Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs VMware Tanzu Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 15, 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
VMware Tanzu Platform
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
13th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Build Automation (14th), Cloud Management (25th), Development Platforms (3rd), Container Management (3rd), Service Mesh (8th), Agile and DevOps Services (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is 9.8%, up from 8.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Tanzu Platform is 3.1%, up from 2.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
PaaS Clouds Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Pivotal Cloud Foundry9.8%
VMware Tanzu Platform3.1%
Other87.1%
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…
DarshanChaudhari - PeerSpot reviewer
Empowers seamless connectivity and integration through APIs while offering robust auto-scaling
I am involved in IT services and we provide a solution to customers. We work with VMware, Nutanix, OpenShift, and Microsoft Hyper-V The Tanzu platform is highly available, scalable, and flexible. It offers native services for autoscaling and integrations through APIs, allowing seamless…

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 feature of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is auto-healing and the plenty of other features that are provided."
"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 provides a set of developer-friendly tools that simplify application deployment."
"The most valuable features are the monitoring and the deployment is easier."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is very robust, especially for building Java."
"Stability is not a concern with this product."
"It supports CI/CD, and is integrated with the CI/CD very well."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is very easy to use compared to other cloud technologies. It has a very good performance."
"The initial setup is easy."
"The valuable feature I have found to be the management of Kubernetes clusters in a private cloud or public clouds, such as Azure or Google Cloud Platform."
"A feature we find valuable is that other products can also be integrated with Mission Control. This means that we can see the status of specific clusters, as well as view the monitoring application logs all from one point."
"Defining security metrics has proven beneficial for customers in maintaining a safe environment."
"The most important thing about the solution is its flexibility."
"The most valuable feature of VMware Tanzu Mission Control is the management functionality of the cluster life cycle. Additionally, the solution integrates well with other vendors, such as Velero for backups and Sonobuoy for compliance. Additionally, it works well in multi-cluster environments."
"The Tanzu platform is highly available, scalable, and flexible."
"We feel very good about these features."
 

Cons

"In the next release, I would like to see easy integration with external tools."
"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."
"I'd like to see a larger service offering."
"There are no synthetic application monitoring and real-time monitoring 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."
"It is not straightforward to setup."
"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."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry doesn't have certain advanced features."
"The disaster recovery feature could be improved to provide better tracking of issues. I would also like to see the introduction of a dashboard view, for even further integration of all the areas that Mission Control looks at."
"VMware Tanzu Service Mesh could add better integration with other cloud platforms, such as vRealize Automation or VMware vCloud Director for cloud providers."
"Another area of improvement is pricing."
"The solution could improve by having better integration with other solutions such as HPE."
"The infrastructure is quite challenging."
"One potential area for expansion would be leveraging AI capabilities, which my customer might be interested in exploring as they grow."
"Tanzu could provide more granular control over whatever networking is being done on the containers. I would also like to see a slightly more detailed view of application-level tracing. I'm referring to the connections between different microservices. If they added a service-matching feature, that would be helpful for the customers to build or be more effective."
"This product doesn't have a GUI. In order to use it properly, I need to connect it to a new GUI or build a GUI to manage it — it's pretty difficult."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is on the higher side and there are cheaper options available."
"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 could improve. However, in this category of solutions, they are all expensive."
"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."
"You're paying for the number of virtual machines you want to install in the installation."
"The solution is bundled in with Cloud Foundry so the pricing is not independent."
"The licensing cost is expensive."
"I would recommend that businesses look into the full price for their requirements. The price is high, but there are some open-source add-ons that can be used for customization while keeping costs down, although these might not be suitable for everyone."
"The license for VMware Tanzu Application Service is expensive. The license should be cheaper."
"There are different licenses available. You have to upgrade your license if you want to scale the solution more."
"VMware Tanzu Mission Control is cheaper than Red Hat OpenShift."
"The price of VMware Tanzu Mission Control is greater than that of Red Hat's competitor solution"
"It is not the most expensive option, and I believe the capabilities align well with the value it provides."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which PaaS Clouds solutions are best for your needs.
866,088 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
37%
Manufacturing Company
17%
Insurance Company
6%
Computer Software Company
4%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
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 Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise9
 

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.
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 VMware Tanzu Mission Control?
It definitely gives the end customer a good overview and perspective of running applications in terms of overall workload footprint. TMC provides a very detailed description of your cloud-native ap...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware Tanzu Mission Control?
The price of VMware Tanzu Mission Control is greater than that of Red Hat's competitor solution. I would rate the pricing of VMware Tanzu Mission Control as four out of ten.
 

Also Known As

PCF, Pivotal Application Service (PAS), Pivotal Container Service (PKS), Pivotal Function Service (PFS)
Tanzu Application Catalog, Application Platform, Application Service, Hub, Mission Control, Service Mesh, Build Service, Concourse for VMware Tanzu
 

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
Verizon, Cerner, Zipcar, Avarteq
Find out what your peers are saying about Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs. VMware Tanzu Platform and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
866,088 professionals have used our research since 2012.