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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 January 2026, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Kubernetes is 6.1%, up from 4.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Tanzu Platform is 9.2%, down from 15.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Container Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Kubernetes6.1%
VMware Tanzu Platform9.2%
Other84.7%
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

"The solution is easy to use."
"The most valuable feature of Kubernetes is its support for load balancing."
"The most valuable feature is the support for Docker containers."
"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."
"The product is highly scalable."
"The best thing about Kubernetes is that most of the containerized applications are centralized."
"A good interface, better than comparable solutions."
"The Desired State Configuration is a handy feature; we can deploy a certain number of pods, and the tool will ensure that the state is maintained in our desired configuration."
"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."
"The multi-tenancy with the VCD is great."
"We never experienced any problems with scalability."
"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 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 initial setup is easy."
"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."
 

Cons

"It would be great if Kubernetes could handle a level of data backup."
"The pricing could be improved. It would be ideal if it was a bit less."
"Some Kubernetes technical support would be helpful."
"There is not a large ecosystem surrounding Kubernetes, making it difficult to identify the right problem due to the vast number of solutions."
"Kubernetes is incredibly complicated, so one area of improvement is the ease of administration. I would like a user interface that you can run to help you debug and diagnose problems and suggest how to configure things."
"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."
"Management features could be simplified."
"We would like to see more validation tools added to this solution, this would provide pre-deployment analysis that developers could use before publishing their infrastructure."
"We want to see a new feature that helps build more security architecture like Zero Trust Security or shifting left in Kubernetes."
"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."
"The network control and security policies must be improved."
"It is not easy to build a solution with containers. It has a graphical user interface, but you need to have a lot of knowledge of Linux and how to work in the command mode. Its support can also be improved. Currently, its biggest disadvantage is that it is a new product, and the clients prefer to go for a solution that has been in the market for a long time. There are not that many people who know this product."
"VMware Tanzu Service Mesh could add better integration with other cloud platforms, such as vRealize Automation or VMware vCloud Director for cloud providers."
"LYNX is a managed cluster solution that takes care of specific details within a cluster, such as sequences or services. I haven't seen this feature in Tanzu Mission Control."
"The solution could improve by having better integration with other solutions such as HPE."
"The product should support integration with Google Cloud Platform (GCP)"
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We use the solution's open-source version."
"This is an open-source solution, so there are no licensing costs associated with its use."
"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."
"Kubernetes is open source. But we have to manage Kubernetes as a team, and the overhead is a bit high. Compared with the platforms like Cloud Foundry, which has a much less operational overhead. Kubernetes, I have to manage the code, and I have to hire the developers. If someone has a product, a developer should know exactly what he's writing or high availability, and all those things may differ the costs."
"There is no licensing fee."
"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."
"I would say the solution is worth the money, but it depends on the required workloads, the type of workload, and the scaling requirements etc."
"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."
"The price of VMware Tanzu Mission Control is greater than that of Red Hat's competitor solution"
"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 only for large or medium size enterprises because it is expensive."
"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."
"The license for VMware Tanzu Application Service is expensive. The license should be cheaper."
"It is not the most expensive option, and I believe the capabilities align well with the value it provides."
"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."
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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.
881,282 professionals have used our research since 2012.