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IBM Public Cloud vs Red Hat OpenShift comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

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

IBM Public Cloud
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
18th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
IoT Platforms (3rd)
Red Hat OpenShift
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
69
Ranking in other categories
Server Virtualization Software (6th), Container Management (7th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (4th), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of IBM Public Cloud is 3.5%, up from 3.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 7.4%, down from 12.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
PaaS Clouds Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Red Hat OpenShift7.4%
IBM Public Cloud3.5%
Other89.1%
PaaS Clouds
 

Featured Reviews

Premnath Jaganathan - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Manager at Uop Ipl
Affordability and security improve our cloud experience while learning new systems
I'm not working with any AI features in IBM Public Cloud, but they are in the process of building it.I am very satisfied with the security that IBM Public Cloud provides. I would rate IBM Public Cloud eight out of ten, where one is worst and ten is the best.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"For non-complex applications, the IBM Cloud works fine and the price is much lower than the competitors."
"It's straightforward, has a good environment and is cost-effective."
"The availability is second to none. Customer support is very good."
"The most valuable feature of IBM Public Cloud is the AI integrations."
"This is a predictable and dependable service."
"IBM Public Cloud is a stable solution; it gives you SLA notifications all the time of what could be done, what is going to happen in the next hour regarding downtime, or anything that affects you, and so far I never noticed any issue, so I'm very happy with the solution."
"The stability is excellent; it's 200% stable with no bugs or glitches, it doesn't crash or freeze, and it's extremely reliable with great performance."
"The initial setup was very easy. It's quite straightforward. Deployment took about fifteen minutes. Everything is well organized."
"The stability has been good."
"What I appreciate from Red Hat OpenShift is the capacity to provide an integrated and secure environment that is more or less better than creating the environment from scratch or based on standard Kubernetes."
"Self-provisioning support saves a lot of time and unnecessary work from the system administrator who can use this time to run and monitor the infrastructure."
"OpenShift's superior dashboard is a notable strength, especially when compared to Kubernetes."
"The initial setup is simple, and OpenShift is open-source, so it's easy to install on any cloud platform."
"If anybody is looking for a solution that can work on-premise as well as on the cloud and gives the flexibility of not tying the solution to the underlying platform, then OpenShift is one of the popular choices you can make."
"OpenShift is based on Kubernetes and we try to use all the Kubernetes objects of OpenShift. We don't use features that are specific to OpenShift, except internal certificates for the services. The one feature that is missing from Kubernetes and that is really useful in OpenShift is the lifecycle of the cluster and the ease of installation. We use VMware and VMware integration internally with the OpenShift installer, which is very good. With OpenShift it's easy to spin up or scale out a cluster."
"We are currently dealing with both local support and Red Hat support, and they have been amazing."
 

Cons

"It will be challenging to implement if you do not have any experience."
"The product should offer more computing, similar to Amazon."
"The deployment can be a bit of a pain. There are a lot of packages and a lot of options and it can require complex configuration to get it right."
"The initial setup and the pricing are areas that need improvement."
"The solution’s pricing could be improved."
"I would like to see a more user-friendly deployment process in the next release of this solution."
"Recently, we just faced some issues with the operating system due to the end of life of CentOS 6...So, then the client wanted to try it out under AWS instead of IBM. In short, it has some complexities."
"Support needs some improvement. Basically, you are doing it all on your own, and it's not easy."
"OpenShift could improve by providing the ability to integrate with public cloud platforms. This way we can easily use the services that these platforms offer. For instance, Amazon AWS. However, all the three major hyper-scalers solutions offer excellent DevOps and CI/CD tooling. If there was an easy way to integrate with them it would be beneficial. We need a way to easily integrate with the monitoring and dashboard services that they provide."
"There is no orchestration platform in OpenShift, but we do in Kubernetes."
"Managing batches in Red Hat OpenShift has been a significant challenge."
"Red Hat OpenShift can be improved by reducing its complexity."
"This solution is fairly expensive but comes at an average cost compared to other solutions in the market."
"Areas where Red Hat OpenShift can be improved include the licensing being a bit complex and maybe expensive, as that is something in the hands of the organization's higher management, especially when those licensing agreements are done, and I think Red Hat OpenShift is quite resource-heavy because the control plane and default monitoring stack consume significant resources, meaning for small clusters, a large percentage of compute goes just to running Red Hat OpenShift itself, not our apps."
"I had to frequently upgrade my cluster due to OpenShift's rolling updates every six months, which I found to be excessive."
"The security model is hard to understand and use."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing fees are straightforward and predictable."
"The price of IBM Cloud is very cheap compared to competitors AWS and Azure."
"In order to be competitive, you have to commit to a contract for at least one year, but you pay a fixed monthly fee."
"Pricing is not as fair as Amazon or Azure."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a nine out of ten."
"IBM Public Cloud is pretty cheap. They have an ongoing free tier that basically won't expire, so as long as your solution is small enough, you can have a test set that you can use for demos, which will cost you almost nothing."
"We are using the trial version of this solution, so we have not paid anything."
"IBM has a lesser price compared to other cloud service providers like Azure and AWS."
"The solution is cost-effective."
"The model of pricing and buying licences is quite rigid. We are in the process of negotiating on demand pricing which will help us take advantage of the cloud as a whole."
"We use the license-free version of Red Hat Openshift but we pay for the support."
"The pricing for OpenShift includes support and licensing, which costs approximately $400."
"The pricing is standard; the solution isn't particularly expensive or affordable."
"The price depends on the type and the nature of the organizations, along with the types of projects that are of considerable range."
"It's expensive. It may be cheaper to invest in building Vanilla Kubernetes, especially if security is not the number one motivation or requirement. Of course, that's difficult, and in some business areas, such as banking, that's not something you can put as a second priority. In other situations, a Vanilla Kubernetes with a sufficiently strong team can be cheaper and almost as effective."
"The cost is quite high."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
University
10%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
23%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise48
 

Questions from the Community

Which is preferable - IBM Public Cloud or Microsoft Azure?
IBM Public Cloud is IBM’s Platform-as-a-Service. It aims to provide organizations with a secure cloud environment to manage data and applications. One of the features we like is the cloud activity ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Public Cloud?
The prices are relatively lower compared to others. It is a good option for medium-sized businesses. However, businesses should also consider other vendors to ensure they meet their specific securi...
What needs improvement with IBM Public Cloud?
The connectivity and speed of IBM Public Cloud are much lower compared to the competition.
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?
Areas where Red Hat OpenShift can be improved include the licensing being a bit complex and maybe expensive, as that is something in the hands of the organization's higher management, especially wh...
 

Also Known As

IBM Bluemix
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Uvionics Tech, Komsomolskaya Pravda, Alpha Modus, Inventive, Web Business Consulting, FindBrok, SilverHook Powerboats, United Way of Allegheny County
UPS, Cathay Pacific, Hilton
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Public Cloud vs. Red Hat OpenShift and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
892,487 professionals have used our research since 2012.