Rancher Labs vs Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform comparison

Rancher Labs and Red Hat are both solutions in the Container Management category. Rancher Labs is ranked #9 with an average rating of 8.8, while Red Hat is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.2. Rancher Labs holds a 7.9% mindshare in CM, compared to Red Hat’s 20.8% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Rancher Labs users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Red Hat users who would recommend it.

Rancher Labs

Read 14 Rancher Labs reviews

3,309 Views
3,144 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Red Hat OpenShift Container...

Read 50 Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform reviews

6,753 Views
6,685 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Rancher Labs

Red Hat OpenShift Container...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 13, 2024

Rancher Labs and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform compete in the container management category. Rancher Labs offers simplicity and ease of use, making it suitable for those seeking efficient deployment without extensive Kubernetes expertise, whereas OpenShift provides a feature-rich ecosystem for enterprises needing advanced capabilities.

Features: Rancher Labs offers ease of deployment, rolling upgrades, and seamless management due to its open-source nature. OpenShift provides built-in security, extensive integrations, and enterprise-grade features like service mesh and cluster management.

Room for Improvement: Rancher Labs could enhance upgrade stability, tool integration, and automatic security features. OpenShift may benefit from better documentation, pricing adjustments, and improved deployment speed during execution.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Rancher Labs facilitates straightforward deployments in various environments, backed by community support. OpenShift's extensive options may add complexity but are offset by structured support channels for intricate setups.

Pricing and ROI: Rancher Labs provides a cost-effective alternative with minimal fees, promising ROI through time and cost savings. Although priced higher, OpenShift justifies its cost with robust security and features, offering value for enterprises investing in performance enhancement.

To learn more, read our detailed Rancher Labs vs. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Rancher Labs vs. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

June 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

Rancher Labs

Ranking in Container Management

9th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Storage for Kubernetes (2nd)

Red Hat OpenShift Container...

Ranking in Container Management

1st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Container Management category, the mindshare of Rancher Labs is 7.9%, down from 9.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is 20.8%, down from 21.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Container Management

Featured Reviews

RyanVassallo

Head of Systems and Infrastructure at Booming Games

Offers an open-source version along with a good UI

The product has multiple good features. One of the solution's good features is that it is the GitOps functionality known as Rancher fleet, which is used for continuous delivery. The tool's UI is very convenient enough to help you manage multiple clusters in the cloud or on-premises, making it a product with which you can manage different clusters and locations. The tool also has a feature that is still kind of maturing, but I think it has very good potential. This new feature is named Harvester, which is allows users to have virtual machines managed by Kubernetes engine. This is very new technology in the market. I think that Harvester needs to mature as a product, and I think that in the future, it will be very powerful. You have one tool that does many things for you.

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Prasad Gupta

Software Engineer at IBM Software Labs

Efficient deployment with resource optimization and multi-region stability

There are several areas where OpenShift could improve. The interface has numerous UI bugs that need addressing. Furthermore, the latest version has deprecated the deployment config, which has its own advantages compared to the deployment container. Lastly, there is no built-in auto-scaling plugin at the OpenShift level; this needs to be addressed as it's available at the cloud provider level, like IBM Cloud.

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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

"The tool's UI is very convenient enough to help you manage multiple clusters in the cloud or the company, making it a product with which you can manage different clusters and locations."

"The solution has a lot of good features, such as you can access the console and edit through the GUI. The dashboard and the UI are designed well, user-friendly, and easy to manage, and access."

"The customized deployment process is the most valuable feature in Rancher Labs."

"The scalability potential is very good."

"The product is simple to use for a beginner."

"The most valuable feature is its comprehensive support, easy resource scaling, compatibility with various OEMs, and seamless service integration."

"This solution is not vendor-locked, which means that we we are able to use it across all of our resources; this feature is of great value to us."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is an open-source solution that is easy to deploy."

More Rancher Labs pros

"OpenShift provides tools that tell me everything I have on a container, and I can make it on-premise or on a cloud infrastructure."

"The software is user-friendly and straightforward to use, which is favorable to a developer."

"Autoscaling is an excellent feature that makes it very simple to scale our applications as required."

"The console or the GUI of OpenShift is awesome. You can do a lot of things from there. You can perform administration tasks as well as development tasks."

"Openshift is a very developer-friendly product."

"The most valuable are security features, particularly when operating in the cloud."

"The best feature is the management for the port life cycle, which automatically recycles, pulls, and scales up and down based on needs and requests."

"It is easy to expand."

More Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform pros

Cons

"We have found that the auto-secure feature of this solution doesn't always work, and could be improved to be more reliable, particularly when working with business critical applications."

