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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 (2nd)
Red Hat OpenShift
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
75
Ranking in other categories
Server Virtualization Software (3rd), Container Management (4th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (3rd), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 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 6.9%, 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 OpenShift6.9%
IBM Public Cloud3.5%
Other89.6%
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.
AA
Operation Director at Zaintech
Platform has transformed our cloud into a secure, unified home for diverse modern applications
One of the best features of Red Hat OpenShift is that it has the catalog, the application catalog, and the operator hub, which allows us to deploy things easily and straightforward without going into a lot of hassles. This is one of the main things, in addition to having integration with ACM and ACS, where we can have the ability to manage multiple clusters and to secure them, deploy them, manage them, run GitOps and day-two operations, as well as upgrades and other functionality which is made easy using these tools. Red Hat OpenShift also provides virtualization capabilities, and I am currently working with Zain to make a project where we will convert F5 appliances to virtual machines and to manage them through Red Hat virtualization, OVE. Red Hat OpenShift is a unique platform because it provides the features for both worlds, containerization, and VMs at the same time, requiring you to learn one skillset in order to manage all of this at the same time. In the beginning, our cloud depended only on virtual machines, so I introduced this to our management to start to work with microservices and with containerization. This was adapted in our cloud, providing us the capability to sell more of these features and to reduce the hardware requirement by about thirty percent, following the trends of using containerization for all modern applications. In addition, it reduced the time to develop and to deploy a new application; all we need is using Jenkins for CI/CD. Once we commit any code, it gets triggered, and it will implement the new container in a very flexible and easy way, within seconds. This decreased the time to market and increased agility, allowing us to capture new opportunities very fast.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is easy to deploy what you need for the initial setup"
"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 most valuable feature of IBM Public Cloud is the AI integrations."
"The platform has everything that I need - or 99% of the requirements we need."
"I am very much satisfied with the technical support team at IBM Public Cloud."
"Regarding advice, I would recommend others choose IBM Public Cloud because it's straightforward, has a good environment, and is cost-effective."
"The price of IBM Cloud is most valuable for us. The service is personable and gives us a good rapport. I can't say it's the best, but it was enough for our needs."
"On the production side, we are seeing a 200% ROI."
"It seems like we're getting a pretty high return on our investment because of our ability to navigate, integrate and migrate across platforms."
"Customer service is perfect."
"Valuable features include auto-recreate of pod if pod fails; fast rollback, with one click, to previous version."
"We are able to operate client’s platform without downtime during security patch management each month and provide a good SLA (as scalability for applications is processed during heavy client website load, automatically)."
"The product seems to be mature enough to use for production application deployments without stability issues."
"Overall, the solution's security throughout the stack and software supply chain is excellent."
"Security is also an important part of this solution. By default, things are running with limited privileges and securely confined to their own resources. This way, different users and projects can all use the same infrastructure."
"The solution offers ease with which we can define how to run applications and configure them. It's much more convenient than creating a virtual machine and configuring application servers, making the process faster and simpler."
 

Cons

"Maybe performance enhancers and reports could be better improved. If they do so, it would be better. Of all the drawbacks I saw, this would be the biggest enhancement."
"There is not a lot of support for this solution, which is something that needs to be improved."
"I would like to see a more user-friendly deployment process in the next release of this solution."
"The initial setup and the pricing are areas that need improvement."
"While they have about 99% of what we need, the only exception, perhaps, was the push notification feature that was discontinued. They delayed the replacement product."
"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."
"An improvement that I would like to see is better configuration capability."
"Support needs some improvement. Basically, you are doing it all on your own, and it's not easy."
"The platform's documentation could be more comprehensive to cover the full spectrum of user needs. Sometimes, achieving specific goals is challenging due to a lack of detailed guidance."
"They could provide a template for application deployment and building services and routes so it can all be promoted as a bundle if needed."
"I'd like to see support for more than one server, a mobile user registry."
"There is no orchestration platform in OpenShift, but we do in Kubernetes."
"The tool lacks some features to make it compliant with Kubernetes"
"We had to discontinue this solution due to many limitations."
"The speed of deploying new applications can be improved."
"One area for improvement with Red Hat OpenShift is in management and cluster implementation."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 licensing fees are straightforward and predictable."
"The price of IBM Cloud is very cheap compared to competitors AWS and Azure."
"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."
"We are using the trial version of this solution, so we have not paid anything."
"Pricing of OpenShift depends on the number of nodes and who is hosting it."
"My company makes payments towards the licensing costs attached to OpenShift."
"The product’s pricing is expensive."
"The cost is quite high."
"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."
"We are currently using the open version, OKD. We plan to get the enterprise version in the future."
"The pricing for OpenShift includes support and licensing, which costs approximately $400."
"We had a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) license for all our servers' operating systems. By having multiple Red Hat products together, you can negotiate costs and leverage on having a sort of enterprise license agreement to reduce the overall outlay or TCO."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
University
11%
Construction Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business14
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise56
 

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?
I hope that the interface and dashboard can become more user-friendly to assist in creating clusters and managing network interfaces easily, as opposed to relying heavily on command lines, which co...
 

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: June 2026.
902,894 professionals have used our research since 2012.