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Rancher Labs vs Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 13, 2024

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

Rancher Labs
Ranking in Container Management
6th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Data Storage for Kubernetes (3rd)
Red Hat OpenShift Container...
Ranking in Container Management
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
49
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Rancher Labs is 8.5%, down from 9.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is 22.1%, up from 20.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Container Management
 

Featured Reviews

RyanVassallo - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers an open-source version along with a good UI
The product has multiple good features. One of the solution's good features is that it is the GitOps functionality known as Rancher fleet, which is used for continuous delivery. The tool's UI is very convenient enough to help you manage multiple clusters in the cloud or on-premises, making it a product with which you can manage different clusters and locations. The tool also has a feature that is still kind of maturing, but I think it has very good potential. This new feature is named Harvester, which is allows users to have virtual machines managed by Kubernetes engine. This is very new technology in the market. I think that Harvester needs to mature as a product, and I think that in the future, it will be very powerful. You have one tool that does many things for you.
Vlado Velkovski - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides automation that speeds up our process by 30% and helps us achieve zero downtime
OpenShift has a pretty steep learning curve. It's not an easy tool to use. It's not only OpenShift but Kubernetes itself. The good thing is that Red Hat provides specific targeted training. There are five or six pieces of training where you can get certifications. The licenses for OpenShift are pretty expensive, so they could be cheaper because the competition isn't sleeping, and Red Hat must take that into account. There are a few versions of OpenShift. There is the normal OpenShift and an OpenShift Plus license. Red Hat could think of how to connect those two subscriptions because, with Red Hat Plus, you have one tool called ACM (Advanced Cluster Management), where you can manage multiple clusters from one place. We deployed this functionality by ourselves, but if you don't pay the license for Red Hat OpenShift Plus, you'll lack this functionality. If you have a multi-cloud environment and you have a lot of work to do, it would be a plus if the Red Had OpenShift Plus license came in a bundle with the regular solutions. This ACM tool should be available in the normal subscription, not just the Plus version. There are new versions on an almost weekly basis. I found myself that the upgrading of OpenShift clusters is not a task that will successfully finish every time. It's a simple and quick, but not reliable process. That's why we use multiple clusters. We use v4.10.3, but we want to move to v4.12.X. The upgrade process itself can fail, and we don't have backups of our OpenShift cluster because we have backups of all the Kubernetes manifests on GitHub. We destroy the cluster, bring up a new one quickly, and apply those scripts. The upgrade itself could be more resilient for us as administrators of OpenShift to be sure that it'll succeed and not occasionally fail. They can improve the reliability of their upgrade process. They also have implementations of some Red Hat-verified operators for a lot of products like Elasticsearch. They're good enough for development purposes, but some of the OpenShift operators still lack resilient production-grade configurations. Red Hat says that we have a few hundred operators, but I believe that only half of them are production-grade ready at this moment. They need to work much more on those operators to become more flexible because you can deploy all of them in development mode, but when we go to production grade and want to make specific changes to the operator and configuration, we lack those possibilities.

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 stable."
"The initial setup is simple and straightforward."
"Rancher Labs is a very user-friendly tool."
"The tool's UI is very convenient enough to help you manage multiple clusters in the cloud or the company, making it a product with which you can manage different clusters and locations."
"The solution has a lot of good features, such as you can access the console and edit through the GUI. The dashboard and the UI are designed well, user-friendly, and easy to manage, and access."
"This solution is not vendor-locked, which means that we we are able to use it across all of our resources; this feature is of great value to us."
"The customized deployment process is the most valuable feature in Rancher Labs."
"The product is simple to use for a beginner."
"The stack in the software supply chain is one of the main reasons that we use OpenShift. When I came to this company, we bought hardware from IBM named Bluemix, and they used ICP, which stands for IBM Cloud Private."
"For us, the fully automated upgrades are valuable. We have to maintain the clusters in production. For us, it is very important that it does not take too much time to manage all the clusters and do life cycle management and upgrades."
"It automates rolling out new features, packaging the code, conducting security scans, and deploying to OpenShift."
"The most valuable are security features, particularly when operating in the cloud."
"The usability and the developer experience. The platform has a centralized consultant that is easy to use for our development, operations and security teams."
"The most valuable features of OpenShift include its advanced security, integrated DNS system, built-in pipeline management with Tekton, enhanced networking routes, and dedicated platforms for DataOps and MLOps."
"The architecture is the best. The solution is scalable if you are on a container-based solution."
"On OpenShift, it's easy to scale applications. We can easily scale up or scale down."
 

