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Portainer vs VMware Tanzu Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Portainer
Ranking in Container Management
15th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Tanzu Platform
Ranking in Container Management
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Build Automation (14th), PaaS Clouds (12th), Cloud Management (25th), Development Platforms (3rd), Service Mesh (7th), Agile and DevOps Services (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Portainer is 4.3%, up from 2.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Tanzu Platform is 8.6%, down from 15.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Container Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
VMware Tanzu Platform8.6%
Portainer4.3%
Other87.1%
Container Management
 

Featured Reviews

EB
Developer with 1-10 employees
A GUI solution that helps to administer a docker using a browser
The first time using Portainer involves a learning curve. It takes longer as you're unfamiliar with the processes and might be lazy to consult the manual. Initially, you may rely on intuition within the GUI. However, after repeating the same tasks three or four times, the process becomes much quicker.
ErmiasGirma - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at Safaricom Ethiopia plc
Has supported container-based deployments and improved infrastructure visibility through monitoring tools
Aria Operations, formerly known as VMware vRealize Operations, has been renamed to vROps. We are currently using this for monitoring purposes. For orchestration, we are using VCD to automate Telco Cloud. VCD is an automation tool, and we are also using VMware Tanzu Platform for the Kubernetes environment, alongside TKG, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. These are also other solutions for the Tanzu Kubernetes environment. For Telco Cloud, we are using it to automate our company's operations, which is for a telecom company. We are familiar with these products, especially vCenter, ESXi, VCD, vCF, and vROps. It is very easy to integrate applications when we deploy vCenter and ESXi since we can enable vSphere with Tanzu feature. We can build namespaces and provide application developers the platform to deploy their applications on pods within containerization. We can easily manage, pull results, and create containers efficiently, making it a simple way to handle applications. We provide namespace labels for application developers, and we can manage their resources along with other aspects easily. Regarding security, we use many tools such as CDX and LDAP, AD for integrating our Kubernetes cluster with the developer teams. We can manage roles and permissions simply. It is very straightforward to integrate with EDX and other third-party tools, Active Directory, to the Kubernetes cluster, allowing easy access and management.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Portainer comes with the ability to take the information of docker definition. Using it, I can visually observe how the container has been created. It allows me to create networks. I can also visually generate volumes and working stacks."
"We never experienced any problems with scalability."
"Tanzu Mission Control has quite a set of rich features when compared to OpenShift."
"The most important thing about the solution is its flexibility."
"The most popular feature of VMware Tanzu Mission Control is its graphical user interface for describing network policies on the Service Mesh, which is highly integrable with other tools commonly used in supply chains such as security."
"The solution is integrated very well with a lot of other systems. Also, its GUI is very good."
"The Day 2 operations support is the most vital feature"
"The Tanzu platform is highly available, scalable, and flexible."
"The Tanzu platform is highly available, scalable, and flexible."
 

Cons

"Portainer needs to be more intuitive."
"The implementation is not easy, it is very complex and can take a day or two to complete."
"The price is very high compared to other Kubernetes environments because Kubernetes is open source."
"One potential area for expansion would be leveraging AI capabilities, which my customer might be interested in exploring as they grow."
"The product should support integration with Google Cloud Platform (GCP)"
"We want to see a new feature that helps build more security architecture like Zero Trust Security or shifting left in Kubernetes."
"The infrastructure is quite challenging."
"LYNX is a managed cluster solution that takes care of specific details within a cluster, such as sequences or services. I haven't seen this feature in Tanzu Mission Control."
"Tanzu provides better manageability as compared to OCP, but when it comes to tagging it with other products, it's a bit rigid. If I have to bring in any new product or something out of the box from a different vendor, working with Tanzu becomes a little difficult. For example, if I want to use the F5 services, I have to add one more layer of Avi, but I don't want to do that. If I have a list of the products that I want to use, such as for firewall services, with Tanzu, I will have to go through another layer, which creates complexity."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The solution is only for large or medium size enterprises because it is expensive."
"There are different licenses available. You have to upgrade your license if you want to scale the solution more."
"The price of VMware Tanzu Mission Control is greater than that of Red Hat's competitor solution"
"The product is not expensive, but it is not cheap."
"VMware Tanzu Mission Control is cheaper than Red Hat OpenShift."
"Since we were at a large data center, the price might not have been a concern for us."
"One of our Spanish customers told us that VMware Tanzu Service Mesh is a very expensive product for their data center."
"I would recommend that businesses look into the full price for their requirements. The price is high, but there are some open-source add-ons that can be used for customization while keeping costs down, although these might not be suitable for everyone."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
University
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise10
 

Questions from the Community

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Which is better - OpenShift Container Platform or VMware Tanzu Mission Control?
Red Hat Openshift is ideal for organizations using microservices and cloud environments. I like that the platform is auto-scalable, which saves overhead time for developers. I think Openshift can b...
What do you like most about VMware Tanzu Mission Control?
It definitely gives the end customer a good overview and perspective of running applications in terms of overall workload footprint. TMC provides a very detailed description of your cloud-native ap...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware Tanzu Mission Control?
The price of VMware Tanzu Mission Control is greater than that of Red Hat's competitor solution. I would rate the pricing of VMware Tanzu Mission Control as four out of ten.
 

Also Known As

No data available
Tanzu Application Catalog, Application Platform, Application Service, Hub, Mission Control, Service Mesh, Build Service, Concourse for VMware Tanzu
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Verizon, Cerner, Zipcar, Avarteq
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Kubernetes and others in Container Management. Updated: January 2026.
881,707 professionals have used our research since 2012.