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Portainer vs Red Hat OpenShift comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Portainer
Ranking in Container Management
20th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Red Hat OpenShift
Ranking in Container Management
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
76
Ranking in other categories
PaaS Clouds (3rd), Server Virtualization Software (3rd), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (2nd), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Portainer is 2.3%, down from 5.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 5.0%, up from 2.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Container Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Red Hat OpenShift5.0%
Portainer2.3%
Other92.7%
Container Management
 

Featured Reviews

EB
Developer with 1-10 employees
A GUI solution that helps to administer a docker using a browser
The first time using Portainer involves a learning curve. It takes longer as you're unfamiliar with the processes and might be lazy to consult the manual. Initially, you may rely on intuition within the GUI. However, after repeating the same tasks three or four times, the process becomes much quicker.
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

"Portainer comes with the ability to take the information of docker definition. Using it, I can visually observe how the container has been created. It allows me to create networks. I can also visually generate volumes and working stacks."
"Two stand-out features are the security model and value-add features that don't exist in Upstream Kubernetes."
"While a PaaS is not for everyone, OpenShift mixes the best combination of new technology with the reuse of existing technology."
"Red Hat OpenShift has positively impacted our organization by adding significantly to our revenues because what we were doing through other vendors shows that with vanilla Kubernetes, there are many features and extra advantages in Red Hat OpenShift."
"The virtualization of my APIs means I no longer have to pay VMware large amounts of money to only run in-house solutions."
"I have seen a return on investment, and it depends upon the types and the nature of some of the most critical applications that have been hosted on the OpenShift infrastructure."
"This solution helps us to account for peak seasons involving higher demand than usual. It also gives us confidence in the security of our overall systems."
"Our small team developed and rolled out everything to production in a short time, mostly thanks to OpenShift."
"A valuable feature of Red Hat OpenShift is its ability to handle increased loads by automatically adding nodes."
 

Cons

"Portainer needs to be more intuitive."
"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."
"One area for improvement with Red Hat OpenShift is in management and cluster implementation."
"Autoscaling issues. It does not increase in a seamless manner. Sometimes, CPU utilization/Memory utilization exceeds and the application just hangs or gets into HeapSpace or OutOfMemory error."
"Credential not hidden, so people on the same group can view it."
"I think OpenShift PREMIERE costs a lot more, compared to the support given in Europe."
"The first installations were tricky."
"Support could improve with faster response times, as responses are currently quite slow."
"I think that OpenShift has too many commands for running services from the CLI, and the configuration files are a little complicated."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"OpenShift is really good when we need to start, but once we get to a certain scale, it becomes too expensive."
"This solution is fairly expensive but comes at an average cost compared to other solutions in the market."
"Pricing of OpenShift depends on the number of nodes and who is hosting it."
"The product has reasonable pricing."
"The cost is quite high."
"My company makes payments towards the licensing costs attached to OpenShift."
"The product’s pricing is expensive."
"The product's support is expensive. I would rate the tool's pricing an eight out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Computer Software Company
8%
Media Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise58
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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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 ...
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 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...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
UPS, Cathay Pacific, Hilton
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Web Services (AWS), Red Hat, Kubernetes and others in Container Management. Updated: August 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.