Flatcar Container Linux vs Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) comparison

Kinvolk and Red Hat are both solutions in the Operating Systems (OS) for Business category. Kinvolk is ranked #15, while Red Hat is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.8. Kinvolk holds a 0.5% mindshare in OSB, compared to Red Hat’s 11.8% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Kinvolk users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of Red Hat users who would recommend it.

Flatcar Container Linux

Read 1 Flatcar Container Linux review

718 Views
567 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (R...

Read 268 Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) reviews

39,082 Views
14,503 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Flatcar Container Linux

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (R...

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Flatcar Container Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat, Canonical, Oracle and others in Operating Systems (OS) for Business.

To learn more, read our detailed Operating Systems (OS) for Business Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Operating Systems (OS) for Business

January 2025

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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

Flatcar Container Linux

Ranking in Operating Systems (OS) for Business

15th

Average Rating

8.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (R...

Ranking in Operating Systems (OS) for Business

1st

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

268

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Operating Systems (OS) for Business category, the mindshare of Flatcar Container Linux is 0.5%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is 11.8%, down from 12.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Operating Systems (OS) for Business

Featured Reviews

Yogesh Deore

Senior Consultant at Capgemini

The solution is stable and allows us to make needed changes

The development teams could sharpen their skills. They should offer applications on the net I have eight years of experience with Flatcar Container Linux. The version of Flatcar Container Linux that I am using is stable. The scalability of this product is fine. It allows us to make the needed…

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Bruce Lundberg

Linux HPC Systems Administrator at a manufacturing company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Reliable patch management, high uptime, and incredible knowledge base

In terms of security, it does a lot of things that most people still turn off. SELinux is turned on by default. They have pretty good firewall rules in their defaults. The audit rules always take tweaking, but, overall, it comes out of the box not too bad. I used to write scripts to harden them from there. There are multiple ways to provision and patch. You have everything from local repositories to doing it by hand. Their knowledge base is incredible. There is so much information out there. It has never taken me longer than 30 minutes to find an answer to anything, even very tough ones. One company I worked for was a security company, and we did a lot of patching on everything. It was designed around security and email hosting, and uptime was pretty much whatever we wanted it to be. I have had a couple of times when the uptime was bad, but it was caused by a third-party solution. In fact, the Norton antivirus was definitely the worst. Red Hat had nothing to do with it.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Flatcar's support is good. The version I am using is stable and allows us to make needed changes."

"The most valuable feature is the reliability of Red Hat's support."

"With regard to security, most companies are moving towards the black box approach and Red Hat. It's much more secure compared to the other vendors."

"The tool is simple and easy to use. It has good support and doesn't have many outages due to the OS."

"It's a rock-solid operating system. We don't need anything fancy from the operating system itself. What we need is something that doesn't crash, stays up to date, and provides the security features that we need to keep external players out."

"Technical support is pretty good. It's one of the main reasons we chose Red Hat over competitors."

"It is hardware-independent. We can use Dell, HPE, or any other hardware. It is also more reasonable than the other operating systems."

"The product is super easy to use."

"I see so many features in Red Hat Enterprise Linux that I do not see in other Linux operating systems, such as Ubuntu. That is why Red Hat is very popular"

More Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) pros

Cons

"The development teams could sharpen their skills. They should offer applications on the net."

"It would be great to have an overview of how various Red Hat products work together. They can show how to tie all those pieces together and how to have the products that we work together for our day-to-day processes."

"Red Hat can be tricky at times, but all operating systems are. The moves to systemd and NetworkManager haven't made the product more user-friendly. Let's put it that way. The network management they had before was easier and somewhat more reliable than NetworkManager, which Red Hat forces us to use now."

"The numerous links to different pages disrupt the flow of information and make it difficult to maintain focus."

"When we initially began working with containers, we encountered some challenges with compatibility."

"I like the way the operating system works now, and I do not really see any bad functionality with it. The only thing I would say is getting rid of some aspects. That is the one part that a lot of admins probably get annoyed with."

"Red Hat Enterprise Linux analytics are cryptic."

"Some problems may occur with the product if you don't patch it after a year or two."

