Microsoft Azure vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry comparison

Microsoft and Broadcom are both solutions in the PaaS Clouds category. Microsoft is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.3, while Broadcom is ranked #13. Microsoft holds a 15.7% mindshare in PSP, compared to Broadcom’s 7.2% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

Microsoft Azure

Read 323 Microsoft Azure reviews

18,565 Views
10,953 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Read 15 Pivotal Cloud Foundry reviews

4,913 Views
4,864 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Microsoft Azure

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 2, 2025

Microsoft Azure and Pivotal Cloud Foundry compete in cloud computing services and platform solutions. Microsoft Azure appears to have an advantage due to its scalability, flexibility, and comprehensive infrastructure that supports hybrid and public cloud environments.

Features: Microsoft Azure offers robust scalability, stability, and a vast array of security tools. It integrates Azure Arc for seamless hybrid cloud management and supports various programming languages, enhancing flexibility. Its AI capabilities, including Azure GitHub Copilot, enhance operations. Pivotal Cloud Foundry provides user-friendly deployment tools with features like CI/CD integration, auto-healing, and dedicated Java support.

Room for Improvement: Microsoft Azure's complexity and customization needs pose challenges. Its pricing structure and documentation need refinement, and some users face technical support issues. Enhancements in AI and real-time data analytics are desired. Pivotal Cloud Foundry would benefit from improved security features and more effective public cloud migration tools. Its high pricing and limited configurative capabilities are noted concerns.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Microsoft Azure provides extensive support and assistance for hybrid and public clouds, yet its complex setup can challenge new users. Pivotal Cloud Foundry offers straightforward deployment, especially for private cloud hosting. However, its support depends more on dedicated technical advice than a community forum, unlike Azure.

Pricing and ROI: Azure offers competitive pricing models, including pay-as-you-go, leading to potential cost savings with strategic use. Discounts on reserved instances and promotional credits enhance value. Pivotal Cloud Foundry is generally pricier, with costs varying by deployment size and feature requirements. Over time, Microsoft Azure tends to offer better ROI owing to its scalability and operational expenditure model, reducing long-term costs compared to on-premise setups.

To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Azure vs. Pivotal Cloud Foundry Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure vs. Pivotal Cloud Foundry

December 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

Microsoft Azure

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

1st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

323

Ranking in other categories

Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) (1st)

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

13th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Microsoft Azure is 15.7%, down from 20.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is 7.2%, down from 9.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

PaaS Clouds Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Microsoft Azure	15.7%
Pivotal Cloud Foundry	7.2%
Other	77.1%

PaaS Clouds

Featured Reviews

Syed Abid

Snr. Infrastructure Architect (Data Centre) at LogicEra

Versatile integrations and reliable customer satisfaction elevate cloud service experience

For Microsoft Azure improvement, they need to enhance their support system. The first level of support should be improved in terms of quality and response time. They need more technical support at the first level, as there are currently only one or two technical people among five to ten staff members at this level. They should ensure that the first level support is more technical because we normally provide services to technical users ourselves. When an issue arises, it usually escalates to the second or third level. When facing first level support, they may have limited knowledge and only collect screenshots to forward to their seniors. They should ensure that the first level support is aligned with L2 and L3 to better assist us, especially since we mention in the ticket that our issues are related to specific problems and require that sort of support.

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reviewer2263239

Head of Engineering at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

PCF allows for fine-grained configuration, especially regarding scaling but routing limitations

Something that can be done better is canary deployment. So, right now, we're using blue-green deployment. The support for canary deployment would be nice. A few things, such as what OpenShift does better are cluster management. Like, you can manage the entire thing together. Currently, it's possible to manage all the clusters, especially when it comes to cluster management using straightforward configuration. As of now, we have to handle each application instance individually, which means servicing them one by one. It would be better if we could perform these actions as a group or in a more streamlined manner. One more downside is actually the cost of this environment. So, major downside of Pivotal, it's the cost. So, the runtime running costs are very high. Extremely high.

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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

"Microsoft Azure has thousands of services and products."

"The most valuable feature is the possibility of using Microsoft and non-Microsoft services on one environment."

"My final overall rating for Microsoft Azure is excellent, giving it a perfect score."

"Its scalability is valuable. Depending on our requirements, we can add as many virtual machines as we want. We are able to get high availability for services. Services are always available, and they have the maximum uptime. If there is any issue with one of the services, another service is always available. It is pay-as-you-go. You don't have to spend any money upfront. You use the service and pay after one month or a couple of hours of use."

