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 8.5. Broadcom holds a 6.2% mindshare in PSP, compared to Red Hat’s 8.2% 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

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4,677 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Red Hat OpenShift

Read 64 Red Hat OpenShift reviews

11,487 Views
5,973 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Red Hat OpenShift

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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: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs. Red Hat OpenShift

March 2026

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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 (9th), Container Management (9th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (5th), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is 6.2%, down from 10.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 8.2%, down from 12.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

PaaS Clouds Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Red Hat OpenShift	8.2%
Pivotal Cloud Foundry	6.2%
Other	85.6%

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.

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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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It provides a set of developer-friendly tools that simplify application deployment."

"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 features are the monitoring and the deployment is easier."

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

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

"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 Pivotal Cloud Foundry is auto-healing and the plenty of other features that are provided."

More Pivotal Cloud Foundry pros

"It has features that enhance security, ease of deployment, and service exposure compared to Kubernetes."

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

"It's cloud agnostic and the containerization and security features are outstanding."

"The most valuable feature of OpenShift is the containers."

"We want to build a solution that can be deployable to any cloud because of client requirements and OpenShift allows us to do this."

"The solution provides a lot of flexibility to the application team for running their applications in the container platform, without needing to monitor the entire infrastructure all the time. It automatically scales and automatically self-heals. There is also a mechanism to alert the team in case it is over-committing or overutilizing the application."

"Red Hat OpenShift has positively impacted my organization primarily through observability, as for us, application uptime matters a lot when providing public-facing products consumed by customers, and hence, we're using that to keep refining our application and products through observability metrics and keeping pace with market trends, as we promised 99.99% uptime to our customers, and the observability in Red Hat OpenShift is really helping us a lot with that."

"What I like best about OpenShift is that it can reduce some of the costs of having multiple applications because you can just move them into small container applications. For example, applications don't need to run for twenty days, only to be used up by Monday. Through OpenShift, you can move some of the small applications into any cloud. I also find the design of OpenShift good."

More Red Hat OpenShift pros

Cons

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

More Pivotal Cloud Foundry cons

"Latency and performance are two areas of concern in OpenShift where improvements are required."

"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."

"OpenShift can improve monitoring. Sometimes there are issues. Additionally, the solution could benefit from protective tools if something was to happen in our network."

"The solution needs to support the new features in Kubernetes more quickly."

"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."

"The latest 4.0 version of OpenShift disabled a few of the features we previously made use of, although this wasn't a huge deal."

"OpenShift could improve by providing the ability to integrate with public cloud platforms. This way we can easily use the services that these platforms offer. For instance, Amazon AWS. However, all the three major hyper-scalers solutions offer excellent DevOps and CI/CD tooling. If there was an easy way to integrate with them it would be beneficial. We need a way to easily integrate with the monitoring and dashboard services that they provide."

"One of the features that I've observed in Tanzu Mission Control is that I can manage multiple Kubernetes environments. For instance, one of my lines of business is using OpenShift OKD; another one wants to use Google Anthos, and somebody else wants to use VMware Tanzu. If I have to manage all these, Tanzu Mission Control is giving me the opportunity to completely manage all of my Kubernetes clusters, whereas, with OpenShift, I can only manage a particular area. I can't manage other Kubernetes clusters. I would like to have the option to manage all Kubernetes clusters with OpenShift."

More Red Hat OpenShift cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve. However, in this category of solutions, they are all expensive."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"This solution is fairly expensive but comes at an average cost compared to other solutions in the market."

"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."

"The product's support is expensive. I would rate the tool's pricing an eight out of ten."

"The product’s pricing is expensive."

"The model of pricing and buying licences is quite rigid. We are in the process of negotiating on demand pricing which will help us take advantage of the cloud as a whole."

More Red Hat OpenShift pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

36%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

24%

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 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

What is your primary use case for OpenShift?

My main use case for Red Hat OpenShift is that we had several security tools that we deployed to Red Hat OpenShift platform, specifically when we were migrating our applications from monolithic arc...

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

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Amazon AWS vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 7% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 7% of the time

Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 6% of the time

Proxmox VE vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 5% of the time

VMware ESXi vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 4% of the time

More Red Hat OpenShift Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

February 2026

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Buyer's Guide

Red Hat OpenShift

February 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

March 2026

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