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Microsoft Azure vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 8, 2026

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

Microsoft Azure
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
324
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (1st)
Pivotal Cloud Foundry
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
15th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Microsoft Azure is 11.7%, down from 18.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is 4.9%, down from 8.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
PaaS Clouds Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Azure11.7%
Pivotal Cloud Foundry4.9%
Other83.4%
PaaS Clouds
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2832981 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Administrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Cloud migration has reduced hardware dependency and supports secure global access to apps
The best features Microsoft Azure offers are cloud scalability, virtual machines, storage, networking, security, monitoring, and identity management. Scalability is the most valuable to our organization because Microsoft Azure allows businesses to scale resources up or down based on workload demand. This helps manage traffic spikes without buying permanent hardware. Virtual machines are also valuable as Microsoft Azure provides cloud-based Windows and Linux virtual machines to run applications, servers, and workloads. Identity and Access Management is important, as the integration with Microsoft Entra ID helps manage user authentication, role-based access, and MFA. For example, employees access business apps securely using single sign-on. Backup and disaster recovery are also important because they provide automated backups and failover options to ensure business continuity. Microsoft Azure positively impacts my organization by reducing infrastructure dependency, improving availability, and enabling remote access. Teams can access applications globally without on-premises server dependency, and in terms of cost, it is very low-cost.
reviewer2263239 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Engineering at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
PCF allows for fine-grained configuration, especially regarding scaling but routing limitations
Something that can be done better is canary deployment. So, right now, we're using blue-green deployment. The support for canary deployment would be nice. A few things, such as what OpenShift does better are cluster management. Like, you can manage the entire thing together. Currently, it's possible to manage all the clusters, especially when it comes to cluster management using straightforward configuration. As of now, we have to handle each application instance individually, which means servicing them one by one. It would be better if we could perform these actions as a group or in a more streamlined manner. One more downside is actually the cost of this environment. So, major downside of Pivotal, it's the cost. So, the runtime running costs are very high. Extremely high.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"One of the features I have found to be valuable is the scale set feature."
"As a software data center, we can put some pretty cool applications running there."
"The product is highly stable."
"The organization can focus more on real business problems instead of IT problems, reduce the time spent setting up the infrastructure, and become more agile and, in many cases, more reliable by using the public cloud."
"It is really scalable and easy to use."
"The support is responsive and dedicated to SMEs."
"Feature-wise, I like its stability. Also, it is easy to access the solution and its options."
"Microsoft Azure covers all aspects, and having a single pane of glass becomes easier."
"The most valuable features of Pivotal Cloud Foundry are its ease of use and the command line interface has the ability to push instances to the cloud easily."
"The most valuable feature of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is auto-healing and the plenty of other features that are provided."
"PCF is open, so the applications run really smoothly and with little downtime."
"It is a scalable product...We are not facing any particular issues since most of the applications in our company are written in Java and .NET."
"The most valuable feature of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is the UI, it is easy to use."
"It supports CI/CD, and is integrated with the CI/CD very well."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is very easy to use compared to other cloud technologies, and it has very good performance."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is very robust, especially for building Java."
 

Cons

"The pricing of the solution could be reduced."
"From a technical point, it has very good features for Microsoft products, but for non-Microsoft products, it may have some limitations."
"Use of the solution could be easier. It is too complex."
"Microsoft Azure needs to be simplified to make it better understood for users."
"I don't understand why we spend so much time and money on Azure when Microsoft relies on third-party companies for support in the CSP model. I don't know how the support model works within Microsoft, but giving it to poor-performing third-party companies is not ideal."
"Sometimes technical support is not as fast as I needed on the first call, but once they are engaged, it is really easy to get an answer."
"What we experienced after two years with an Azure subscription is that there is good knowledge in Microsoft Partners for Azure, but generally they are too specialized and could not cover everything, because they always miss something related for example to networking, database, web apps, security, or integration on Azure."
"Azure could be made more user-friendly."
"I'd like to see a larger service offering."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is not scalable, infinitely, because when you install it on a set of virtual machines it is very hard to scale. It's easy to scale on an application level, but not it is not similar to if you were using Amazon. Amazon you can scale thousands of applications."
"Scalability is terrible. So far we have not been able to scale it up."
"I would prefer to use Amazon AWS or Google Cloud Platform rather than Pivotal Cloud Foundry."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve the documentation. They are good, but they could improve more. Additionally, it would be beneficial if there were more use case examples."
"The initial setup was not easy, it was a bit complex."
"It is not straightforward to setup."
"It should offer more security features."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is fine."
"We pay our bill in a monthly or 6 monthly billing cycle. The cost depends on how much you use during the period."
"Microsoft Azure is a cost-effective solution where you use it as per your requirement and pay for it."
"Reducing the price would be of benefit to our customers."
"There are no licensing fees."
"I would like to see it more easily accessible."
"The solution does require a license."
"As of now, there are no monthly or yearly subscription fees."
"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve. However, in this category of solutions, they are all expensive."
"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is based on the customer's requirements. However, the price is comparable to other similar solutions."
"You're paying for the number of virtual machines you want to install in the installation."
"We do pay for the licensing cost because we have opted for a private cloud setup. So, it is a cloud setup, and we have to make payments based on the cloud size. I do not consider it very costly when comparing it to the market."
"The pricing is on the higher side and there are cheaper options available."
"Licensing is on a monthly basis and right now we pay $24/month. There are no other costs over and above that."
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Comparison Review

it_user8586 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
Aug 14, 2013
Amazon vs Rackspace vs Microsoft vs Google: Cloud Hosting Services Comparison
Amazon Web Services, Rackspace OpenStack, Microsoft Windows Azure and Google are the major cloud hosting and storage service providers. Athough Amazon is top of them and is oldest in cloud market, Rackspace, Microsoft and Google are giving tough competition to each other and to Amazon also for…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Construction Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
28%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business141
Midsize Enterprise54
Large Enterprise153
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Large Enterprise11
 

Questions from the Community

Which is preferable - IBM Public Cloud or Microsoft Azure?
IBM Public Cloud is IBM’s Platform-as-a-Service. It aims to provide organizations with a secure cloud environment to manage data and applications. One of the features we like is the cloud activity ...
Which is better - SAP Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure?
One of the best features of SAP Cloud Platform is that it is web-based and you can log in from anywhere in the world. SAP Cloud Platform is suitable for companies of any size; it works well with bo...
How does Microsoft Azure compare to Google Firebase?
I would recommend Google Firebase instead of Microsoft Azure, simply for the array of features that it has to offer. In particular, the Firebase library grants you access to a shared data structure...
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...
 

Also Known As

Windows Azure, Azure, MS Azure
PCF, Pivotal Application Service (PAS), Pivotal Container Service (PKS), Pivotal Function Service (PFS)
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

BMW, Toyota, easyJet, NBC Sports, HarperCollins, Aviva, TalkTalk Business, Avanade, and Telenor.
Humana, Citibank, Mercedes Benz, Liberty Mutual, The Home Depot, GE, West Corp, Merrill Corporation, CoreLogic, Orange, Dish Network, Comcast, Bloomberg, Internal Revenue Service, Ford Motor Company, Garmin, Volkswagen, Solera, Allstate, US Air Force, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, ScotiaBank
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Azure vs. Pivotal Cloud Foundry and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
915,533 professionals have used our research since 2012.