Google Kubernetes Engine vs Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform comparison

Google and Red Hat are both solutions in the Container Management category. Google is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.2, while Red Hat is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.2. Google holds a 2.1% mindshare in CM, compared to Red Hat’s 22.6% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of Google users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Red Hat users who would recommend it.

Google Kubernetes Engine

Read 37 Google Kubernetes Engine reviews

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847 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Red Hat OpenShift Container...

Read 49 Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform reviews

7,970 Views
6,590 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Google Kubernetes Engine

Red Hat OpenShift Container...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 13, 2024

Google Kubernetes Engine and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform compete in container management systems. GKE seems to have the upper hand with its integration and ease of use, while OpenShift excels in security and advanced management features.

Features: GKE is renowned for its seamless integration with Google Cloud, offering strong machine learning capabilities, automatic updates, and excellent microservices support. Its autoscaling features allow efficient resource management. OpenShift emphasizes security, offers extensive DevOps tools, and advanced cluster management. It supports complex deployments and provides detailed control over deployments along with strong security and compliance features.

Room for Improvement: GKE needs improvement in backup systems, configuration simplicity, and enhanced application-level security. Users have called for better application security and a reliable backup system. OpenShift could improve in documentation, platform integration, and pricing. Its setup complexity and resource demands have been seen as a barrier to simple applications.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: GKE is noted for ease of deployment on public clouds, fitting for environments leveraging Google's infrastructure. It eases hybrid and multi-cloud deployments but could offer better technical support. OpenShift offers deployment flexibility across on-premises and cloud environments, supports hybrid models, but its customer service and complex setup can be challenging.

Pricing and ROI: GKE provides competitive pricing but can be expensive when addressing high availability. It uses a pay-as-you-go model with no initial licensing cost, suitable for startups and businesses. OpenShift’s premium pricing reflects its enterprise-ready capabilities, which can be costly for smaller organizations. Yet, it offers considerable value for larger enterprises due to its comprehensive features.

To learn more, read our detailed Google Kubernetes Engine vs. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Google Kubernetes Engine vs. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

March 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

Google Kubernetes Engine

Ranking in Container Management

10th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Red Hat OpenShift Container...

Ranking in Container Management

1st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Google Kubernetes Engine is 2.1%, down from 3.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is 22.6%, up from 20.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Container Management

Featured Reviews

Abhilash Gopidas

Deployment Manager at HealthEdge Software, Inc.

The auto-scaling feature helps during peak hours, but the support is not great

The product has no downtime. Automated scaling is a valuable feature. During peak hours, the datasets are on a higher volume. We need scaling in place. Otherwise, there's a degradation in the performance. We might sometimes miss data, or there will be no data sync between systems. Auto-scaling helps deal with performance needs during peak hours. There's no lag time for processing data.

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Vlado Velkovski

DevOps Architect at KIBS

Provides automation that speeds up our process by 30% and helps us achieve zero downtime

OpenShift has a pretty steep learning curve. It's not an easy tool to use. It's not only OpenShift but Kubernetes itself. The good thing is that Red Hat provides specific targeted training. There are five or six pieces of training where you can get certifications. The licenses for OpenShift are pretty expensive, so they could be cheaper because the competition isn't sleeping, and Red Hat must take that into account. There are a few versions of OpenShift. There is the normal OpenShift and an OpenShift Plus license. Red Hat could think of how to connect those two subscriptions because, with Red Hat Plus, you have one tool called ACM (Advanced Cluster Management), where you can manage multiple clusters from one place. We deployed this functionality by ourselves, but if you don't pay the license for Red Hat OpenShift Plus, you'll lack this functionality. If you have a multi-cloud environment and you have a lot of work to do, it would be a plus if the Red Had OpenShift Plus license came in a bundle with the regular solutions. This ACM tool should be available in the normal subscription, not just the Plus version. There are new versions on an almost weekly basis. I found myself that the upgrading of OpenShift clusters is not a task that will successfully finish every time. It's a simple and quick, but not reliable process. That's why we use multiple clusters. We use v4.10.3, but we want to move to v4.12.X. The upgrade process itself can fail, and we don't have backups of our OpenShift cluster because we have backups of all the Kubernetes manifests on GitHub. We destroy the cluster, bring up a new one quickly, and apply those scripts. The upgrade itself could be more resilient for us as administrators of OpenShift to be sure that it'll succeed and not occasionally fail. They can improve the reliability of their upgrade process. They also have implementations of some Red Hat-verified operators for a lot of products like Elasticsearch. They're good enough for development purposes, but some of the OpenShift operators still lack resilient production-grade configurations. Red Hat says that we have a few hundred operators, but I believe that only half of them are production-grade ready at this moment. They need to work much more on those operators to become more flexible because you can deploy all of them in development mode, but when we go to production grade and want to make specific changes to the operator and configuration, we lack those possibilities.

