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Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Red Hat OpenShift comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 5, 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

Pivotal Cloud Foundry
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
16th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Red Hat OpenShift
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
76
Ranking in other categories
Server Virtualization Software (3rd), Container Management (4th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (2nd), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is 5.0%, down from 9.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 6.3%, down from 11.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
PaaS Clouds Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Red Hat OpenShift6.3%
Pivotal Cloud Foundry5.0%
Other88.7%
PaaS Clouds
 

Featured Reviews

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.
AA
Operation Director at Zaintech
Platform has transformed our cloud into a secure, unified home for diverse modern applications
One of the best features of Red Hat OpenShift is that it has the catalog, the application catalog, and the operator hub, which allows us to deploy things easily and straightforward without going into a lot of hassles. This is one of the main things, in addition to having integration with ACM and ACS, where we can have the ability to manage multiple clusters and to secure them, deploy them, manage them, run GitOps and day-two operations, as well as upgrades and other functionality which is made easy using these tools. Red Hat OpenShift also provides virtualization capabilities, and I am currently working with Zain to make a project where we will convert F5 appliances to virtual machines and to manage them through Red Hat virtualization, OVE. Red Hat OpenShift is a unique platform because it provides the features for both worlds, containerization, and VMs at the same time, requiring you to learn one skillset in order to manage all of this at the same time. In the beginning, our cloud depended only on virtual machines, so I introduced this to our management to start to work with microservices and with containerization. This was adapted in our cloud, providing us the capability to sell more of these features and to reduce the hardware requirement by about thirty percent, following the trends of using containerization for all modern applications. In addition, it reduced the time to develop and to deploy a new application; all we need is using Jenkins for CI/CD. Once we commit any code, it gets triggered, and it will implement the new container in a very flexible and easy way, within seconds. This decreased the time to market and increased agility, allowing us to capture new opportunities very fast.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is very easy to use compared to other cloud technologies, and it has very good performance."
"We find its stability and scalability valuable."
"It provides a set of developer-friendly tools that simplify application deployment."
"The most valuable feature of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is the UI, it is easy to use."
"The solution is stable and resilient. In our company, we do not even see any challenges with the solution."
"The solution is stable, and we have not experienced any infrastructure issues, so it is very good and captures a few metrics, onboarding to App Dynamics."
"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."
"It is a scalable product...We are not facing any particular issues since most of the applications in our company are written in Java and .NET."
"Red Hat OpenShift has positively impacted our organization by improving efficiency and collaboration, and in comparison it seems to be better than IBM Cloud."
"The product's initial setup is very easy, especially compared to AWS."
"Excellent GUI support, so one does not need to use the command line client for almost any tasks. Great support for building images directly from Git repositories with hooks."
"In my experience, the best feature Red Hat OpenShift offers is that the environment is easy to use, meaning that it is easy for the configuration and the management in the different environments and provides easy visibility that allows me to watch the reports for the leadership in the company."
"A smaller cloud running on containers enables easy deployment with the ability to scale up and scale down, and it can host multiple services on the same platform."
"The most valuable thing about it is the support available."
"It is an excellent product."
"I like OCP, and the management UI is better than the open-source ones."
 

Cons

"In the next release, I would like to see easy integration with external tools."
"It should offer more security features."
"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."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry doesn't have certain advanced 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."
"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."
"Scalability is terrible. So far we have not been able to scale it up."
"I want easier node management and more user-friendly scripts for installing master and worker nodes."
"The area for improvement is mostly in support for legacy applications."
"My team contacts OpenShift support whenever there's an issue, and it was a very bad experience."
"The product’s integration with Windows containers and other third-party products needs improvement."
"For some reason there have been some DNS issues."
"OpenShift's storage management could be better."
"We had stability issues, especially with earlier versions where the underlying Kubernetes wasn't stable at all."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"You're paying for the number of virtual machines you want to install in the installation."
"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve. However, in this category of solutions, they are all expensive."
"The product has reasonable pricing."
"The cost is quite high."
"We are currently using the open version, OKD. We plan to get the enterprise version in the future."
"This solution is fairly expensive but comes at an average cost compared to other solutions in the market."
"The solution is cost-effective."
"The pricing for OpenShift includes support and licensing, which costs approximately $400."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
29%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Comms Service Provider
5%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise58
 

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...
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 ...
What needs improvement with OpenShift?
One area for improvement in Red Hat OpenShift is during upgrades, as there is currently no option to revert to a previous version if vulnerabilities or issues arise. I believe that providing such a...
What is your primary use case for OpenShift?
My main use case for Red Hat OpenShift is training for several products, mainly for container orchestration, and I am currently using OCP. Previously, I trained on different products such as virtua...
 

Also Known As

PCF, Pivotal Application Service (PAS), Pivotal Container Service (PKS), Pivotal Function Service (PFS)
No data available
 

Overview

 

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
Find out what your peers are saying about Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs. Red Hat OpenShift and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.