Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Red Hat OpenShift comparison

VMware and Red Hat are both solutions in the PaaS Clouds category. VMware is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.0, while Red Hat is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.6. VMware holds a 10.3% mindshare in PSP, compared to Red Hat’s 12.1% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of VMware users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Red Hat users who would recommend it.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Read 15 Pivotal Cloud Foundry reviews

7,551 Views
6,345 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Red Hat OpenShift

Read 61 Red Hat OpenShift reviews

10,368 Views
8,526 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Red Hat OpenShift

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 16, 2025

Red Hat OpenShift and Pivotal Cloud Foundry compete in the container orchestration and cloud platform market. Based on the results, Red Hat OpenShift seems to have the upper hand with stronger security features and automation capabilities.

Features: Red Hat OpenShift is recognized for its robust security model, extensive automation capabilities, and excellent support for container orchestration and DevOps pipelines. Its seamless deployment using Kubernetes templates and integration with Jenkins are also highly valued. Meanwhile, Pivotal Cloud Foundry is highlighted for its ease of use, robust Java support, and a seamless integration experience with CI/CD platforms, which is particularly beneficial for developers working on Java applications.

Room for Improvement: Red Hat OpenShift needs enhancements in documentation and simplified debugging processes. Users face complexity in configuration and seek improvements in scalability and legacy app support. Pivotal Cloud Foundry, despite its strong CI/CD integration, could improve its documentation, reduce costs, and address challenges related to moving services to public clouds while enhancing advanced features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Both platforms offer various deployment options, including on-premises and cloud environments. Red Hat OpenShift's deployment ease is noted, although it requires skilled professionals due to its complex setup. Pivotal Cloud Foundry is known for being user-friendly. Red Hat's customer service provides extensive support, but response times are inconsistent. Pivotal Cloud Foundry's support is generally well-regarded, with users indicating potential for service enhancements.

Pricing and ROI: OpenShift is considered expensive, especially in larger environments, yet users find the investment worthwhile due to its comprehensive features and support, ensuring a good ROI. Pivotal Cloud Foundry's pricing is variable, often on the higher side, and ROI depends on scale and usage context. Both platforms emphasize savings in time and resources, leading to strong returns on investment, though OpenShift is noted for its distinctly higher cost.

To learn more, read our detailed Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs. Red Hat OpenShift Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs. Red Hat OpenShift

April 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

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Ranking in PaaS Clouds

8th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

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

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

Senior Software Engineer at Wells Fargo

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.

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Mikhael Ibrahim

Platform Engineer & Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

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.

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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

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

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

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

"Stability is not a concern with this product."

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

"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."

"We find its stability and scalability valuable."

"The solution is stable and resilient. In our company, we do not even see any challenges with the solution."

More Pivotal Cloud Foundry pros

"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."

"This solution helps us to account for peak seasons involving higher demand than usual. It also gives us confidence in the security of our overall systems."

"OpenShift is more enterprise-oriented, offers good support, and provides integration with multiple solutions."

"Great integration with Jenkins for constant integration and development. Supports all the major languages and environments - PHP, Java, Node.js, Ruby, etc."

"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."

"Provides support throughout the whole platform."

"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)."

"I am impressed with the product's security features."

More Red Hat OpenShift pros

Cons

"It should offer more security features."

"Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve on the technology it is a bit complex."

"Pivotal Cloud Foundry doesn't have certain advanced features."

"It is not straightforward to setup."

"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."

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

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

"There are no synthetic application monitoring and real-time monitoring features."

More Pivotal Cloud Foundry cons

"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."

"If we can have a GUI-based configuration with better flexibility then it will be great."

"OpenShift requires a very expensive and complex infrastructure."

"The area for improvement is mostly in support for legacy applications."

"Documentation and technical support could be improved. The product is good, but when we raise a case with support—say we are having an image issue—the support is not really up to the mark. It is difficult to get support... When we raise a case, their support people will hesitate to get on a call or a screen-sharing session. That is a major drawback when it comes to OpenShift."

"I think that OpenShift has too many commands for running services from the CLI, and the configuration files are a little complicated."

"The interface could be simplified a bit more."

"The metrics in OpenShift can use improvement."

More Red Hat OpenShift cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

"We use the license-free version of Red Hat Openshift but we pay for the support."

"OpenShift is really good when we need to start, but once we get to a certain scale, it becomes too expensive."

"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."

"The product's support is expensive. I would rate the tool's pricing an eight out of ten."

"The pricing for OpenShift includes support and licensing, which costs approximately $400."

"It's important to start small because the solution is scalable. We can build our cluster and look at the bundle option, not the external subscriptions. Talking to the people at Red Hat can save us money."

"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."

"This solution is fairly expensive but comes at an average cost compared to other solutions in the market."

More Red Hat OpenShift pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

38%

Manufacturing Company

19%

Insurance Company

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

32%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Insurance Company

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...

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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.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

What do you like most about OpenShift?

OpenShift facilitates DevOps practices and improves CI/CD workflows in terms of stability compared to Jenkins.

See all answers

What needs improvement with OpenShift?

Simplified Networking: While OpenShift has advanced networking features, simplifying configurations for complex setups could make it more accessible to users with varying expertise levels Resource ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Azure vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 32% of the time

Google Cloud vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 11% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 11% of the time

Heroku vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 5% of the time

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Compared 4% of the time

More Pivotal Cloud Foundry Competitors

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 18% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 14% of the time

Amazon AWS vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 9% of the time

Google Cloud vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 8% of the time

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 4% of the time

More Red Hat OpenShift Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

April 2025

Download Pivotal Cloud Foundry product report

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat OpenShift

April 2025

Download Red Hat OpenShift product report

Also Known As

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

No data available

Overview

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

VMware

Red Hat OpenShift offers a robust, scalable platform with strong security and automation, suitable for container orchestration, application deployment, and microservices architecture.

Designed to modernize applications by transitioning from legacy systems to cloud-native environments, Red Hat OpenShift provides powerful CI/CD integration and Kubernetes compatibility. Its security features, multi-cloud support, and source-to-image functionality enhance deployment flexibility. While the GUI offers user-friendly navigation, users benefit from its cloud-agnostic nature and efficient lifecycle management. However, improvements are needed in documentation, configuration complexity, and integration with third-party platforms. Pricing and high resource demands can also be challenging for wider adoption.

What are the key features of Red Hat OpenShift?

Security: Comprehensive security features ensure safe deployments and operations.
Scalability: Auto-scaling and monitoring capabilities cater to high-demand environments.
CI/CD Integration: Seamless integration for efficient continuous deployment processes.
Cloud Compatibility: Supports multi-cloud and on-premise solutions with ease.
GUI: Simplifies platform management and enhances usability.

What benefits and ROI should users look for?

Improved Efficiency: Streamlined operations reduce time and resource investments.
Enhanced Flexibility: Adapt quickly to changing demands and environments.
Quick Deployment: Fast application deployment supports agile project timelines.
Robust Support: Access to dependable customer support services.

Red Hat OpenShift is strategically implemented for diverse industries focusing on container orchestration and application modernization. Organizations leverage it for migrating applications to cloud-native environments and managing CI/CD pipelines. Its functionality facilitates efficient resource management and microservices architecture adoption, supporting enterprise-level DevOps practices. Users employ it across cloud and on-premises platforms to drive performance improvements.

Red Hat

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

Buyer's Guide

Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs. Red Hat OpenShift

April 2025

Free Report: Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs. Red Hat OpenShift

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