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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
19th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
IoT Platforms (2nd)
Red Hat OpenShift
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
64
Ranking in other categories
Server Virtualization Software (9th), Container Management (9th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (5th), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of IBM Public Cloud is 3.3%, up from 3.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 8.2%, down from 12.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
PaaS Clouds Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Red Hat OpenShift8.2%
IBM Public Cloud3.3%
Other88.5%
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

"It is a scalable product. You can scale it up and down."
"For non-complex applications, the IBM Cloud works fine and the price is much lower than the competitors."
"I've found the stability to be excellent. The performance is good."
"The beauty of cloud service providers, especially public cloud service providers, is that they are scalable every time when you need them because their payment model is pay-as-you-go."
"This product is very good because it is accessible in remote locations, and anyone can deploy from any place."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of IBM Public Cloud is the AI integrations."
"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."
"Its security is most valuable. It's by default secure, which is very important."
"Scaling and uptime of the applications are positives."
"I have seen a return on investment, and it depends upon the types and the nature of some of the most critical applications that have been hosted on the OpenShift infrastructure."
"OpenShift is more enterprise-oriented, offers good support, and provides integration with multiple solutions."
"We are currently dealing with both local support and Red Hat support, and they have been amazing."
"OpenShift offers an easy-to-use graphical user interface for cluster management, making it more accessible for administrators."
"Valuable features include auto-recreate of pod if pod fails; fast rollback, with one click, to previous version."
 

Cons

"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."
"The solution needs to be more autonomous. It should let the DL go to allow for more jobs on the cloud. It could have a better interface as well."
"The solution’s pricing could be improved."
"They could improve on customizing reporting capabilities."
"The connectivity and speed of IBM Public Cloud are much lower compared to the competition."
"They do not have a very good virtual network implemented, and the VPC is the most important feature that needs to be improved."
"It will be challenging to implement if you do not have any experience."
"There is not a lot of support for this solution, which is something that needs to be improved."
"Some of the storage services and integrations with third-party tools should be made possible."
"This solution could be improved by offering best practices on standardization and additional guidance on how to use this solution."
"It would be great if it supported Bitbucket repositories too."
"My team has found some bugs in OpenShift due to continuous integration, and this is an area for improvement in the platform. RedHat should fix the bugs. Another area for improvement in OpenShift is that upgrading clusters can be challenging, resulting in downtime. Application support also needs improvement in OpenShift because the platform doesn't support all applications in the cloud. I'd like upgraded storage in the next release of OpenShift, especially when I need to do a DR exercise. It would also be good if the platform allows mirroring with another cluster, or more portability in terms of moving applications to another cluster."
"We want to see better alerting, especially in critical situations requiring immediate intervention. Until we go to the dashboard, it can be challenging to quickly recognize that there's an issue for us to deal with. Therefore, a popup of the event or a tweaked GUI to catch our attention when it's alerting would be a welcome change. Everything else is good. We don't need any additional features. From the operations perspective, as an administrator, there is nothing concerning."
"They could work on the pricing model, making it more flexible and possibly lower."
"Credential not hidden, so people on the same group can view it."
"The whole area around the hybrid cloud could be improved. I would like to deploy a Red Hat OpenShift cluster on-premise and on the cloud, then have Red Hat do the entire hybrid cloud management."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"It pretty much has a standard price. There is no hidden price with IBM Public Cloud."
"IBM has a lesser price compared to other cloud service providers like Azure and AWS."
"Pricing is not as fair as Amazon or 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."
"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."
"The licensing fees are straightforward and predictable."
"We are currently using the open version, OKD. We plan to get the enterprise version in the future."
"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 cost is quite high."
"The product’s pricing is expensive."
"Depending on the extent of the product use, licenses are available for a range of time periods, and are renewable at the end of the period."
"The solution is cost-effective."
"I don't deal with the cost part, but I know that the cost is very high when compared to other products. They charge for CPU and memory, but we don't worry about it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
University
17%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Educational Organization
7%
Financial Services Firm
24%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Government
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 Business17
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise43
 

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: March 2026.
883,546 professionals have used our research since 2012.