OpenShift vs Pivotal Cloud Foundry comparison

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Executive Summary
Updated on Mar 6, 2024

We compared OpenShift and Pivotal Cloud Foundry based on our user's reviews in several parameters.

OpenShift and Pivotal Cloud Foundry both offer scalable, secure, and user-friendly platforms with efficient automation capabilities. While OpenShift excels in customer service and integration options, Pivotal Cloud Foundry is praised for its flexibility and extensive documentation. However, OpenShift users have raised concerns about the complex interface and setup process, while Pivotal Cloud Foundry users have highlighted scalability and support as areas for improvement. Both platforms have proven to be profitable investments with fair pricing structures.

Features: OpenShift stands out with its robust scalability, efficient containerization, strong security measures, extensive automation capabilities, and seamless integration. Pivotal Cloud Foundry excels in its scalability, flexibility, strong automation, simplified development process, and extensive documentation and resources.

Pricing and ROI: The setup cost for OpenShift is reported to be smooth and hassle-free, with no negative comments from users. In comparison, Pivotal Cloud Foundry also has reasonable setup costs, according to user feedback. Both products have straightforward and easily manageable licensing processes., OpenShift users have reported it as a profitable investment, while Pivotal Cloud Foundry has yielded a positive ROI with valuable features, scalability, streamlined processes, and increased productivity.

Room for Improvement: OpenShift could benefit from improvements in its user interface, initial setup process, error handling, customization options, and integrations. Pivotal Cloud Foundry would benefit from enhancements in scalability, documentation, support resources, features, flexibility, and performance optimization.

Deployment and customer support: Based on the user feedback, it appears that the implementation process for OpenShift can vary, with some users reporting spending separate timeframes on deployment and setup. In contrast, feedback for Pivotal Cloud Foundry suggests that these terms may refer to the same period, and the duration can range from weeks to months depending on specific circumstances., OpenShift's customer service received praise for its promptness, effectiveness, and expertise. Customers deemed the experience exceptional. Pivotal Cloud Foundry's service was also praised for being responsive, helpful, and reliable with knowledgeable and friendly representatives. Overall, customers seem satisfied with both services.

The summary above is based on 41 interviews we conducted recently with OpenShift and Pivotal Cloud Foundry users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.

To learn more, read our detailed OpenShift vs. Pivotal Cloud Foundry Report (Updated: March 2024).
767,667 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The stability has been good.""In terms of implementation, OpenShift is very user-friendly, which is an advantage. We are using it along with GitLab for implementing CI/CD pipelines. That's a feature that other products also have, but in OpenShift, we find it good.""I love to automate everything and OpenShift was been born for that. It takes care of the network layer itself and I don't need to dive into it; I can work on a top level. Our project has numerous services designed to run in Docker containers, and we have run almost all pieces in OpenShift.""I am impressed with the product's security features.""The security features of OpenShift are strong when in use of role-based access.""Valuable features include auto-recreate of pod if pod fails; fast rollback, with one click, to previous version.""The company had a product called device financing, where the company worked as a partner with Google. It allowed customers to take mobile phones on loan or via credit. When we migrated those services to OpenShift in February last year, we were able to sell over 100,000 devices in a single day, which was very good.""It's cloud agnostic and the containerization and security features are outstanding."

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"I find the ease of deployment and management of microservices to be the most valuable features. The platform also has good auto-scaling capabilities.""The most valuable feature of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is auto-healing and the plenty of other features that are provided.""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.""The most valuable feature of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is the UI, it is easy to use.""The most valuable features are the monitoring and the deployment is easier.""We find its stability and scalability valuable.""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."

