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Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE vs Red Hat OpenShift comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE
Ranking in Container Management
10th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Container Monitoring (6th)
Red Hat OpenShift
Ranking in Container Management
12th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
62
Ranking in other categories
PaaS Clouds (3rd), Server Virtualization Software (10th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (6th), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE is 8.2%, up from 7.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 2.4%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Container Management
 

Featured Reviews

Prasanthraj PN - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers efficient deployment and management with easy resource allocation, yet faces challenges in integration and compatibility
Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE offers easy and fast deployment, management, stability, reliability, and cost-effectiveness. The resource allocation is very simple. If we need to expand the memory, storage space, or processor core, it is very easy to manage through our central control. These features are what stand out the most.
Pratul Shukla - PeerSpot reviewer
Adopting a flexible and efficient approach with noticeable improvements in operational costs and continued challenges in job management
Currently, one of the biggest challenges we face is with services and jobs. For spawning batches, although it has crons, it is not easy to integrate with enterprise systems such as Autosys. The entire company uses Autosys, but we are not able to integrate it effectively. We need intermediate servers to run OC utility commands and initiate the cron job. We have to do a lot of modifications to ensure our batches work properly. With physical or virtual servers, even in AWS, we are able to write and manage multiple jobs. Managing batches in Red Hat OpenShift has been a significant challenge. Integrating third parties is a challenge with Red Hat OpenShift. For example, with Elasticsearch, onboarding itself was difficult, running file beats and dealing with routing issues. It is not straightforward, especially since we have some components in AWS as. AWS has many capabilities that come out of the box and are easier to work with compared to Red Hat OpenShift. Red Hat OpenShift's biggest disadvantage is they do not provide any private cloud setup where we can host on our site using their services. The main reason we went with Red Hat OpenShift was because it is a private cloud, and we have regulatory requirements that prevent us from using public cloud.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The technical support is excellent."
"We can add some add-ons and plugins to the product if we need to."
"The solution is embedded in the hypervisor and there are no deployment costs."
"The solution provides no downtime features. If we face issues, we create a new port, deploy it there, and then drop the existing one. This way, we avoid NKE downtime on our website."
"The platform is valuable due to its ease of use and quick deployment capabilities."
"Nutanix's support is really good."
"We can do a lot of provisioning."
"My experience with Nutanix's technical support is excellent."
"The security is good."
"The product's initial setup is very easy, especially compared to AWS."
"The most valuable feature of OpenShift is the security context constraint (SCC). The solution’s security throughout the stack is good. And security context constraints provide port-level security. It's a granular level of control, where you can give privileges to certain users to work on certain applications."
"Great integration with Jenkins for constant integration and development. Supports all the major languages and environments - PHP, Java, Node.js, Ruby, etc."
"OpenShift offers more stability than Kubernetes."
"Self-provisioning support saves a lot of time and unnecessary work from the system administrator who can use this time to run and monitor the infrastructure. For the developer, this means less time waiting for the provisioning and excellent flexibility for development, testing, and production. Also, in such systems it is easy for developers to monitor applications even after deployment."
"The virtualization of my APIs means I no longer have to pay VMware large amounts of money to only run in-house solutions."
"The stability has been good."
 

Cons

"Nutanix has limitations compared to VMware, particularly in testing and industry tie-ups with different OEMs. Deploying virtual machines, especially for industrial automation, can be challenging due to compatibility issues."
"There have been challenges related to software bugs, especially regarding long-term licensing options and issues within our customer network."
"One major issue we faced was that appliances couldn't migrate from VMware to the tool. However, this seems to be a common problem across platforms. We've seen the same issue when migrating from VMware to RHV or other solutions. It's not specifically a Nutanix problem but rather an issue migrating appliances from one VM infrastructure to another. Some kernel-level and storage-level issues impact this process."
"GUI lacks sufficient information to help with understanding the installation and process."
"I have issues with the product's interoperability."
"The product lacks some virtualization capabilities, making it an area for improvement where the solution can focus on providing users with more virtualization capabilities related to disk systems."
"In the next release, I would like to have automatic dynamic scaling, both upscaling and downscaling."
"There is no auto-scaling feature in Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE; however, NKP offers it. In NKE, we created additional worker nodes and increased CPU and RAM capacity, but it required manual intervention."
"This is a fairly expensive solution."
"OpenShift requires a very expensive and complex infrastructure. These demands can deter people from learning OpenShift."
"One glaring flaw is how OpenShift handles operators. Sometimes operators are forced to go into a particular namespace. When you do that, OpenShift creates an installation plan for everything in that namespace. These operators may be completely separate from each other and have nothing to do with each other, but now they are tied at the hip. You can't upgrade one without upgrading all of them. That's a huge mistake and highly problematic."
"If we can have a GUI-based configuration with better flexibility then it will be great."
"The operators need a lot of improvement, with better integrations."
"Managing batches in Red Hat OpenShift has been a significant challenge."
"We want to see better alerting, especially in critical situations requiring immediate intervention. Until we go to the dashboard, it can be challenging to quickly recognize that there's an issue for us to deal with. Therefore, a popup of the event or a tweaked GUI to catch our attention when it's alerting would be a welcome change. Everything else is good. We don't need any additional features. From the operations perspective, as an administrator, there is nothing concerning."
"The monitoring part could be better to monitor the performance."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate NKE's pricing a six out of ten."
"The product's licenses are included in the software version deployed in our data center."
"While deploying Kubernetes clusters on Nutanix is cost-effective, there may be additional costs for remote branch offices where Kubernetes is less common."
"The platform is averagely priced. I rate the pricing as four out of ten."
"I rate the product price a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."
"The product’s pricing is expensive."
"We are currently using the open version, OKD. We plan to get the enterprise version in the future."
"It's expensive. It may be cheaper to invest in building Vanilla Kubernetes, especially if security is not the number one motivation or requirement. Of course, that's difficult, and in some business areas, such as banking, that's not something you can put as a second priority. In other situations, a Vanilla Kubernetes with a sufficiently strong team can be cheaper and almost as effective."
"My company makes payments towards the licensing costs attached to OpenShift."
"The cost is quite high."
"The pricing is standard; the solution isn't particularly expensive or affordable."
"The licensing cost for OpenShift is expensive when compared to other products. RedHat also charges you additional costs apart from the standard licensing fees."
"Depending on the extent of the product use, licenses are available for a range of time periods, and are renewable at the end of the period."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Financial Services Firm
29%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE?
The most valuable features of the Nutanix Kubernetes Engine (NKE) are its simplicity and efficiency during the initial cluster creation phase.
What needs improvement with Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE?
I have heard there are many features added in NKP that are not available in Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE, such as load balancer features. The unified control plane feature is not being used in Nut...
What is your primary use case for Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE?
I have been working with the Nutanix Kubernetes platform for the past five years. Currently, I am supporting JetBlue Airlines in America, which uses a Nutanix environment and Nutanix Kubernetes Eng...
How does OpenShift compare with Amazon AWS?
Open Shift makes managing infrastructure easy because of self-healing and automatic scaling. There is also a wonderful dashboard mechanism to alert us in case the application is over-committing or ...
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...
What do you like most about OpenShift?
OpenShift facilitates DevOps practices and improves CI/CD workflows in terms of stability compared to Jenkins.
 

Also Known As

Nutanix Karbon
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

JetBlue, International Speedway Corporation, SAIC Volkswagen
UPS, Cathay Pacific, Hilton
Find out what your peers are saying about Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE vs. Red Hat OpenShift and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.