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Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Red Hat OpenShift comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 22, 2025

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
11th
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
7.1
Number of Reviews
62
Ranking in other categories
Server Virtualization Software (11th), Container Management (12th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (6th), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is 9.2%, up from 8.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 11.8%, up from 11.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
PaaS Clouds Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Red Hat OpenShift11.8%
Pivotal Cloud Foundry9.2%
Other79.0%
PaaS Clouds
 

Featured Reviews

Stephen  Hack - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to use, simple to sign-in, but lacking graphical interface
Pivotal Cloud Foundry is used as a cloud platform Pivotal Cloud Foundry has helped our organization by the way we've set it up, it's easy to sign in, bind services, push services, and create YAML files. The most valuable features of Pivotal Cloud Foundry are its ease of use and the command line…
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

"I find the ease of deployment and management of microservices to be the most valuable features. The platform also has good auto-scaling capabilities."
"We find its stability and scalability valuable."
"It supports CI/CD, and is integrated with the CI/CD very well."
"The most valuable features are the monitoring and the deployment is easier."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its ability to scale. The services that connect to the database are also very good."
"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."
"Stability is not a concern with this product."
"It provides a set of developer-friendly tools that simplify application deployment."
"In terms of implementation, OpenShift is very user-friendly, which is an advantage. We are using it along with GitLab for implementing CI/CD pipelines. That's a feature that other products also have, but in OpenShift, we find it good."
"We are currently dealing with both local support and Red Hat support, and they have been amazing."
"The company had a product called device financing, where the company worked as a partner with Google. It allowed customers to take mobile phones on loan or via credit. When we migrated those services to OpenShift in February last year, we were able to sell over 100,000 devices in a single day, which was very good."
"I am impressed with the product's security features."
"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."
"Overall, the solution's security throughout the stack and software supply chain is excellent."
"OpenShift's superior dashboard is a notable strength, especially when compared to Kubernetes."
"OpenShift offers an easy-to-use graphical user interface for cluster management, making it more accessible for administrators."
 

Cons

"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."
"The Pivotal Cloud Foundry's initial setup has a learning curve for my team, but it was easy to use."
"It is not straightforward to setup."
"There are no synthetic application monitoring and real-time monitoring features."
"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 doesn't have certain advanced features."
"In the next release, I would like to see easy integration with external tools."
"In the next release, they should offer additional applications for the databases, and improve the deployment experience."
"There have been some issues with security, in particular, that we had to address. At times they make it “clunky." I am quite confident these parameters will appear in the next releases. They have been reported as bugs and are actually in process."
"There is no orchestration platform in OpenShift."
"The solution only offers support for one server."
"This solution could be improved by offering best practices on standardization and additional guidance on how to use this solution."
"This is a fairly expensive solution."
"The metrics in OpenShift can use improvement."
"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 GUI could have more capabilities, particularly around virtualization. Some features are missing, such as storage migrations, when compared with VMware."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 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."
"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is based on the customer's requirements. However, the price is comparable to other similar solutions."
"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."
"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."
"The product’s pricing is expensive."
"We are currently using the open version, OKD. We plan to get the enterprise version in the future."
"The product's support is expensive. I would rate the tool's pricing an eight out of ten."
"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."
"OpenShift is really good when we need to start, but once we get to a certain scale, it becomes too 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."
"Pricing of OpenShift depends on the number of nodes and who is hosting it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
38%
Manufacturing Company
17%
Insurance Company
6%
Healthcare Company
4%
Financial Services Firm
28%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise40
 

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...
What do you like most about Pivotal Cloud Foundry?
I find the ease of deployment and management of microservices to be the most valuable features. The platform also has good auto-scaling capabilities.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pivotal Cloud Foundry?
I would say it is around a nine out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive. Just short of Oracle. It's sort of Oracle cloud.
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 do you like most about OpenShift?
OpenShift facilitates DevOps practices and improves CI/CD workflows in terms of stability compared to Jenkins.
What needs improvement with OpenShift?
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 ent...
 

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 2025.
867,341 professionals have used our research since 2012.