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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

"I rate Google Kubernetes Engine a ten out of ten."

"The initial setup was very easy because it's like a Google platform as a service. It's just one button to set it up. The deployment took only a few minutes."

"It's easy to manage and deploy. It's the best."

"The solution simplified deployment, making it more automated. Previously, Docker required manual configuration, often done by developers on their computers. However, with Google Kubernetes Engine, automation extends to configuration, deployment, scalability, and viability, primarily originating from Docker rather than Kubernetes. Its most valuable feature is the ease of configuration."

"GKE's plugin management and configuration sync are excellent features. The amount of data it provides is good, and I've been able to integrate it with the things I need."

"The solution is available across AWS, GCP and Azure and is seamless."

"The feature that I like the most is the ease of use as compared to AWS. Its ease of use is very high, and I can quickly deploy clusters with a simple template."

"Before using this solution, it was a lot of manual tasks and a lot of people participated in the process."

More Google Kubernetes Engine pros

"Technical support is good; they are fast and reliable."

"OpenShift integrates seamlessly with our CI/CD pipelines, offering robust automation and deployment capabilities."

"It is easy to expand."

"The architecture is the best. The solution is scalable if you are on a container-based solution."

"OpenShift is a user-friendly container platform with a solid GUI that helps you follow what is going on and gives you an overview of all your clusters. It's more user-friendly than the Kubernetes itself. The interface helps you learn the platform and provides access to some features or specific comments."

"I find the security features and use of operators in OpenShift Container Platform highly valuable."

"Some of the primary features we leverage in the platform have to do with how we manage the cluster configurations, the properties, and the auto-scalability. These are the features that definitely provide value in terms of reducing overhead for the developers."

"OpenShift provides tools that tell me everything I have on a container, and I can make it on-premise or on a cloud infrastructure."

More Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform pros

Cons

"While the GKE cluster is secure, application-level security is an essential aspect that needs to be addressed. The security provided by GKE includes the security of communication between nodes within the cluster and the basic features of Kubernetes security. However, these features may not be sufficient for the security needs of an enterprise. Additional security measures must be added to ensure adequate protection. It has become a common practice to deploy security tools within a Kubernetes cluster. It would be ideal if these tools were included as part of the package, as this is a standard requirement in the industry. Thus, application-level security should be integrated into GKE for improved security measures."

"Their documentation is a little here and there. Sometimes, the information is not clear or updated. Their documentation should be a little bit better."

"The tool's configuration features need improvement."

"It needs to support load balancing."

"The primary area for improvement would be the complexity involved when working with Google Kubernetes Engine, especially when using Terraform."

"The user interface could be improved."

"I would rate the scalability a seven out of ten."

"I use the Firebase tool with GKE and it would be helpful if the solution can give notifications when we reach the budget limit."

More Google Kubernetes Engine cons

"Container Platform could be improved if we could aggregate logs out of the box instead of having to do it through integrations with other products."

"We are not big customers of Red Hat, but sometimes, we have severe bugs. We are very innovative, and sometimes, we have to wait for a long time to get proper attention. Red Hat should improve on that."

"The price needs to be improved in OpenShift Container Platform. When I choose this, the product is the first factor that we have to make a long analysis to compare the real cost for the other services. However, price is high."

"The product's setup process could be easier."

"Things are there and the documentation is there, however, there still needs to be quick guides available."

"OpenShift Container Platform needs to work on integrations."

"The setup process is not great."

"OpenShift has certain restrictions in terms of managing the cluster when it's running on a public cloud. For example, identity and access management integration with the IM of AWS is quite difficult. It requires some open-source tools to integrate. This is one area where I always see room for improvement."

More Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its pricing is good. They bill us only per user. That's nice."

