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Portainer vs Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform comparison

 

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
18th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Red Hat OpenShift Container...
Ranking in Container Management
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
52
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Portainer is 2.8%, down from 5.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is 14.9%, down from 21.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Container Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform14.9%
Portainer2.8%
Other82.3%
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.
ST
Open Shift Lead at Al Rajhi Bank
Seamless upgrades have protected business operations and support secure, flexible deployments
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform needs some improvements, for example, in upgrade time, as normally, an extended upgrade method should be allowed, but sometimes if anyone clicks twice, it tries to upgrade the second level and gets stuck, so that area should be enhanced. The strictness of the SSD and HDD also should be aligned, because in some environments, we cannot strictly make some rules related to HDD, since Red Hat is strictly making a rule after 4.16 to adopt SSD instead of HDD, which in some environments will not allow, so some workaround should be done on that. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is the best option, but as many companies and the world are mainly looking for security purposes, the clear text format needs to be adopted instead of any third party. Red Hat has to develop its own product, as HashiCorp and CyberArk Conjur exist, but Red Hat needs to protect the clear text format because the secret should not be seen by anyone. Currently, it is a clear text method allowing anyone in the namespace to see the username and password, which should be controlled in that way. The major improvements needed are related to upgrade time and strict rule-making.

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."
"I like the Flexibility of the solution."
"For us, the fully automated upgrades are valuable. We have to maintain the clusters in production. For us, it is very important that it does not take too much time to manage all the clusters and do life cycle management and upgrades."
"If you care about your performance and the support, I would recommend it for enterprise mission critical applications."
"OpenShift provides tools that tell me everything I have on a container, and I can make it on-premise or on a cloud infrastructure."
"On OpenShift, it's easy to scale applications. We can easily scale up or scale down."
"I definitely recommend Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to other organizations due to its high availability, security, ease of use, and all the built-in features it offers."
"The solution's security throughout the stack and the software supply chain is very reliable. When it was on-prem, it was by default secured by our company firewalls and security tools, and now it's in the cloud, which has its security and systems in place. This provides stability to our infrastructure."
"It has been a good solution to deploy all containerized applications."
 

Cons

"Portainer needs to be more intuitive."
"Things are there and the documentation is there, however, there still needs to be quick guides available."
"The complexity of the installation could be reduced. While we got the necessary support, the instructions could be clearer."
"Setting up OpenShift isn't easy. I rate it three out of ten for ease of setup. We're deploying it in three phases. They're in the second phase now. The total deployment time will be five months. We expect to complete the deployment this March. There are 13 people on three teams working on this deployment."
"The setup process is not great and could be better."
"The solution needs to introduce open ID connect integration for role-based access control."
"The initial setup can be hard."
"We encounter difficulties while accessing the environment and managing the cluster. This particular area needs improvement."
"There should be a simplification of the overall cluster environment. It should require fewer resources. Just to run a simple Hello World app, it requires about seven servers, and that's just crazy. I understand that it is fully redundant, but it's prohibitively expensive to get something simple going."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The product is expensive."
"We paid for Cloud Pak for integration. It all depends on how many VMs or how many CPUs you are using. They do the licensing based on that."
"OpenShift Container Platform is highly-priced."
"The solution is expensive, and I rate it an eight out of ten. There is a subscription called OpenShift Plus, which offers additional features and products the vendor provides to complement the OpenShift Container Platform. These include ACM, Red Hat Quay, and Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation."
"I'm not familiar with pricing or financial aspects. In terms of effort versus benefit, it's worth it."
"The license to use the OpenShift Container Platform is free. If you are capable with Java you can modify it."
"Its price is a bit high because it's a premium product, but as long as the business is ready to pay for that, it's okay."
"We have to pay for the license."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
University
7%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business14
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise41
 

Questions from the Community

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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 OpenShift Container Platform?
Regarding whether Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is expensive or if the price is reasonable for my customers, to me, the services it provides should incur some costs, but based on market feed...
What needs improvement with OpenShift Container Platform?
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform needs some improvements, for example, in upgrade time, as normally, an extended upgrade method should be allowed, but sometimes if anyone clicks twice, it tries...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Edenor, BMW, Ford, Argentine Ministry of Health
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Kubernetes and others in Container Management. Updated: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.