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Oracle Solaris vs Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 7, 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

Oracle Solaris
Ranking in Operating Systems (OS) for Business
9th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
49
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (R...
Ranking in Operating Systems (OS) for Business
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
268
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Operating Systems (OS) for Business category, the mindshare of Oracle Solaris is 3.2%, down from 3.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is 11.8%, down from 12.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Operating Systems (OS) for Business
 

Featured Reviews

Zandile Mushi - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers good security features and reliability
The tool is quite complex and difficult for anyone trying to use or study it. The complexity of learning the tool is an area of concern where improvements are required. Oracle Solaris' lighter and simpler version can be introduced. I feel that Oracle Solaris is a user-friendly tool because I am exposed to it.
Bruce Lundberg - PeerSpot reviewer
Reliable patch management, high uptime, and incredible knowledge base
In terms of security, it does a lot of things that most people still turn off. SELinux is turned on by default. They have pretty good firewall rules in their defaults. The audit rules always take tweaking, but, overall, it comes out of the box not too bad. I used to write scripts to harden them from there. There are multiple ways to provision and patch. You have everything from local repositories to doing it by hand. Their knowledge base is incredible. There is so much information out there. It has never taken me longer than 30 minutes to find an answer to anything, even very tough ones. One company I worked for was a security company, and we did a lot of patching on everything. It was designed around security and email hosting, and uptime was pretty much whatever we wanted it to be. I have had a couple of times when the uptime was bad, but it was caused by a third-party solution. In fact, the Norton antivirus was definitely the worst. Red Hat had nothing to do with it.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature of Oracle Solaris is the incremental backup that happens in the system."
"We like that the virtualization is built in, so you don't have to spend extra money on buying licenses for a hypervisor."
"Solaris' best feature is its stability."
"It is a scalable solution. I recommend it for bigger companies."
"Solaris Zones and Containers are my favorite features."
"Solaris's best features are high availability, robustness, and database hosting."
"One of the main features of this solution is the ease of use."
"Oracle Solaris is pre-installed in our environment. Thus, it is simple to customize."
"RHEL enables us to deploy applications and emerging workloads across bare-metal and virtualized environments and I find those workloads to be extremely reliable. The reliability is so good that I rarely find myself calling Red Hat support any longer. Support is the first benefit of using RHEL, but the second thing is that the platform is so stable that the need to use support is negligible."
"It is generally easy to initiate a support case with Red Hat, and there are clear escalation paths if needed. The support team responds based on the contract level."
"Red Hat's greatest asset is its extensive community, which provides valuable support and advice when issues arise."
"The most valuable features are ease of support and the ability to run a read-only course on the operating system."
"Reliability is the most valuable feature."
"The Red Hat Linux comes with Anaconda, a fascinating tool that is useful if I need to connect multiple systems. I also like role-based access."
"It is open source. Most of the features are already there for you."
"Red Hat Enterprise Linux stands out for its stability and support, which are critical for enterprise applications in the finance sector. We don't want any downtime, so we need fast support support and quick issue resolution."
 

