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Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs VMware Tanzu Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 29, 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
15th
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
6.6
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Build Automation (16th), Cloud Management (31st), Development Platforms (5th), Container Management (10th), Service Mesh (8th), Agile and DevOps Services (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is 5.0%, down from 10.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Tanzu Platform is 4.1%, up from 2.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
PaaS Clouds Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Tanzu Platform4.1%
Pivotal Cloud Foundry5.0%
Other90.9%
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.
ErmiasGirma - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at Safaricom Ethiopia plc
Has supported container-based deployments and improved infrastructure visibility through monitoring tools
Aria Operations, formerly known as VMware vRealize Operations, has been renamed to vROps. We are currently using this for monitoring purposes. For orchestration, we are using VCD to automate Telco Cloud. VCD is an automation tool, and we are also using VMware Tanzu Platform for the Kubernetes environment, alongside TKG, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. These are also other solutions for the Tanzu Kubernetes environment. For Telco Cloud, we are using it to automate our company's operations, which is for a telecom company. We are familiar with these products, especially vCenter, ESXi, VCD, vCF, and vROps. It is very easy to integrate applications when we deploy vCenter and ESXi since we can enable vSphere with Tanzu feature. We can build namespaces and provide application developers the platform to deploy their applications on pods within containerization. We can easily manage, pull results, and create containers efficiently, making it a simple way to handle applications. We provide namespace labels for application developers, and we can manage their resources along with other aspects easily. Regarding security, we use many tools such as CDX and LDAP, AD for integrating our Kubernetes cluster with the developer teams. We can manage roles and permissions simply. It is very straightforward to integrate with EDX and other third-party tools, Active Directory, to the Kubernetes cluster, allowing easy access and management.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"PCF is open, so the applications run really smoothly and with little downtime."
"The solution is stable and resilient. In our company, we do not even see any challenges with the solution."
"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 feature of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is the UI, it is easy to use."
"The most valuable feature of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is auto-healing and the plenty of other features that are provided."
"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."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is very robust, especially for building Java."
"Defining security metrics has proven beneficial for customers in maintaining a safe environment."
"We can build namespaces and provide application developers the platform to deploy their applications on pods within containerization, and we can easily manage, pull results, and create containers efficiently, making it a simple way to handle applications."
"Tanzu Mission Control has quite a set of rich features when compared to OpenShift."
"The most important feature of Tanzu Mission Control is its integration with the other products, especially with ESX and vSAN. This is a strong part of Tanzu Mission Control. In other solutions, such as OpenShift or Kubernetes, you can find similar features, but they don't have similar integration. With Tanzu Mission Control, you get a total solution with only one provider. You have the integration with the infrastructure, virtualization of networking, and virtualization of storage. You have a natural integration, and you don't have the problem of integrating it with different products or providers. Sometimes, different companies have good integration, but it is not always guaranteed. For example, many years ago, Cisco and VMware were good partners in networking, but when VMware started to sell ESX, the relationship was broken. This is the problem that you can face when you are using solutions from two different companies."
"We feel very good about these features."
"Tanzu is easy to upgrade and scale, whether we're talking about horizontal or vertical scaling. It is as smooth as possible without any downtime. The platform maintenance, upgrading, and operations part is very smooth."
"The observability platform and end-to-end service portal provided by Tanzu are the most valuable features."
"The most popular feature of VMware Tanzu Mission Control is its graphical user interface for describing network policies on the Service Mesh, which is highly integrable with other tools commonly used in supply chains such as security."
 

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."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve on the technology, it is a bit complex."
"Scalability is terrible. So far we have not been able to scale it up."
"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 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."
"I'd like to see a larger service offering."
"It should offer more security features."
"It is not straightforward to setup."
"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."
"The biggest gap for me was just that the solution is relatively tied to Cloud Foundry. If you have anything you need to deploy outside of that, it becomes burdensome."
"The solution's initial setup process was complex...The solution could benefit from improved customization and visibility for its users."
"Tanzu is not yet a mature product, and it's not present in large environments."
"The product should support integration with Google Cloud Platform (GCP)"
"It is not easy to build a solution with containers. It has a graphical user interface, but you need to have a lot of knowledge of Linux and how to work in the command mode. Its support can also be improved. Currently, its biggest disadvantage is that it is a new product, and the clients prefer to go for a solution that has been in the market for a long time. There are not that many people who know this product."
"Tanzu provides better manageability as compared to OCP, but when it comes to tagging it with other products, it's a bit rigid. If I have to bring in any new product or something out of the box from a different vendor, working with Tanzu becomes a little difficult. For example, if I want to use the F5 services, I have to add one more layer of Avi, but I don't want to do that. If I have a list of the products that I want to use, such as for firewall services, with Tanzu, I will have to go through another layer, which creates complexity."
"The price is very high compared to other Kubernetes environments because Kubernetes is open source."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is based on the customer's requirements. However, the price is comparable to other similar solutions."
"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."
"Licensing is on a monthly basis and right now we pay $24/month. There are no other costs over and above that."
"Since we were at a large data center, the price might not have been a concern for us."
"It is not the most expensive option, and I believe the capabilities align well with the value it provides."
"The solution is only for large or medium size enterprises because it is expensive."
"The product is not expensive, but it is not cheap."
"One of our Spanish customers told us that VMware Tanzu Service Mesh is a very expensive product for their data center."
"There are different licenses available. You have to upgrade your license if you want to scale the solution more."
"The solution is bundled in with Cloud Foundry so the pricing is not independent."
"The licensing cost is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
35%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
4%
Insurance Company
4%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise11
 

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...
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 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.
What needs improvement with VMware Tanzu Mission Control?
The product should support integration with Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The tool's flexibility in onboarding different clusters needs to improve, it's presently limited to a few clusters on the li...
 

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: June 2026.
900,838 professionals have used our research since 2012.