Cons

"One area for improvement in Rancher Labs is the development aspect."
"We have found that the auto-secure feature of this solution doesn't always work, and could be improved to be more reliable, particularly when working with business critical applications."
"The biggest room for improvement in Rancher Labs would be to have a proper upgrading plan."
"There needs to be an improvement in observability and microservice monitoring tools in Rancher Labs."
"We'd like their monitoring tool to be integrated by default."
"I can't migrate to the newer version."
"The solution could improve by adding more features in the dashboard, such as monitoring, scanning, and security. This would be a great benefit."
"They should improve application visibility along with code visibility."
"I believe that the documentation part is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required."
"Whenever we onboard or deploy services that talk to Oracle Database, they take a lot of time to become active and serve the incoming request, so it would be good to see some improvement here. This could be an OpenShift issue or an internal network problem within our organization."
"The complexity of the installation could be reduced. While we got the necessary support, the instructions could be clearer."
"The monitoring and logging could be improved."
"OpenShift Container Platform could improve by having better integration."
"The product could benefit from additional operators and tools integrated with OpenShift."
"Things are there and the documentation is there, however, there still needs to be quick guides available."
"Quality of support may be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost is reasonable since it's open source. Rancher effectively addresses container orchestration trends, especially for those with some Kubernetes knowledge."
"Although Rancher Labs is an open-source solution, they also offer a paid version, where you buy the support when needed."
"The solution is free and open source but there is a fee for support."
"There is an annual subscription. The price of the solution should be cheaper and have better pricing flexibility."
"There are no hidden charges attached to the product unless a user opts for the premium support offered by the solution."
"This is an open-source solution, so there are no licensing costs involved."
"The pricing of the solution sits in the mid range, not high and not low. It has a fixed price that you pay every month."
"I'm an architect, so I have no involvement in the pricing and licensing of the platform."
"OpenShift Container Platform is highly-priced."
"We currently have an annual license renewal."
"Its price is a bit high because it's a premium product, but as long as the business is ready to pay for that, it's okay."
"The solution is expensive, and I rate it an eight out of ten. There is a subscription called OpenShift Plus, which offers additional features and products the vendor provides to complement the OpenShift Container Platform. These include ACM, Red Hat Quay, and Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation."
"I'm not familiar with pricing or financial aspects. In terms of effort versus benefit, it's worth it."
"The product is expensive."
"We paid for Cloud Pak for integration. It all depends on how many VMs or how many CPUs you are using. They do the licensing based on that."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
32%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Rancher Labs?
The tool's UI is very convenient enough to help you manage multiple clusters in the cloud or the company, making it a product with which you can manage different clusters and locations.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Rancher Labs?
The cost is reasonable since it's open-source. Rancher effectively addresses container orchestration trends, especially for those with some Kubernetes knowledge.
What needs improvement with Rancher Labs?
While Rancher Labs provides some level of security, it's not considered very robust. We found it to offer basic security features, which met some of our requirements, but we also relied on other op...
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 OpenShift Container Platform?
The tool's most valuable features include high availability, scalability, and security. Other features like advanced cluster management, advanced cluster security, and Red Hat Quay make it powerful...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for OpenShift Container Platform?
OpenShift pricing varies by region. For example, a simple cluster with three nodes in DAL-10 might cost around $560 to $580 per month, subject to specific configurations like memory and CPU cores.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Albert Heijn, Bell, BMC, Samsung, WindStream, Johnson & Johnson
Edenor, BMW, Ford, Argentine Ministry of Health
Find out what your peers are saying about Rancher Labs vs. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,900 professionals have used our research since 2012.