"Azure offers broad compatibility with both structured and unstructured data. For example, we use PostgreSQL for storing Azure's official data and manage various types of data, including tabular and image data, accommodating the storage of all data types we handle. So, in many ways, Azure simplified the data storage and management needs."

"Managed storage capabilities, which create a very simple way to create, copy, and replicate local or geo-replicate, it's very simple to assign workloads."

"The pricing is quite good, and it is designed as pay-per-use."

"Azure is very user friendly. I was able to create some database servers really fast. The user interface is intuitive."

More Microsoft Azure pros

"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is very robust, especially for building Java."

"Stability is not a concern with this product."

"It supports CI/CD, and is integrated with the CI/CD very well."

"The most valuable feature of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is auto-healing and the plenty of other features that are provided."

"It provides a set of developer-friendly tools that simplify application deployment."

"It is a scalable product...We are not facing any particular issues since most of the applications in our company are written in Java and .NET."

"The most valuable features of Pivotal Cloud Foundry are its ease of use and the command line interface has the ability to push instances to the cloud easily."

"Pivotal Cloud Foundry is very easy to use compared to other cloud technologies. It has a very good performance."

More Pivotal Cloud Foundry pros

Cons

"We need more security to be available on our smartphones and mobile devices."

"The solution’s learning curve could be improved."

"The solution must improve its pricing."

"We like that they have the new capabilities, but sometimes they're deprecating capabilities faster than we can handle. If we had to improve it, we would want to stay on some of these older capabilities a bit longer."

"They should include a cybersecurity feature to improve the protection of the systems. They could do better in terms of the pricing model. Its price keeps on changing. Their technical support can also be better."

"There are multiple DevOps solutions and tools available in Microsoft Azure, but most of the time they are either in the build mode, meaning you don't get complete support for them because they are either making changes, or changing the names of the particular services. Sometimes, services vanish from the portal. We are not able to see that. I think they actually change the names of the services."

"It could be more flexible. If you look at all Mircosoft products, they are not up to the mark. For example, Azure Ready doesn't provide the same kind of access a domain administrator has and the kind of flexibility that they have when using Active Directory. Microsoft support could be better. Their service could also be better. For example, specific policies for templates suddenly become unavailable. When I checked, they said that certain things might be withdrawn based on customer feedback. This happened once or twice, and it wasn't available at all for five days, it just went down."

"The price of the Azure license could be cheaper."

More Microsoft Azure cons

"The user interface should be simpler to navigate because it t can take time for users to learn it."

"Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve the documentation. They are good, but they could improve more. Additionally, it would be beneficial if there were more use case examples."

"It should offer more security features."

"There is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the future of Pivotal Cloud Foundry."

"In the next release, I would like to see easy integration with external tools."

"In the next release, they should offer additional applications for the databases, and improve the deployment experience."

"Regarding the setup phase, every step is a hurdle. With Pivotal Cloud Foundry, I won't get any proper resources for that. Even if I Google it, there is no proper solution for Pivotal Cloud Foundry."

"The Pivotal Cloud Foundry's initial setup has a learning curve for my team, but it was easy to use."

More Pivotal Cloud Foundry cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing fees are more than $1,000,000 USD annually."

"The current pricing is on a pay-as-you-go subscription."

"The long-term cost is higher than if you set up the servers on-premises, which is something that could be improved through more competitive pricing."

"We have an annual license subscription to use the solution."

"The cost could definitely be lower."

"Software licensing models can be expensive depending on what you need compared to open source solutions, for example. However, if you don't have the technical skills, you may be better off paying for a license and support instead of trying to use open source solutions."

"Pricing of Microsoft Azure services depends on the build of what you prepare to deploy."

"Microsoft always provides the entry-level solution with a cheap license. Once you start to like the product, then you have to pay for the full package, which is more expensive than the entry-level solution. Every feature comes with a license and a cost. Some licenses have multiple features, and some features require a specific license."

More Microsoft Azure pricing and cost advice

"The pricing is on the higher side and there are cheaper options available."

"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve. However, in this category of solutions, they are all expensive."

"You're paying for the number of virtual machines you want to install in the installation."

"Licensing is on a monthly basis and right now we pay $24/month. There are no other costs over and above that."

"The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is based on the customer's requirements. However, the price is comparable to other similar solutions."

