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Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) vs Rocky Linux comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 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

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
Rocky Linux
Ranking in Operating Systems (OS) for Business
7th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
5
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 Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is 11.8%, down from 12.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Rocky Linux is 12.1%, up from 7.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Operating Systems (OS) for Business
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Dominique Locksley - PeerSpot reviewer
Very simple to work with, easy to learn, and has a competitive pricing
The UX design, the user front end, and the user GUI are very well done on the GNOME and KDE platform side. It's very simple to work with, easy to learn, and know where things are. I have worked with a lot of different solutions like Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, and CentOS. Rocky Linux is very easy, and if you switch from one to the other, you can easily detect your tools in the front end. Since it is very similar to the file system breakdown of downloads and documents, it's very easy to show users where things will be.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's more stable than the other operating systems."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its good integration with Ansible."
"The graphical user interface is useful. However, we prefer to use the command line as we can do many more things."
"The frequent updates are valuable."
"The documentation is excellent."
"The product is super easy to use."
"It enables us to achieve security compliance. Our security team is quite happy, especially in terms of patching up our servers, etc. It's compliant with our security requirements."
"With Red Hat, the community is so robust. Most of the time, while waiting for a Red Hat engineer to call us back, the solution to the issue is already provided."
"It's very simple to work with, easy to learn, and know where things are."
"The custom install scripts streamline the setup process, making it straightforward."
"I haven't needed to use customer service or support, which speaks volumes about their product's reliability and ease of use."
"It helps us keep our workstations in sync and ensures consistent settings across most of our machines."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its stability."
 

Cons

"Red Hat's standard deployment is with Satellite and Kickstart, but we're looking at other options to help speed it along. We do have a mix of bare metal and virtualized servers and it's easier to spin up in the virtualized world versus bare metal. That's why we're looking at some options outside of Red Hat, for the bare metal."
"I'm happy with the value RHEL delivers, but there's always room to improve."
"Red Hat training is phenomenal, but it is expensive. There has to be a better way to onboard new engineers into Linux to really and truly compete with Microsoft."
"The cost of this solution could be improved."
"Nowadays, delays are common with their support, and it often takes time to get assistance from experienced engineers."
"Sometimes, when upgrading or migrating systems, there are differences in the repositories of the versions that aren't one-to-one replaceable. For example, there are significant differences in the repositories from version 7 to 8. We needed to upgrade RHEL from version 7 to 8 because it had reached the end of its life. A Postgres database was running on it that used a RHEL 7 package, allowing some database or reporting features. When I upgraded to RHEL 8, it was not in the repository. I needed to install it with some workaround. Of course, it was installed with some minor incompatible dependencies."
"It would be great to have an overview of how various Red Hat products work together. They can show how to tie all those pieces together and how to have the products that we work together for our day-to-day processes."
"Continuous improvement is essential to enhance user experiences and address evolving needs."
"The solution's audio integration for virtual machines could be improved."
"I have certain problems with the tool's DNS part, making it an area where improvements are required."
"Improved integration with Windows, particularly Active Directory, would be beneficial for the product. Currently, this aspect requires additional effort."
"One of the potential issues is that if you don't pay for support, you may need to manage certain aspects on your own and rely on the community for assistance."
"In terms of improvement, Rocky Linux needs to clarify its identity and target audience."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"RHEL has a decent pricing model. It's a subscription, which makes sense. The OS itself is free, but you pay for the support. I have never heard any complaints about the pricing."
"We purchased our license from ITM, our local provider."
"I have very little experience with pricing and getting quotes. The whole VMware thing happened, and everybody is looking at different alternatives. At this point, any competitor is probably a good choice based on the cost."
"The licensing is tricky to understand. Enterprises want to be beyond reproach when it comes to licensing. We would rather over-license than under-license. However, that can be complicated with a high-performance development team who may need multiple operating system instances or want to experiment with spinning up many machines to see if something works or sticks."
"This is not a cheap solution but it gets you the support if you ever need it."
"The solution is moving away from its open source roots and licensing is a little bit of an issue."
"Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers a straightforward pricing and licensing model."
"The price point for that is phenomenal because you are paying for support. From a pricing perspective, it is on point. It is definitely a value-add, and it is extremely transparent from a customer standpoint."
"Compared to the market prices of other tools, the solution has a very competitive pricing."
"The product is expensive. I rate the pricing a three."
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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
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
9%
Computer Software Company
14%
University
12%
Educational Organization
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What do you like most about Rocky Linux?
It's very simple to work with, easy to learn, and know where things are.
What needs improvement with Rocky Linux?
Improved integration with Windows, particularly Active Directory, would be beneficial for the product. Currently, this aspect requires additional effort.
What is your primary use case for Rocky Linux?
I use the solution in my company to do some automation stuff to run Ansible, and it has an administration server to provide all the Linux control like a client node can be connected to that master ...
 

Also Known As

Red Hat Enterprise Linux, RHEL
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) vs. Rocky Linux and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
831,615 professionals have used our research since 2012.