More Pivotal Cloud Foundry Pros →

Cons
"Latency and performance are two areas of concern in OpenShift where improvements are required.""One of the features that I've observed in Tanzu Mission Control is that I can manage multiple Kubernetes environments. For instance, one of my lines of business is using OpenShift OKD; another one wants to use Google Anthos, and somebody else wants to use VMware Tanzu. If I have to manage all these, Tanzu Mission Control is giving me the opportunity to completely manage all of my Kubernetes clusters, whereas, with OpenShift, I can only manage a particular area. I can't manage other Kubernetes clusters. I would like to have the option to manage all Kubernetes clusters with OpenShift.""The software-defined networking part of it caused us quite a bit of heartburn. We ran into a lot of problems with the difference between on-prem and cloud, where we had to make quite a number of modifications... They've since resolved it, so it's not really an issue anymore.""Its virtual upgrades are time-consuming.""Credential not hidden, so people on the same group can view it.""My team has found some bugs in OpenShift due to continuous integration, and this is an area for improvement in the platform. RedHat should fix the bugs. Another area for improvement in OpenShift is that upgrading clusters can be challenging, resulting in downtime. Application support also needs improvement in OpenShift because the platform doesn't support all applications in the cloud. I'd like upgraded storage in the next release of OpenShift, especially when I need to do a DR exercise. It would also be good if the platform allows mirroring with another cluster, or more portability in terms of moving applications to another cluster.""The whole area around the hybrid cloud could be improved. I would like to deploy a Red Hat OpenShift cluster on-premise and on the cloud, then have Red Hat do the entire hybrid cloud management.""OpenShift could improve by providing the ability to integrate with public cloud platforms. This way we can easily use the services that these platforms offer. For instance, Amazon AWS. However, all the three major hyper-scalers solutions offer excellent DevOps and CI/CD tooling. If there was an easy way to integrate with them it would be beneficial. We need a way to easily integrate with the monitoring and dashboard services that they provide."

More OpenShift Cons →

"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.""Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve on the technology it is a bit complex.""The Pivotal Cloud Foundry's initial setup has a learning curve for my team, but it was easy to use.""There are no synthetic application monitoring and real-time monitoring features.""Pivotal Cloud Foundry doesn't have certain advanced features.""The user interface should be simpler to navigate because it t can take time for users to learn it.""It should offer more security features.""There is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the future of Pivotal Cloud Foundry."

More Pivotal Cloud Foundry Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "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."
  • "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."
  • "Pricing of OpenShift depends on the number of nodes and who is hosting it."
  • "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 are currently using the open version, OKD. We plan to get the enterprise version in the future."
  • "The licensing cost for OpenShift is expensive when compared to other products. RedHat also charges you additional costs apart from the standard licensing fees."
  • "This solution is fairly expensive but comes at an average cost compared to other solutions in the market."
  • "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."
  • More OpenShift Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "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 price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is based on the customer's requirements. However, the price is comparable to other similar solutions."
  • "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."
  • "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."
  • More Pivotal Cloud Foundry Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer: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 is… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer:OpenShift facilitates DevOps practices and improves CI/CD workflows in terms of stability compared to Jenkins.
    Top Answer:I find the ease of deployment and management of microservices to be the most valuable features. The platform also has good auto-scaling capabilities.
    Top Answer: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.
    Top Answer: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. A few things, such as what OpenShift does… more »
    Ranking
    4th
    out of 37 in PaaS Clouds
    Views
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    Comparisons
    12,960
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    28
    Average Words per Review
    651
    Rating
    8.6
    7th
    out of 37 in PaaS Clouds
    Views
    11,015
    Comparisons
    9,966
    Reviews
    11
    Average Words per Review
    532
    Rating
    7.5
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    PCF, Pivotal Application Service (PAS), Pivotal Container Service (PKS), Pivotal Function Service (PFS)
    Learn More
    Overview

    OpenShift is Red Hat's Kubernetes platform that provides a cloud environment for development, hosting, and scaling applications. The solution enables a cloud-like experience regardless of the location where it has been deployed, including in the cloud, on premises, or at the edge. It allows developers to select where to build, deploy, and run applications through a consistent experience, supported by full-stack automated operations, and self-service provisioning.

    OpenShift employs an open hybrid cloud strategy which is built on the foundation of technologies including Linux, containers, and automation. This approach provides clients with a flexible selection of where to run their applications. Applications can be built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and are automatically compatible with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. OpenShift enables automation inside and outside clients' Kubernetes clusters.

    The solution works with traditional, modernized, and cloud-native applications. It supports a wide variety of workloads, including Java, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), and databases. Due to the vast ecosystem of technology partners that OpenShift supports, clients can benefit from automated deployment and life-cycle management. This product improves the security of the full application life cycle by decreasing operational risk. This is achieved by shifting security left and automating development, security, and operations (DevSecOps).

    OpenShift Features

    OpenShift facilitates clients’ application-running processes through various features. Some of the product’s features include:

    • Backup and recovery: This feature ensures logical and physical protection through containers, Kubernetes, and serverless present opportunities. It is used to meet recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO).

