Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Red Hat OpenShift comparison

Broadcom and Red Hat are both solutions in the PaaS Clouds category. Broadcom is ranked #14, while Red Hat is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.3. Broadcom holds a 6.7% mindshare in PSP, compared to Red Hat’s 8.6% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Broadcom users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Red Hat users who would recommend it.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Read 15 Pivotal Cloud Foundry reviews

4,851 Views
4,802 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Red Hat OpenShift

Read 64 Red Hat OpenShift reviews

11,157 Views
6,136 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Red Hat OpenShift

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 4, 2026

Red Hat OpenShift and Pivotal Cloud Foundry compete in the cloud platform category. OpenShift appears to have the upper hand due to its broader and more developed feature set, which caters to diverse deployments.

Features: Red Hat OpenShift offers strong CI/CD capabilities, robust automation, and a scalable environment, supporting deployments with Docker containers and Kubernetes compatibility. Pivotal Cloud Foundry is valued for its ease of use, particularly with Java support, and robust integration capabilities which simplify application deployment.

Room for Improvement: Red Hat OpenShift users have identified challenges in documentation, complexity of its security model, and scalability issues, particularly with auto-scaling and monitoring. Integration with various services also needs improvement. Pivotal Cloud Foundry users suggest better documentation, enhanced security features, support for canary deployments, and cost reduction to improve its offering.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: OpenShift's deployment is versatile, supporting on-premises, hybrid, and private cloud environments, but its customer support requires better responsiveness and communication. Cloud Foundry also supports varied deployment environments and benefits from a strong community, offering accessible technical assistance, although information access could be more streamlined.

Pricing and ROI: OpenShift’s robust feature set comes with a high price, but many opt for its open-source version with paid support to control costs. It offers significant ROI in resource management and scalability, appealing to larger businesses. Pivotal Cloud Foundry's pricing is similar to other solutions, considered expensive yet valuable for its platform navigability and integration, especially for organizations bound to a single cloud infrastructure. While OpenShift's ecosystem is seen as costly but supportive, Cloud Foundry is praised for integration and simplicity at a comparable premium.

To learn more, read our detailed Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs. Red Hat OpenShift Report (Updated: February 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs. Red Hat OpenShift

February 2026

Download the complete report

Helped 882,333 peers since 2012

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

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

14th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Red Hat OpenShift

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

3rd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Server Virtualization Software (10th), Container Management (8th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (5th), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is 6.7%, down from 10.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 8.6%, down from 11.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

PaaS Clouds Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Red Hat OpenShift	8.6%
Pivotal Cloud Foundry	6.7%
Other	84.7%

PaaS Clouds

Featured Reviews

reviewer2263239

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.

Read full review

Pratul Shukla

Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features are the monitoring and the deployment is easier."

"Stability is not a concern with this product."

"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."

"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is very robust, especially for building Java."

"PCF is open, so the applications run really smoothly and with little downtime."

"It supports CI/CD, and is integrated with the CI/CD very well."

"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 solution is stable and resilient. In our company, we do not even see any challenges with the solution."

More Pivotal Cloud Foundry pros

"The solution is easy to scale."

"The stability has been good."

"A valuable feature of Red Hat OpenShift is its ability to handle increased loads by automatically adding nodes."

"We are currently dealing with both local support and Red Hat support, and they have been amazing."

"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."

"The product's initial setup is very easy, especially compared to AWS."

"Valuable features include time to market, avoiding vendor lock-in, and the ease of working in a multi-cloud environment."

"The most valuable aspect of this solution is the great customer service and the ability for our team to get assistance when we need it."

More Red Hat OpenShift pros

Cons

"It should offer more security features."

"The user interface should be simpler to navigate because it t can take time for users to learn it."

"Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve on the technology it is a bit complex."

"The Pivotal Cloud Foundry's initial setup has a learning curve for my team, but it was easy to use."

"There are no synthetic application monitoring and real-time monitoring features."

"It is not straightforward to setup."

"In the next release, they should offer additional applications for the databases, and improve the deployment experience."

"I'd like to see a larger service offering."

More Pivotal Cloud Foundry cons

"They could work on the pricing model, making it more flexible and possibly lower."

"Documentation and technical support could be improved. The product is good, but when we raise a case with support—say we are having an image issue—the support is not really up to the mark. It is difficult to get support... When we raise a case, their support people will hesitate to get on a call or a screen-sharing session. That is a major drawback when it comes to OpenShift."

"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."

"Room for improvement is around the offerings that come as a bundle with the container platform. The packaging of the platform should be done such that customers do not have to purchase additional licenses."

"OpenShift's storage management could be better."

"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."