"I can't migrate to the newer version."

"The solution could improve by adding more features in the dashboard, such as monitoring, scanning, and security. This would be a great benefit."

"One area for improvement in Rancher Labs is the development aspect."

"There needs to be an improvement in observability and microservice monitoring tools in Rancher Labs."

"They should improve application visibility along with code visibility."

"Could be more intuitive."

"If you have poor infrastructure, you will have issues with the tool."

More Rancher Labs cons

"OpenShift needs to improve their container storage."

"The complexity of the installation could be reduced. While we got the necessary support, the instructions could be clearer."

"The setup process is not great."

"The monitoring and logging could be improved."

"The stability needs improvement."

"The price needs to be improved in OpenShift Container Platform. When I choose this, the product is the first factor that we have to make a long analysis to compare the real cost for the other services. However, price is high."

"Things are there and the documentation is there, however, there still needs to be quick guides available."

"Container Platform could be improved if we could aggregate logs out of the box instead of having to do it through integrations with other products."

More Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There are no hidden charges attached to the product unless a user opts for the premium support offered by the solution."

"This is an open-source solution, so there are no licensing costs involved."

"The pricing of the solution sits in the mid range, not high and not low. It has a fixed price that you pay every month."

"Although Rancher Labs is an open-source solution, they also offer a paid version, where you buy the support when needed."

"The cost is reasonable since it's open source. Rancher effectively addresses container orchestration trends, especially for those with some Kubernetes knowledge."

"The solution is free and open source but there is a fee for support."

"There is an annual subscription. The price of the solution should be cheaper and have better pricing flexibility."

"We currently have an annual license renewal."

"The pricing and licensing are handled on an upper management level, and I'm not involved in that, but I understand the solution to be somewhat pricey."

"OpenShift with Red Hat support is pretty costly. We have done a comparison between AWS EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Services) which provides fully managed services from AWS. It's built on open-source-based Kubernetes clusters and it is much cheaper compared to Red Hat, but it is a little expensive compared to ECS provided by AWS."

"I'm an architect, so I have no involvement in the pricing and licensing of the platform."

"The solution is expensive, and I rate it an eight out of ten. There is a subscription called OpenShift Plus, which offers additional features and products the vendor provides to complement the OpenShift Container Platform. These include ACM, Red Hat Quay, and Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation."

"The pricing is a bit more expensive than expected."

"If you buy the product for a year or three, you get a lot of discounts...I feel that the product is worth its cost, especially since setting it up can be done with just a few clicks."

"We paid for Cloud Pak for integration. It all depends on how many VMs or how many CPUs you are using. They do the licensing based on that."

More Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

38%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

11%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Rancher Labs?

The tool's UI is very convenient enough to help you manage multiple clusters in the cloud or the company, making it a product with which you can manage different clusters and locations.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Rancher Labs?

The cost is reasonable since it's open-source. Rancher effectively addresses container orchestration trends, especially for those with some Kubernetes knowledge.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Rancher Labs?

While Rancher Labs provides some level of security, it's not considered very robust. We found it to offer basic security features, which met some of our requirements, but we also relied on other op...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about OpenShift Container Platform?

The tool's most valuable features include high availability, scalability, and security. Other features like advanced cluster management, advanced cluster security, and Red Hat Quay make it powerful...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for OpenShift Container Platform?

The current licensing cost for this solution is around $23,000 per year, per month. Regarding the current licensing cost, I would rate my satisfaction around seven or seven and a half; there's alwa...

See all answers

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Rancher Labs

June 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

June 2025

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform report

Download Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform product report

Overview

Rancher Labs build innovative, open source software that makes it easy to deploy and manage containers in production on any infrastructure. We enable organizations to accelerate all aspects of their software development pipeline, from writing and testing code to running complex microservices-based applications.

Rancher, our flagship container management platform, allows users to easily manage all aspects of running containers in development and production environments, on any infrastructure. With well over four million downloads, Rancher has quickly become the tools of choice for teams serious about running containers in production. This includes large enterprises such as Sony, IBM, Tyco, Align Technologies and more.

Rancher Labs

Red Hat® OpenShift® offers a consistent hybrid cloud foundation for building and scaling containerized applications. Benefit from streamlined platform installation and upgrades from one of the enterprise Kubernetes leaders.

Red Hat

Sample Customers

Albert Heijn, Bell, BMC, Samsung, WindStream, Johnson & Johnson

Edenor, BMW, Ford, Argentine Ministry of Health

Buyer's Guide

Rancher Labs vs. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

June 2025

Free Report: Rancher Labs vs. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

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