    • CI/CD pipelines: This feature of OpenShift automates the continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, accelerating the time for application development.

    • GitOps: The GitOps feature increases security and reliability for applications through tools like Git repositories, Kubernetes, and CI/CD. The product includes this feature to allow developers more freedom in app development through tracing and accounting for the application life cycle in the Git repository.

    • Helm: Helm is a package and installs manager that simplifies the deployment of containerized apps. It is included in the features of OpenShift to assist users with interoperability and support cloud-native applications from independent software vendors (ISVs).

    • Sandboxed containers: OpenShift offers sandboxed containers based on Kata Containers to provide an additional layer of isolation for applications while meeting high-security requirements.

    • Windows containers: The product offers this feature to facilitate users when running their Windows applications by providing them a scheduled, orchestrated, and managed environment.

    • Security: OpenShift offers various operations through which clients can ensure the safety of their data and applications. They include container host and platform multitenancy, security and trusted content sources, security of the container registry, the build pipeline, and data, managing security container deployments, and more.

    • Service Mesh: This feature provides a uniform way for clients to connect, manage, and observe microservices-based applications. It also provides detailed behavioral insight.

    • Operators: This feature automates the development, configuration, and management of Kubernetes-native applications.

    • Virtualization: OpenShift allows users to run and manage virtual machine (VM) and container workloads side by side.

    OpenShift Benefits

    OpenShift provides the companies and users utilizing it with various benefits. These benefits include the following:

    • OpenShift provides scalability for applications, allowing them to run across hundreds of nodes in seconds.

    • The product offers flexibility by simplifying the deployment and management of hybrid infrastructure and providing self-managed or fully-managed service.

    • OpenShift incorporates open-source technologies alongside its native components and features.

    • The product enhances the developer experience by offering a variety of tools, multi language support, and integrated development environment (IDE) integrations.

    • The solution supports automated installation and over-the-air platform upgrades in the cloud with Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, as well as various on-premise platforms.

    • OpenShift includes streamlined and automated container and app builds, as well as health management and scaling.

    • The solution enhances the support of smaller-footprint topologies in edge scenarios.

    • OpenShift provides easy multiple cluster management through Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes.

    • The product has enhanced security capabilities that include access controls, an enterprise registry with a built-in scanner, and networking.

    • The solution supports a wide spectrum of enterprise storage solutions for running stateful as well as stateless apps.

    Reviews from Real Users

    An executive head of department - M-PESA Tech at a comms service provider gives OpenShift a high rating because its automation can go a long way in reducing time to market and the time required to fix issues that arise from deployment.

    Vikram C., head of infrastructure & cloud ops at a comms service provider, rates highly three qualities of OpenShift, summarizing them to mature, seamless integration, and easy setup.

    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

    Sample Customers
    UPS, Cathay Pacific, Hilton
    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
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm32%
    Comms Service Provider18%
    Manufacturing Company11%
    Computer Software Company11%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm33%
    Computer Software Company10%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    Insurance Company6%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm56%
    Comms Service Provider11%
    Retailer11%
    Government11%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm38%
    Manufacturing Company21%
    Insurance Company5%
    Computer Software Company5%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business27%
    Midsize Enterprise10%
    Large Enterprise63%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business13%
    Midsize Enterprise9%
    Large Enterprise78%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business33%
    Large Enterprise67%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business10%
    Midsize Enterprise4%
    Large Enterprise86%
    Buyer's Guide
    OpenShift vs. Pivotal Cloud Foundry
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about OpenShift vs. Pivotal Cloud Foundry and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    767,667 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    OpenShift is ranked 4th in PaaS Clouds with 53 reviews while Pivotal Cloud Foundry is ranked 7th in PaaS Clouds with 15 reviews. OpenShift is rated 8.4, while Pivotal Cloud Foundry is rated 7.6. The top reviewer of OpenShift writes "Provides us with the flexibility and efficiency of cloud-native stacks while enabling us to meet regulatory constraints". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Pivotal Cloud Foundry writes "Easy to use, simple to sign-in, but lacking graphical interface". OpenShift is most compared with Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), whereas Pivotal Cloud Foundry is most compared with Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, VMware Tanzu Application Service and Cloud Foundry. See our OpenShift vs. Pivotal Cloud Foundry report.

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    We monitor all PaaS Clouds reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.