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Rancher Labs vs Red Hat OpenShift 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
8.5
Rancher Labs provides efficient open-source solutions like OpenShift with significant cost savings and an eight out of ten rating.
Sentiment score
7.4
Red Hat OpenShift boosts productivity and ROI, with improved scalability, resource utilization, and reduced costs compared to VMware.
With OpenShift combined with IBM Cloud App integration, I can spin an integration server in a second as compared to traditional methods, which could take days or weeks.
Platform Engineer & Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Moving to OpenShift resulted in increased system stability and reduced downtime, which contributed to operational efficiency.
Infrastructure Manager at Appzone Group
It is always advisable to get the bare minimum that you need, and then add more when necessary.
Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.8
Rancher Labs' customer service and technical support are praised for responsiveness, with users valuing community forums for assistance.
Sentiment score
6.8
Red Hat OpenShift support is mixed, with praise for premium options but concerns over response times and documentation consistency.
Red Hat's technical support is responsive and effective.
Infrastructure Manager at Appzone Group
Customer support is really good because so far in our case, we have always received a prompt response, and they have been really helpful to us.
ML Engineer - Specialist at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
I have been pretty happy in the past with getting support from Red Hat.
Manager IT Infrastructure at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Rancher Labs offers robust scalability for small to large teams, with effective deployment and minor automation improvements suggested.
Sentiment score
7.4
Red Hat OpenShift is scalable, easy to deploy, integrates well, supports thousands of users, and suits large organizations.
The on-demand provisioning of pods and auto-scaling, whether horizontal or vertical, is the best part.
Manager IT Infrastructure at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
OpenShift's horizontal pod scaling is more effective and efficient than that used in Kubernetes, making it a superior choice for scalability.
Platform Engineer & Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Red Hat OpenShift scales excellently, with a rating of ten out of ten.
System Analyst at Freelancer
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.7
Rancher Labs is praised for its stability and reliability, though users note complexity and upgrade challenges.
Sentiment score
7.7
Red Hat OpenShift is stable and reliable, despite past issues, with high resource needs for optimal performance.
It provides better performance yet requires more resources compared to vanilla Kubernetes.
Platform Engineer & Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
I've had my cluster running for over four years.
Infrastructure Manager at Appzone Group
It performs well under load, providing the desired output.
System Analyst at Freelancer
 

Room For Improvement

Rancher Labs needs improved stability, integrations, user-friendly features, enhanced security, multicloud support, and better community and development resources.
Red Hat OpenShift faces challenges in usability, security, integration, and documentation, requiring enhancements in scaling, setup, and multi-cloud support.
Learning OpenShift requires complex infrastructure, needing vCenter integration, more advanced answers, active directory, and more expensive hardware.
Platform Engineer & Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
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.
Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
We should aim to include VMware-like capabilities to be competitive, especially considering cost factors.
System Analyst at Freelancer
 

Setup Cost

Rancher Labs provides a cost-effective open-source container orchestration with optional paid support, seen as competitively mid-range priced.
Red Hat OpenShift is seen as costly, with competitive enterprise pricing but restrictive for smaller organizations; alternatives may be cheaper.
Initially, licensing was per CPU, with a memory cap, but the price has doubled, making it difficult to justify for clients with smaller compute needs.
Senior Technical Lead at MORO
The pricing for Red Hat OpenShift is considered quite high.
Manager for Middleware at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Red Hat can improve on the pricing part by making it more flexible and possibly on the lower side.
Manager IT Infrastructure at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Valuable Features

Rancher Labs offers user-friendly Kubernetes management, seamless integrations, and supports GitOps and virtual machine management with promising potential.
Red Hat OpenShift excels with fast CI/CD, scalability, strong security, and seamless DevOps integration for large projects.
Because it was centrally managed in our company, many metrics that we had to write code for were available out of the box, including utilization, CPU utilization, memory, and similar metrics.
Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
The concept of containers and scaling on demand is a feature I appreciate the most about Red Hat OpenShift.
Manager IT Infrastructure at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
A valuable feature of Red Hat OpenShift is its ability to handle increased loads by automatically adding nodes.
System Analyst at Freelancer
 

Categories and Ranking

Rancher Labs
Ranking in Container Management
11th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Data Storage for Kubernetes (2nd)
Red Hat OpenShift
Ranking in Container Management
10th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
64
Ranking in other categories
PaaS Clouds (3rd), Server Virtualization Software (11th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (5th), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Rancher Labs is 5.6%, down from 9.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 3.5%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Container Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Red Hat OpenShift3.5%
Rancher Labs5.6%
Other90.9%
Container Management
 

Featured Reviews

RyanVassallo - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Systems and Infrastructure at Booming Games
Offers an open-source version along with a good UI
The product has multiple good features. One of the solution's good features is that it is the GitOps functionality known as Rancher fleet, which is used for continuous delivery. The tool's UI is very convenient enough to help you manage multiple clusters in the cloud or on-premises, making it a product with which you can manage different clusters and locations. The tool also has a feature that is still kind of maturing, but I think it has very good potential. This new feature is named Harvester, which is allows users to have virtual machines managed by Kubernetes engine. This is very new technology in the market. I think that Harvester needs to mature as a product, and I think that in the future, it will be very powerful. You have one tool that does many things for you.
Pratul Shukla - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
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.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
46%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
26%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise42
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Rancher Labs?
The tool's UI is very convenient enough to help you manage multiple clusters in the cloud or the company, making it a product with which you can manage different clusters and locations.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Rancher Labs?
The cost is reasonable since it's open-source. Rancher effectively addresses container orchestration trends, especially for those with some Kubernetes knowledge.
What needs improvement with Rancher Labs?
While Rancher Labs provides some level of security, it's not considered very robust. We found it to offer basic security features, which met some of our requirements, but we also relied on other op...
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 do you like most about OpenShift?
OpenShift facilitates DevOps practices and improves CI/CD workflows in terms of stability compared to Jenkins.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Albert Heijn, Bell, BMC, Samsung, WindStream, Johnson & Johnson
UPS, Cathay Pacific, Hilton
Find out what your peers are saying about Rancher Labs vs. Red Hat OpenShift and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
879,711 professionals have used our research since 2012.