"The pricing for GKE is dependent on the type of machine or virtual machine (VM) that is selected for the nodes in the cluster. There is a degree of flexibility in choosing the specifications of the machine, such as the number of CPUs, GPUs, and so on. Google provides a variety of options, allowing the user to create the desired cluster composition. However, the cost can be quite steep when it comes to regional clusters, which are necessary for high availability and failover. This redundancy is crucial for businesses and is required to handle an increase in requests in case of any issues in one region, such as jumping to a different region in case of a failure in the Toronto region. While it may be tempting to choose the cheapest type of machines, this may result in a limited capacity and user numbers, requiring over-provisioning to handle additional requests, such as those for a web application."

"Pricing is a bit expensive compared to some other products, but it's acceptable."

"It is competitive, and it is not expensive. It is almost competitive with AWS and the rest of the cloud solutions. We are spending around 3K USD per month. There are four projects that are currently running, and each one is incurring a cost of around 3K USD."

"We are planning to use external support, and hire a commercial partner for it."

"The solution's price is reasonable."

"This is an open source solution, so there is no pricing or licensing."

"I would rate Kubernetes' pricing four out of five."

More Google Kubernetes Engine pricing and cost advice

"It largely depends on how much money they earn from the application being deployed; you don't normally deploy an app just for the purpose of having it. You must constantly look into your revenue and how much you spend every container, minute, or hour of how much it is working."

"It depends on who you're talking to. For a large corporation, it is acceptable, other than the significant infrastructure requirements. For a small organization, it is in no way suitable, and we'd go for Amazon's container solution."

"OpenShift pricing varies by region. For example, a simple cluster with three nodes in DAL-10 might cost around $560 to $580 per month, subject to specific configurations like memory and CPU cores."

"OpenShift with Red Hat support is pretty costly. We have done a comparison between AWS EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Services) which provides fully managed services from AWS. It's built on open-source-based Kubernetes clusters and it is much cheaper compared to Red Hat, but it is a little expensive compared to ECS provided by AWS."

"The product pricing is competitive and structured around vCPU subscriptions, aligning with our application requirements."

"The pricing is a bit more expensive than expected."

"OpenShift Container Platform is highly-priced."

"The pricing and licensing are handled on an upper management level, and I'm not involved in that, but I understand the solution to be somewhat pricey."

More Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

12%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

12%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Google Kubernetes Engine?

The product has no downtime.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google Kubernetes Engine?

The on-demand nodes are quite expensive, so we now use spot machines.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Google Kubernetes Engine?

Gemini could be more integrated with Google Kubernetes Engine ( /products/google-kubernetes-engine-reviews ). For example, it would be helpful if I could easily find log information in a particular...

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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...

See all answers

What do you like most about OpenShift Container Platform?

The tool's most valuable features include high availability, scalability, and security. Other features like advanced cluster management, advanced cluster security, and Red Hat Quay make it powerful...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for OpenShift Container Platform?

OpenShift pricing varies by region. For example, a simple cluster with three nodes in DAL-10 might cost around $560 to $580 per month, subject to specific configurations like memory and CPU cores.

See all answers

Comparisons

Akamai Connected Cloud (Linode) vs Google Kubernetes Engine

Compared 25% of the time

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Google Kubernetes Engine

Compared 14% of the time

Rancher Labs vs Google Kubernetes Engine

Compared 12% of the time

Kubernetes vs Google Kubernetes Engine

Compared 9% of the time

Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE vs Google Kubernetes Engine

Compared 9% of the time

More Google Kubernetes Engine Competitors

Amazon EKS vs Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

Compared 49% of the time

Nutanix Kubernetes Engine NKE vs Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

Compared 16% of the time

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

Compared 8% of the time

Amazon Elastic Container Service vs Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

Compared 4% of the time

Kubernetes vs Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

Compared 2% of the time

More Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Google Kubernetes Engine

April 2025

Download Google Kubernetes Engine product report

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

March 2025

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform report

Download Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform product report

Also Known As

GKE

No data available

Overview

Kubernetes Engine is a managed, production-ready environment for deploying containerized applications. It brings our latest innovations in developer productivity, resource efficiency, automated operations, and open source flexibility to accelerate your time to market.

Google

Red Hat® OpenShift® offers a consistent hybrid cloud foundation for building and scaling containerized applications. Benefit from streamlined platform installation and upgrades from one of the enterprise Kubernetes leaders.

Red Hat

Sample Customers

Philips Lighting, Alpha Vertex, GroupBy, BQ

Edenor, BMW, Ford, Argentine Ministry of Health

Buyer's Guide

Google Kubernetes Engine vs. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

March 2025

Free Report: Google Kubernetes Engine vs. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

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