"Linux overall needs improvement. They cannot go much beyond what Linus Torvalds's kernel implementation can do. I come from AIX, and there were very cool things in AIX that I am missing dearly, e.g., being able to support not only adding, but also reducing memory and number of processors. That is not supported on Linux right now, and it is the same for the mainstream file systems supported by Red Hat. There is no way of reducing a file system or logical volume. Whereas, in AIX, it was a shoo-in. These are the little things where we can say, "Ah, we are missing AIX for that.""

More Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"We can always ask for Red Hat Enterprise Linux to be less expensive but when we compare it to other options, there are savings in the long run."

"The pricing is great for virtual systems."

"Lowering the cost of enterprise-level offerings could attract organizations seeking operating systems or Kubernetes solutions, as these tools are essential for many businesses in the region."

"It seems to be fair. It is not overpriced."

"I like my developer account. The free sixteen licenses that they give with the developer account are great because that gives me the ability to keep using it at home instead of trying CentOS or something like that."

"We are an educational institution and as such, what we pay is less than the average company."

"The setup cost is non-existent. With licensing, there was a little snafu because I misread something. There was a slight learning curve because we use virtual data center licensing. We had to understand how it all maps. We had to understand how that mapping works when the hypervisors are Red Hat or VMware. There is a slight learning curve, but it worked out. It ends up being easy."

"Red Hat Enterprise Linux licensing is expensive."

More Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user281973

Storage and VMware Expert at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

Aug 24, 2017

It's improved our company's system environments that run Oracle databases.

Red Hat is mission critical to our environment Red Hat has improved the mission critical environments running Oracle databases, while CentOS has improved our web environment and MySQL. Oracle and SAP Environment and all HPC environments. 10 years No issues Very stable i don´t find any problem…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

22%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

11%

University

11%

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

Which would you choose - RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) or CentOS?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is fantastic. It is an inexpensive solution that has excellent security, performance, and stability, and also lots of features. I specifically like that the solution has fe...

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What do you like most about Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)?

It is open source. We can customize it as per our requirements.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)?

I do not have any insights, but I know why the prices went up. At the time, it made sense. I do not know what the pricing is like now. Previously, the pricing model was advantageous as it allowed u...

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Comparisons

Ubuntu Linux vs Flatcar Container Linux

Compared 69% of the time

SUSE Linux Enterprise vs Flatcar Container Linux

Compared 8% of the time

CentOS vs Flatcar Container Linux

Compared 8% of the time

More Flatcar Container Linux Competitors

SUSE Linux Enterprise vs Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

Compared 21% of the time

Windows Server vs Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

Compared 16% of the time

Rocky Linux vs Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

Compared 15% of the time

Windows 10 vs Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

Compared 10% of the time

Alpine Linux vs Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

Compared 0% of the time

More Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Operating Systems (OS) for Business

January 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

January 2025

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Also Known As

No data available

Red Hat Enterprise Linux, RHEL

Overview

Flatcar Container Linux is a lightweight, secure, and reliable operating system designed for running containers at scale with automatic updates and a minimal attack surface. The solution is easy to use and manage and has a simple and intuitive command-line interface and a powerful set of tools for managing containers and clusters.

It supports various container runtimes, including Docker, Kubernetes, and Mesos. It can be deployed on various infrastructure platforms, including bare metal, virtual machines, and cloud environments. Flatcar Container Linux is an ideal choice for organizations deploying containerized applications in production environments.

Kinvolk

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a stable and reliable open-source operating system for running application servers, databases, web servers, and production systems. It is also used for cloud infrastructure services, BI, and disaster assistance. Its valuable features include support and subscription, ease of management and troubleshooting, integration with existing infrastructure, security updates and hardening tools, scalability, and flexibility.

Red Hat has helped organizations accelerate deployment, provide stability, control, and reliable updates, and enable the deployment of current applications and emerging workloads across different environments.

Red Hat

Sample Customers

CISCO, mettle, Microsoft, Upguard, GMX

Travel Channel, Mohawk Industries, Hilti, Molecular Health, Exolgan, Hotelplan Group, Emory University, BlueCross BlueShield of North Carolina, HCA Healthcare, Paychex, UPS, Intermountain Healthcare, Brinker International, TransUnion, Union Bank, CA Technologies

Buyer's Guide

Operating Systems (OS) for Business

January 2025

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