Cons

"The challenge arises from the differences in commands and configurations compared to more common systems like Linux."
"Red Hat Enterprise Linux is more secure and better documented. So Oracle could learn from them when it comes to security and documentation."
"They could also enable Oracle OEM for x86 architecture as well."
"More monitoring tools could be included in the product."
"Oracle Solaris can improve by supporting all the recent features that are in the market from other competitors."
"I don't want to receive any updates on Oracle"
"This product is not as flexible as other similar solutions on the market today."
"The scalability of the solution can be improved."
"There should be more upgrades to the security features."
"Red Hat Enterprise Linux should be available in a free version that developers could try on their own machines before deciding to implement the enterprise edition. It would be nice to have a community version available with all the features so developers can become more familiar with RHEL."
"Red Hat could add some AI features. There's a lot of talk about AI nowadays, but I don't think will be in Red Enterprise Linux itself. The cloud applications benefit from AI, but I don't think that will be integrated into the OS yet."
"Deployment is simple if you have been using the solution for a long time. However, it can be complex if you are new to it."
"We hope it will improve tasks we have found challenging in the past, like documentation searches."
"There is room for improvement in integration with different cloud platforms."
"The solution's licensing sometimes could be a little bit confusing for someone who's not a full-blown system admin and doesn't have a lot of experience with Red Hat Enterprise Linux."
"I also want the co-pilot to provide more granular control and more features in the GUI, so we can have one configuration from the GUI itself. It would be helpful to have a feature similar to the one in Windows where we can manage all the net flows from one console in a single pane of glass and install it on-premises like an admin center. It would be great if Red Hat had some kind of admin center to manage all the RHEL boxes without using an additional product like Satellite or something, we could use the co-pilot on all the systems to monitor the dashboard."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"As a private user or individual, I wouldn't recommend it to others, considering it is a costly product."
"If you buy Oracle hardware it's supported free with the hardware. If you're putting it on non-Oracle hardware, that is when you buy the support license, which is also very reasonable. It is $1000 dollars per year, so it's not overly expensive."
"The price is not good and needs to improve."
"Solaris is highly priced compared to other solutions, but since it's a niche product, this is to be expected."
"Its licensing is on a yearly basis."
"It is an expensive product. I rate the pricing a ten out of ten."
"It is a very expensive product."
"It is more expensive, but very complete and worth enacting."
"It's pretty expensive, but I'm not familiar with the pricing of other vendors for their operating systems. I'd rate it a seven out of ten in terms of pricing. Red Hat Enterprise Linux's main advantage is the support that you get by purchasing their subscriptions."
"Its licensing is pretty confusing. There are a lot of subscriptions, and it isn't always clear which subscription is the best, but with their support, it's easy to find the right one."
"While expensive, Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers efficiency and performance."
"We still have a few with one-to-one standard server licensing, but we are utilizing the virtualization host licensing. We license it based on the host, not based on VMs, which is cool. I was very happy that there was certain licensing with SAP to have access to SAP repos. Its cost was the same as the regular one, so I was happy about that."
"They knew we would buy tons of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so they were a little bit more relaxed. We wanted a thousand licenses, and we could pick those up. We true up. Our license experience has been positive with the exception of having to deal with all of the broken-up accounts, which is as much our fault as anybody's."
"The solution is cost-effective."
"It is pretty expensive, but it is worth it. Generally, in an enterprise environment, there is no cheap solution. This is coming from someone who is working with a company that provides a lot of solutions a bit cheaper than the industry standard. In the enterprise environment, I believe no solution is inexpensive, but RHEL is still pretty expensive. Additional costs that I am aware of are usually for support and setup."
"The pricing and licensing are a bit higher for Red Hat Enterprise because we're able to get 70% of its features with the CentOS version. For the 30% of features that Red Hat provides, I think they need to reduce the licensing fee."
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Comparison Review

it_user281973 - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 24, 2017
It's improved our company's system environments that run Oracle databases.
Red Hat is mission critical to our environment Red Hat has improved the mission critical environments running Oracle databases, while CentOS has improved our web environment and MySQL. Oracle and SAP Environment and all HPC environments. 10 years No issues Very stable i don´t find any problem…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does Oracle Linux compare with Solaris?
When comparing Oracle Linux and Solaris, I believe that Linux is more secure and more flexible. It is also very suitable for enterprises that are already Oracle solution users. I found Linux to be ...
What do you like most about Oracle Solaris?
We use the solution as an internal operating system.
Which would you choose - RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) or CentOS?
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is fantastic. It is an inexpensive solution that has excellent security, performance, and stability, and also lots of features. I specifically like that the solution has fe...
What do you like most about Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)?
It is open source. We can customize it as per our requirements.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)?
I do not have any insights, but I know why the prices went up. At the time, it made sense. I do not know what the pricing is like now. Previously, the pricing model was advantageous as it allowed u...
 

Also Known As

Solaris 11, Solaris
Red Hat Enterprise Linux, RHEL
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Siemens, IVV
Travel Channel, Mohawk Industries, Hilti, Molecular Health, Exolgan, Hotelplan Group, Emory University, BlueCross BlueShield of North Carolina, HCA Healthcare, Paychex, UPS, Intermountain Healthcare, Brinker International, TransUnion, Union Bank, CA Technologies
Find out what your peers are saying about Oracle Solaris vs. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
831,997 professionals have used our research since 2012.