Kubernetes. It's very complicated to deal with. I just do it because I have to."
"The solution has some issues regarding availability during high loads. Worker nodes are sometimes unavailable, affecting the overall availability of the applications. This is a bug or underlying problem with the tool, and Azure and other providers are looking into improving this by releasing new versions of Kubernetes that fix some of the platform's issues."
"Setup was not straightforward."
"The security of the solution is in its infancy and needs a lot of work."
"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."
"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."
"The infrastructure is quite challenging."
"We want to see a new feature that helps build more security architecture like Zero Trust Security or shifting left in Kubernetes."
"The price is very high compared to other Kubernetes environments because Kubernetes is open source."
"VMware Tanzu Service Mesh could add better integration with other cloud platforms, such as vRealize Automation or VMware vCloud Director for cloud providers."
"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."
"Tanzu provides better manageability as compared to OCP, but when it comes to tagging it with other products, it's a bit rigid. If I have to bring in any new product or something out of the box from a different vendor, working with Tanzu becomes a little difficult. For example, if I want to use the F5 services, I have to add one more layer of Avi, but I don't want to do that. If I have a list of the products that I want to use, such as for firewall services, with Tanzu, I will have to go through another layer, which creates complexity."
"The solution's initial setup process was complex...The solution could benefit from improved customization and visibility for its users."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If you're using a public cloud, the cost depends on the number of nodes you are planning to deploy Kubernetes on."
"The solution itself is open-source, so there is no cost attached to it. However, it requires a virtual machine to operate, which does come at a cost; a choice of a pay as you go model, or a monthly charge via an enterprise agreement. There is a pricing calculator available, where organizations can determine the level and number of virtual machines required, and how much that will cost."
"There are no licensing fees."
"In addition to Kubernetes, you have to pay for support."
"I am using the solution's open-source version."
"The price of Kubernetes could be lower. However, it is less expensive than VMware Tanzu. Additionally, technical support is expensive. The overall cost of the solution is approximately $1,000 annually."
"Kubernetes is free; it's open-source software."
"Google Kubernetes Engine is free in the simplest setup, AWS Kubernetes Engine costs about $50 (depending on the region), in a three master setup, so it's almost the same as the cost of the EC2 instances and it's totally fine from my point of view."
"Its pricing is very competitive. We get around 70% or 75%, sometimes even 80%, discount on the product. I would rate it a four out of five in terms of pricing."
"There are different licenses available. You have to upgrade your license if you want to scale the solution more."
"The solution is only for large or medium size enterprises because it is expensive."
"VMware Tanzu Mission Control is cheaper than Red Hat OpenShift."
"The least expensive licensing cost for VMware is around $350 per core."
"One of our Spanish customers told us that VMware Tanzu Service Mesh is a very expensive product for their data center."
"The licensing cost is expensive."
"The license for VMware Tanzu Application Service is expensive. The license should be cheaper."
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Top Industries

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

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business26
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise47
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise10
 

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.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Kubernetes?
I have had a good experience with pricing, but the setup costs are high.
What needs improvement with Kubernetes?
Kubernetes can be improved, though I cannot specify exactly how at this time.
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

K8
Tanzu Application Catalog, Application Platform, Application Service, Hub, Mission Control, Service Mesh, Build Service, Concourse for VMware Tanzu
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

China unicom, NetEase Cloud, Nav, AppDirect
Verizon, Cerner, Zipcar, Avarteq
Find out what your peers are saying about Kubernetes vs. VMware Tanzu Platform and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,565 professionals have used our research since 2012.