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Microsoft Azure vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry comparison

 

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
323
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (1st)
Pivotal Cloud Foundry
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
14th
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 February 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Microsoft Azure is 15.2%, down from 20.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is 6.7%, down from 10.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
PaaS Clouds Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Microsoft Azure15.2%
Pivotal Cloud Foundry6.7%
Other78.1%
PaaS Clouds
 

Featured Reviews

Syed Abid  - PeerSpot reviewer
Snr. Infrastructure Architect (Data Centre) at LogicEra
Versatile integrations and reliable customer satisfaction elevate cloud service experience
For Microsoft Azure improvement, they need to enhance their support system. The first level of support should be improved in terms of quality and response time. They need more technical support at the first level, as there are currently only one or two technical people among five to ten staff members at this level. They should ensure that the first level support is more technical because we normally provide services to technical users ourselves. When an issue arises, it usually escalates to the second or third level. When facing first level support, they may have limited knowledge and only collect screenshots to forward to their seniors. They should ensure that the first level support is aligned with L2 and L3 to better assist us, especially since we mention in the ticket that our issues are related to specific problems and require that sort of support.
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

"It's a cloud service, so it's always up to date."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Azure is that it is easy to use."
"The time to market is fast compared back to the traditional on-premise hosting. That is one of the better things I can say because there is no need to worry. The Pack services will enable it to start immediately."
"Active Directory is a good feature. The infrastructure features that Azure provides are also good."
"The ability to scale down is a big thing."
"We like that you sign in only once and that grants access to all of the Microsft applications, as well as others such as ServiceNow and SAP Concur."
"There are several products within Azure."
"Microsoft Azure is a very dynamic cloud service that allows you to migrate your workload, applications, and data."
"The most valuable feature of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is the UI, it is easy to use."
"We find its stability and scalability valuable."
"I find the ease of deployment and management of microservices to be the most valuable features. The platform also has good auto-scaling capabilities."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its ability to scale. The services that connect to the database are also very good."
"The solution is stable and resilient. In our company, we do not even see any challenges with the solution."
"The most valuable features are the monitoring and the deployment is easier."
"The most valuable feature of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is auto-healing and the plenty of other features that are provided."
"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."
 

Cons

"The main issue is the lack of notifications for updates. Processes for certain operations, like connecting to Git repositories, have changed without sufficient communication. A system to announce or update users about these changes would be very helpful."
"I would like to see better policy-based management and everything related to security management could have been better integrated."
"The license price could be lower."
"They need to make storage easy and offer more interconnectivity between solutions."
"The Azure Billing API could be so much better. It only provides billing metrics for a set duration."
"There are times when using a service in Microsoft Azure can be confusing because you have four or five options that do similar operations. It would be helpful if there was a clear decision tree around those features. Microsoft does provide a lot of decision trees around a lot of their services, but it's not for everything."
"Something that could be added to the solution is the use of deep learning, which is going to grow in the near future."
"Technical support needs to be better."
"It is not straightforward to setup."
"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."
"In the next release, I would like to see easy integration with external tools."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry doesn't have certain advanced features."
"The Pivotal Cloud Foundry's initial setup has a learning curve for my team, but it was easy to use."
"I'd like to see a larger service offering."
"Regarding the setup phase, every step is a hurdle. With Pivotal Cloud Foundry, I won't get any proper resources for that. Even if I Google it, there is no proper solution for Pivotal Cloud Foundry."
"It should offer more security features."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Microsoft Azure's pricing is reasonable. We pay around 5000 dollars per annum."
"The pricing for the end-user packages is a bit high. It is full of very interesting services, but I would still like it to be less expensive."
"The price of the solution is reasonable."
"It is not an expensive product and is adaptable to various requirements. It offers a free tier for small-scale usage and the ability to scale up as needed when requirements grow."
"Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis."
"Keep to PaaS to gain the optimal benefits from an OPEX finance and resource perspective."
"Its price should be optimized so that we can use more features."
"I rate the tool's pricing a six out of ten."
"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 price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is based on the customer's requirements. However, the price is comparable to other similar solutions."
"The pricing is on the higher side and there are cheaper options available."
"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve. However, in this category of solutions, they are all expensive."
"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
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
University
6%
Financial Services Firm
37%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Insurance Company
5%
Computer Software Company
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business140
Midsize Enterprise53
Large Enterprise150
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: February 2026.
882,606 professionals have used our research since 2012.