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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 (11th), 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

"This solution provides a comprehensive way to scale up our ports and containers, without having to use multiple products."
"It's really scalable and efficient for resource management."
"The most valuable feature is that it's a container orchestrator. It has a huge user base and it is easily incorporated into all of the public clouds."
"It is a very good solution for deploying microservices in an application. It has a lot of freedom in it, which makes it very interesting. It is also web-enabled. You can run services in other virtual applications and virtual machines."
"Provision of a managed platform as a service."
"It's scalable."
"This solution is cost effective and fast. We are able to use Kubernetes to orchestrate hundreds of container images which has been a major benefit."
"I like the replication center and the configuration."
"Defining security metrics has proven beneficial for customers in maintaining a safe environment."
"The solution is integrated very well with a lot of other systems. Also, its GUI is very good."
"We can build namespaces and provide application developers the platform to deploy their applications on pods within containerization, and we can easily manage, pull results, and create containers efficiently, making it a simple way to handle applications."
"The most important thing about the solution is its flexibility."
"The multi-tenancy with the VCD is great."
"VMware Tanzu Mission Control has many valuable features, such as ease of use and customization."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"Having a thread dump and memory dump, and seeing how many objects were created would be useful."
"Kubernetes can improve by providing a service offering catalog that can be readily populated in Kubernetes."
"Security could be improved. It would be helpful if there were other security modules built into Kubernetes."
"We faced a challenge while migrating and upgrading versions of Kubernetes. After the upgrade, some pods were not up as expected, leading to downtime."
"This product should have a more advanced built-in scheduler that uses real application metrics in the scheduling strategy."
"The virtual machines should be GUI-based"
"It's complex to manage and requires specialists."
"I would rate the stability as five out of ten. If any containers take more space, sometimes the cluster goes down."
"Customers have noticed a considerable price increase after VMware's acquisition by Broadcom."
"Having a unified dashboard to manage all infrastructure, whether it involves additional IT infrastructure or modern apps, would be highly advantageous"
"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."
"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 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."
"Cost is always a concern. Smaller companies might find the price a bigger issue."
"The solution could improve by having better integration with other solutions such as HPE."
"Another area of improvement is pricing."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"You need to pay for a license if you buy branded products. For example, if you take the services from Azure, AWS, or Google, the price of the Kubernetes cluster is inclusive of the service that's being offered to us on a pay-and-use model."
"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."
"If you have a solid AKS and a solid DevOps process, you'll automatically get an ROI, not just in terms of cost but also in how quickly you can see your business application progress."
"In addition to Kubernetes, you have to pay for support."
"The solution requires a license to use it."
"If you're using a public cloud, the cost depends on the number of nodes you are planning to deploy Kubernetes on."
"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."
"VMware Tanzu Mission Control is cheaper than Red Hat OpenShift."
"Since we were at a large data center, the price might not have been a concern for us."
"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 licensing cost is expensive."
"The license for VMware Tanzu Application Service is expensive. The license should be cheaper."
"The product is not expensive, but it is not cheap."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
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.
881,346 professionals have used our research since 2012.