"The whole area around the hybrid cloud could be improved. I would like to deploy a Red Hat OpenShift cluster on-premise and on the cloud, then have Red Hat do the entire hybrid cloud management."

"I want easier node management and more user-friendly scripts for installing master and worker nodes."

More Red Hat OpenShift cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"You're paying for the number of virtual machines you want to install in the installation."

"Licensing is on a monthly basis and right now we pay $24/month. There are no other costs over and above that."

"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is based on the customer's requirements. However, the price is comparable to other similar solutions."

"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 solution is cost-effective."

"My company makes payments towards the licensing costs attached to OpenShift."

"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."

"The pricing is standard; the solution isn't particularly expensive or affordable."

"We had a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) license for all our servers' operating systems. By having multiple Red Hat products together, you can negotiate costs and leverage on having a sort of enterprise license agreement to reduce the overall outlay or TCO."

"It's important to start small because the solution is scalable. We can build our cluster and look at the bundle option, not the external subscriptions. Talking to the people at Red Hat can save us money."

"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."

"The price depends on the type and the nature of the organizations, along with the types of projects that are of considerable range."

More Red Hat OpenShift pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which PaaS Clouds solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

882,333 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

37%

Manufacturing Company

15%

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

25%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Large Enterprise	11

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	17
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	43

Questions from the Community

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...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

What do you like most about OpenShift?

OpenShift facilitates DevOps practices and improves CI/CD workflows in terms of stability compared to Jenkins.

See all answers

What needs improvement with OpenShift?

Areas where Red Hat OpenShift can be improved include the licensing being a bit complex and maybe expensive, as that is something in the hands of the organization's higher management, especially wh...

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Azure vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 33% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 15% of the time

Google Cloud vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 6% of the time

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 6% of the time

Cloud Foundry vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 5% of the time

More Pivotal Cloud Foundry Competitors

Microsoft Azure vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 8% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 8% of the time

Proxmox VE vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 6% of the time

Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 5% of the time

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 4% of the time

More Red Hat OpenShift Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

January 2026

Download Pivotal Cloud Foundry product report

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat OpenShift

January 2026

Download Red Hat OpenShift product report

Also Known As

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

No data available

Overview

Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) is the leading enterprise PaaS, powered by Cloud Foundry. PCF provides a cloud-native application platform that allows you to continuously deliver any app to every major private and public cloud with a single platform. PCF is proven to accelerate feature delivery with higher developer productivity and a 200:1 developer to operator ratio. PCF's built-in security and self-healing capabilities reduce risk in your app portfolio while maintaining high-availability at scale to keep customer facing systems online even in the most challenging circumstances. pivotal.io

Broadcom

Red Hat OpenShift offers a robust, scalable platform with strong security and automation, suitable for container orchestration, application deployment, and microservices architecture.

Designed to modernize applications by transitioning from legacy systems to cloud-native environments, Red Hat OpenShift provides powerful CI/CD integration and Kubernetes compatibility. Its security features, multi-cloud support, and source-to-image functionality enhance deployment flexibility. While the GUI offers user-friendly navigation, users benefit from its cloud-agnostic nature and efficient lifecycle management. However, improvements are needed in documentation, configuration complexity, and integration with third-party platforms. Pricing and high resource demands can also be challenging for wider adoption.

What are the key features of Red Hat OpenShift?

Security: Comprehensive security features ensure safe deployments and operations.
Scalability: Auto-scaling and monitoring capabilities cater to high-demand environments.
CI/CD Integration: Seamless integration for efficient continuous deployment processes.
Cloud Compatibility: Supports multi-cloud and on-premise solutions with ease.
GUI: Simplifies platform management and enhances usability.

What benefits and ROI should users look for?

Improved Efficiency: Streamlined operations reduce time and resource investments.
Enhanced Flexibility: Adapt quickly to changing demands and environments.
Quick Deployment: Fast application deployment supports agile project timelines.
Robust Support: Access to dependable customer support services.

Red Hat OpenShift is strategically implemented for diverse industries focusing on container orchestration and application modernization. Organizations leverage it for migrating applications to cloud-native environments and managing CI/CD pipelines. Its functionality facilitates efficient resource management and microservices architecture adoption, supporting enterprise-level DevOps practices. Users employ it across cloud and on-premises platforms to drive performance improvements.

Red Hat

Sample Customers

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

UPS, Cathay Pacific, Hilton

Buyer's Guide

Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs. Red Hat OpenShift

February 2026

Free Report: Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs. Red Hat OpenShift

Find out what your peers are saying about Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs. Red Hat OpenShift and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.

DOWNLOAD NOW

882,333 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs. Red Hat OpenShift report.

See our list of best PaaS Clouds vendors.

We monitor all PaaS Clouds reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.