"We do pay for the licensing cost because we have opted for a private cloud setup. So, it is a cloud setup, and we have to make payments based on the cloud size. I do not consider it very costly when comparing it to the market."

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Comparison Review

it_user8586

Engineer at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

Aug 14, 2013

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Computer Software Company

Educational Organization

Financial Services Firm

37%

Manufacturing Company

16%

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	140
Midsize Enterprise	53
Large Enterprise	150

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Large Enterprise	11

Questions from the Community

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One of the best features of SAP Cloud Platform is that it is web-based and you can log in from anywhere in the world. SAP Cloud Platform is suitable for companies of any size; it works well with bo...

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How does Microsoft Azure compare to Google Firebase?

I would recommend Google Firebase instead of Microsoft Azure, simply for the array of features that it has to offer. In particular, the Firebase library grants you access to a shared data structure...

See all answers

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...

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Comparisons

Alibaba Cloud vs Microsoft Azure

Compared 11% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Microsoft Azure

Compared 10% of the time

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) vs Microsoft Azure

Compared 9% of the time

Red Hat OpenShift vs Microsoft Azure

Compared 7% of the time

SAP Cloud Platform vs Microsoft Azure

Compared 6% of the time

More Microsoft Azure Competitors

Red Hat OpenShift vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 22% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 14% of the time

Google Cloud vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 6% of the time

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 6% of the time

Cloud Foundry vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 4% of the time

More Pivotal Cloud Foundry Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure

December 2025

Download Microsoft Azure product report

Buyer's Guide

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

December 2025

Download Pivotal Cloud Foundry product report

Also Known As

Windows Azure, Azure, MS Azure

PCF, Pivotal Application Service (PAS), Pivotal Container Service (PKS), Pivotal Function Service (PFS)

Overview

Microsoft Azure integrates services and offers flexibility, ensuring compatibility with diverse environments. Its scalability, security, and cost-efficient features enhance deployment and management, making it ideal for infrastructure services and application hosting.

Azure provides a comprehensive suite of tools for application deployment, virtual machine management, and data analytics. It allows seamless integration with Power BI and offers a user-friendly interface supported by detailed documentation and technical support. Though users appreciate its capabilities, they sometimes face challenges with costs, setup, and interface complexity, alongside integration and performance issues. Frequent updates and a learning curve are also noted, though Azure's cloud-based security and scalability remain critical for disaster recovery and business continuity.

What are Azure's key features?

Integrated Services: Ensures compatibility with Microsoft and non-Microsoft environments.
Scalability: Supports growing business demands with flexible computing power.
Security: Offers robust cloud-based security features for data protection.
Cost Efficiency: Provides options that optimize costs for diverse requirements.
Application Deployment: Facilitates quick rollout of apps and services.

What benefits should users expect from Azure?

Operational Optimization: Allows companies to streamline processes effectively.
Innovative Efficiency: Empowers businesses to innovate with powerful tools.
Reliable Support: Backed by strong technical support and comprehensive documentation.
Flexible Cloud Solutions: Offers a range of options for cloud migrations and infrastructure management.

Microsoft Azure is widely implemented in industries like financial services, healthcare, and logistics for hosting enterprise applications and vital services. Companies utilize its capabilities for IoT applications, DevOps, and Kubernetes clusters, benefiting from its cloud migrations, data analytics, and active directory support.

Microsoft

Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) is the leading enterprise PaaS, powered by Cloud Foundry. PCF provides a cloud-native application platform that allows you to continuously deliver any app to every major private and public cloud with a single platform. PCF is proven to accelerate feature delivery with higher developer productivity and a 200:1 developer to operator ratio. PCF's built-in security and self-healing capabilities reduce risk in your app portfolio while maintaining high-availability at scale to keep customer facing systems online even in the most challenging circumstances. pivotal.io

Broadcom

Sample Customers

BMW, Toyota, easyJet, NBC Sports, HarperCollins, Aviva, TalkTalk Business, Avanade, and Telenor.

Humana, Citibank, Mercedes Benz, Liberty Mutual, The Home Depot, GE, West Corp, Merrill Corporation, CoreLogic, Orange, Dish Network, Comcast, Bloomberg, Internal Revenue Service, Ford Motor Company, Garmin, Volkswagen, Solera, Allstate, US Air Force, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, ScotiaBank

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure vs. Pivotal Cloud Foundry

December 2025

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