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Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Red Hat OpenShift comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 16, 2025

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

Pivotal Cloud Foundry
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
8th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Red Hat OpenShift
Ranking in PaaS Clouds
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
61
Ranking in other categories
Server Virtualization Software (9th), Container Management (12th), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (7th), Agile and DevOps Services (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the PaaS Clouds category, the mindshare of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is 10.3%, up from 7.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift is 12.1%, up from 11.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
PaaS Clouds
 

Featured Reviews

Vasundhara  Joshi - PeerSpot reviewer
Seamlessly scalable since applications written in Java and .NET do not create issues for its users
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. However, if we go for Azure or some other cloud, we can get a lot of information. I believe there is not much information for Pivotal Cloud Foundry since it may be some license issue. If you go for Azure, the migration process is straightforward. Since we have been given 10 GB of space in the public cloud, we are utilizing it in our company. So, we are trying to deploy our application on the cloud, and for us, it is like a trial process for now. From our total application rate, I can say that only two to three percent is on Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Currently, half of the code is in the shell script, which is causing issues. Also, most people in my organization have worked on Java-related code. For most of the applications, they are using the same, that is, shell script and AUTOsist, and so we haven't migrated yet. So that is the reason that we are planning to opt for a hybrid model so that we don't have to migrate completely to Pivotal Cloud Foundry.
Mikhael Ibrahim - PeerSpot reviewer
Seamlessly monitor microservices with streamlined DevOps capabilities
Most benefit from it, however, I work with Kubernetes, and installing Vanilla Kubernetes is easy. That said, it introduces many tools that need to be set up individually. OpenShift comes ready out of the box, with all tools installed and configured. Red Hat certifies and confirms that all the components are compatible with each other. OpenShift's superior dashboard is a notable strength, especially when compared to Kubernetes. The integrated DevOps capabilities, such as pipelines and the container registry, are extremely beneficial. Additionally, its capability to monitor microservices and containers with integrated tools like Prometheus is a major advantage. The horizontal pod scaling exceeds the scalability features I found in Kubernetes.

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 Pivotal Cloud Foundry is the UI, it is easy to use."
"Stability is not a concern with this product."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its ability to scale. The services that connect to the database are also very good."
"The most valuable features are the monitoring and the deployment is easier."
"We find its stability and scalability valuable."
"The most valuable feature of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is auto-healing and the plenty of other features that are provided."
"PCF is open, so the applications run really smoothly and with little downtime."
"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."
"OpenShift facilitates DevOps practices and improves CI/CD workflows in terms of stability compared to Jenkins."
"Valuable features include auto-recreate of pod if pod fails; fast rollback, with one click, to previous version."
"The virtualization of my APIs means I no longer have to pay VMware large amounts of money to only run in-house solutions."
"OpenShift's superior dashboard is a notable strength, especially when compared to Kubernetes."
"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."
"Excellent GUI support, so one does not need to use the command line client for almost any tasks. Great support for building images directly from Git repositories with hooks."
"Self-provisioning support saves a lot of time and unnecessary work from the system administrator who can use this time to run and monitor the infrastructure. For the developer, this means less time waiting for the provisioning and excellent flexibility for development, testing, and production. Also, in such systems it is easy for developers to monitor applications even after deployment."
"The initial setup is simple, and OpenShift is open-source, so it's easy to install on any cloud platform."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"The Pivotal Cloud Foundry's initial setup has a learning curve for my team, but it was easy to use."
"It should offer more security features."
"The user interface should be simpler to navigate because it t can take time for users to learn it."
"Pivotal Cloud Foundry doesn't have certain advanced features."
"In the next release, they should offer additional applications for the databases, and improve the deployment experience."
"It is not straightforward to setup."
"The tool lacks some features to make it compliant with Kubernetes"
"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."
"I had to frequently upgrade my cluster due to OpenShift's rolling updates every six months, which I found to be excessive."
"The product’s integration with Windows containers and other third-party products needs improvement."
"The operators need a lot of improvement, with better integrations."
"The interface could be simplified a bit more."
"Needs work on volume handling (although this is already better with GlusterFS). Security (SSSD) would also be an improvement."
"An enhancement to consider for the future might involve incorporating a comprehensive solution for CI/CD tailored specifically for OpenShift."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Licensing is on a monthly basis and right now we pay $24/month. There are no other costs over and above that."
"You're paying for the number of virtual machines you want to install in the installation."
"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."
"The price depends on the type and the nature of the organizations, along with the types of projects that are of considerable range."
"The cost is quite high."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The pricing is standard; the solution isn't particularly expensive or affordable."
"The product has reasonable pricing."
"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
Financial Services Firm
39%
Manufacturing Company
19%
Insurance Company
6%
Healthcare Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
32%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Insurance Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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 do you like most about Pivotal Cloud Foundry?
I find the ease of deployment and management of microservices to be the most valuable features. The platform also has good auto-scaling capabilities.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pivotal Cloud Foundry?
I would say it is around a nine out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive. Just short of Oracle. It's sort of Oracle cloud.
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 ...
What do you like most about OpenShift?
OpenShift facilitates DevOps practices and improves CI/CD workflows in terms of stability compared to Jenkins.
What needs improvement with OpenShift?
I had to frequently upgrade my cluster due to OpenShift's rolling updates every six months, which I found to be excessive. Making updates a yearly occurrence could be beneficial. In terms of self-s...
 

Also Known As

PCF, Pivotal Application Service (PAS), Pivotal Container Service (PKS), Pivotal Function Service (PFS)
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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
UPS, Cathay Pacific, Hilton
Find out what your peers are saying about Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs. Red Hat OpenShift and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
845,589 professionals have used our research since 2012.