No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

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
70
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

"The availability is second to none. Customer support is very good."
"What I like most in IBM Public Cloud is how easy it is to create serverless functions. They are called IBM functions, but in AWS, they are called Lambda functions. Those are pretty standard, and another thing I like the most is that you have fewer restrictions on the amount of data you can transfer across those functions. IBM Public Cloud is way more flexible than AWS. I also like that IBM Public Cloud is pretty straightforward to integrate. As long as you have all the tools IBM provides you, getting everything up and running is straightforward."
"Overall, I would say that IBM Cloud is stable, straightforward, and is a good service."
"I've found the stability to be excellent. The performance is good."
"I am very much satisfied with the technical support team at IBM Public Cloud."
"In terms of performance, resiliency, and availability, it is second to none."
"The initial setup was very easy. It's quite straightforward. Deployment took about fifteen minutes. Everything is well organized."
"This is a predictable and dependable service."
"Great GUI and CLI tools allowing developers to deploy, test and delete projects on demand, freeing up time for the operations team to work on production readiness."
"There is a quick deployment of the application, and we can scale out efficiently with the help of OpenShift."
"The scalability of OpenShift combined with Kubernetes is good. At least from the software standpoint, it becomes quite easy to handle the scalability through configuration. You need to constantly monitor the underlying infrastructure and ensure that it has adequate provisioning. If you have enough infrastructure, then managing the scalability is quite easy which is done through configuration."
"The initial setup is simple, and OpenShift is open-source, so it's easy to install on any cloud platform."
"The most valuable feature is the high availability for the applications."
"The developers seem to like the source-to-image feature. That makes it easy for them to deploy an application from code into containers, so they don't have to think about things. They take it straight from their code into a containerized application. If you don't have OpenShift, you have to build the container and then deploy the container to, say, EKS or something like that."
"This solution is providing a platform with OOTB features that are difficult to build from scratch."
"Red Hat OpenShift offers very comprehensive security standards, everything is designed based on a zero-trust security framework, and I appreciate that about it."
 

Cons

"The IBM Cloud is less stable than AWS, Google, and Oracle."
"It will be challenging to implement if you do not have any experience."
"It will be challenging to implement if you do not have any experience."
"They could improve on customizing reporting capabilities."
"An area for improvement in IBM Public Cloud is getting up-to-date information on how to set up everything. It's hard to find new documentation."
"The product should offer more computing, similar to Amazon."
"The solution’s pricing could be improved."
"There is not a lot of support for this solution, which is something that needs to be improved."
"Red Hat OpenShift can be improved by reducing its complexity."
"OpenShift's storage management could be better."
"Room for improvement is around the offerings that come as a bundle with the container platform. The packaging of the platform should be done such that customers do not have to purchase additional licenses."
"Most of the configurations are command based. If we can have a GUI-based configuration with better flexibility then it will be great."
"Documentation and technical support could be improved. The product is good, but when we raise a case with support—say we are having an image issue—the support is not really up to the mark. It is difficult to get support... When we raise a case, their support people will hesitate to get on a call or a screen-sharing session. That is a major drawback when it comes to OpenShift."
"It would be great if it supported Bitbucket repositories too."
"The metrics in OpenShift can use improvement."
"Autoscaling is a very unique feature, but it could be useful to have more options based on traffic statistics, for example, via Prometheus. So, there should be more ready solutions to autoscale based on specific applications."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing is not as fair as Amazon or Azure."
"The licensing fees are straightforward and predictable."
"It pretty much has a standard price. There is no hidden price with IBM Public Cloud."
"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."
"In order to be competitive, you have to commit to a contract for at least one year, but you pay a fixed monthly fee."
"The price of IBM Cloud is very cheap compared to competitors AWS and Azure."
"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."
"This solution is fairly expensive but comes at an average cost compared to other solutions in the market."
"The cost is quite high."
"Pricing of OpenShift depends on the number of nodes and who is hosting it."
"It's important to start small because the solution is scalable. We can build our cluster and look at the bundle option, not the external subscriptions. Talking to the people at Red Hat can save us money."
"My company makes payments towards the licensing costs attached to OpenShift."
"The product’s pricing is expensive."
"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."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which PaaS Clouds solutions are best for your needs.
892,868 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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
6%
 

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 Business19
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise50
 

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.
892,868 professionals have used our research since 2012.