Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) vs. Red Hat OpenShift

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft's Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is designed to make deploying and managing containerized applications easy. It offers serverless Kubernetes, an integrated continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) experience, and enterprise-grade security and governance. It allows development and operations teams on a single platform to rapidly build, deliver, and scale applications with confidence.N/A
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
OpenShift is Red Hat's Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. OpenShift is an application platform in the cloud where application developers and teams can build, test, deploy, and run their applications.
$0.08
per hour
Pricing
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)Red Hat OpenShift
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)Red Hat OpenShift
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)Red Hat OpenShift
Considered Both Products
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
Chose Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
Integration with other standard azure services make Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) case strong. As we use most of the azure services it is easy to integrate. It is difficult to use EKS as the user interface is not intuitive and difficult to integrate. The services need to be …
Red Hat OpenShift
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
We explore a lot of services to use in. But in todays world everything is cloud and the on premise solutions are not very strong until we discover Red Hat OpenShift which still very committed to maintain on premise solutions, we select Openshift and since first day we are very …
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
greate UI UX, easy to use, even when you have no clue about any command lines, you still can manage your apps. Also, public documentation is great, if you search for anything you can find it online. A great community and a support system
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
It definitely has additional bells and vessels like SM, UI and monitoring/logging stack
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
To benefit from premium support.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
It's a fairly different experience compared to the other environments due to the additional security
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift has a better security posture than EKS. I enjoy the console on Red Hat OpenShift more as well. I believe there is greater observability for Red Hat OpenShift.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
RedHat OpenShift can run on-prem and on Azure, meaning we can get support from RedHat from two platforms, despite it being on those different platforms.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
It is the best Enterprise ready orchestration solution for us.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
They are all nice products, and they all have their place. But I'm convinced that from now on, instead of instantly just creating a Kubernetes cluster, I'm going to start seeing if Red Hat OpenShift is the best answer based on the project's overall needs. It's truly made that …
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
The other platforms are cloud based, and less relevant when you have to choose an on prem scenario. Red Hat OpenShift encapsulates Kubernetes and provides more, so that you have an all-in-one platform instead of dealing with various separate services. [Red Hat] OpenShift is …
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Much better on all scales of evaluation.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift is a more complete and integrated platform, with lots of out of the box components that the other platforms don't have, and customers need to stack lots of other software in order to have monitoring, cost management, log management, user policies governance, …
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
OpenShift is a more comprehensive solution.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
The console is a major upgrade over the bare bones interface given by cloud providers.
Features
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)Red Hat OpenShift
Container Management
Comparison of Container Management features of Product A and Product B
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
7.6
5 Ratings
7% below category average
Red Hat OpenShift
-
Ratings
Security and Isolation8.65 Ratings00 Ratings
Container Orchestration8.05 Ratings00 Ratings
Cluster Management7.45 Ratings00 Ratings
Storage Management7.45 Ratings00 Ratings
Resource Allocation and Optimization8.05 Ratings00 Ratings
Discovery Tools6.95 Ratings00 Ratings
Update Rollouts and Rollbacks6.45 Ratings00 Ratings
Self-Healing and Recovery8.05 Ratings00 Ratings
Analytics, Monitoring, and Logging7.65 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
-
Ratings
Red Hat OpenShift
8.2
277 Ratings
5% above category average
Ease of building user interfaces00 Ratings8.1239 Ratings
Scalability00 Ratings9.0265 Ratings
Platform management overhead00 Ratings7.9247 Ratings
Workflow engine capability00 Ratings7.9225 Ratings
Platform access control00 Ratings8.4249 Ratings
Services-enabled integration00 Ratings8.2234 Ratings
Development environment creation00 Ratings8.6242 Ratings
Development environment replication00 Ratings8.5229 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification00 Ratings7.8242 Ratings
Issue recovery00 Ratings7.7240 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes00 Ratings8.4243 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)Red Hat OpenShift
Small Businesses
Portainer
Portainer
Score 9.0 out of 10
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.6 out of 10
Enterprises
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)Red Hat OpenShift
Likelihood to Recommend
7.0
(6 ratings)
9.1
(266 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
8.9
(27 ratings)
Usability
7.0
(1 ratings)
8.4
(12 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
5.5
(1 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
8.7
(131 ratings)
Support Rating
9.0
(1 ratings)
6.8
(10 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
6.7
(4 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(3 ratings)
Professional Services
-
(0 ratings)
7.3
(1 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)Red Hat OpenShift
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft
AKS works very well for running containerized applications that require high availability and scalability. This includes systems like our HRIS platform and customer-facing web applications. AKS is a good choice when applications are broken into multiple services that need independent scaling and deployment. It provides the flexibility needed to manage these architectures effectively. But for single, low-traffic applications or simple internal tools, AKS can be overkill. For scenarios like that Azure App Service would be better.
Read full review
Red Hat
Red Hat OpenShift, despite its complexity and overhead, remains the most complete and enterprise-ready Kubernetes platform available. It excels in research projects like ours, where we need robust CI/CD, GPU scheduling, and tight integration with tools like Jupyter, OpenDataHub, and Quiskit. Its security, scalability, and operator ecosystem make it ideal for experimental and production-grade AI workloads. However, for simpler general hosting tasks—such as serving static websites or lightweight backend services—we find traditional VMs, Docker, or LXD more practical and resource-efficient. Red Hat OpenShift shines in complex, container-native workflows, but can be overkill for basic infrastructure needs.
Read full review
Pros
Microsoft
  • AKS makes it easier to replicate data to multiple regions
  • Azure portal make it easier to manage the resources of the organization
Read full review
Red Hat
  • We had a few microservices that dealt with notifications and alerts. We used OpenShift to deploy these microservices, which handle and deliver notifications using publish-subscribe models.
  • We had to expose an API to consumers via MTLS, which was implemented using Server secret integration in OpenShift. We were then able to deploy the APIs on OpenShift with API security.
  • We integrated Splunk with OpenShift to view the logs of our applications and gain real-time insights into usage, as well as provide high availability.
Read full review
Cons
Microsoft
  • Steep learning curve
  • Expected charges are unclear until you see real production usage
  • Operations teams need to learn an entirely new skill set
Read full review
Red Hat
  • I wouldn't necessarily say there is look everyday technology transform. I can see a trend wherein Red Hat OpenShift is adopting all the new technology trends and helping their customers align with their priorities and the emerging technology trends. I wouldn't call out various scope for development every day. There is scope for development. It is all how the organizations adopt it and how they deliver it to their customers. I don't want to call out there is scope for development. It's happening. It is a never ending process.
  • At the moment, I don't have anything to call out. We are experiencing Red Hat OpenShift and we can see every day they're coming up with new features as and when they come up with new features, we want to experience it more and more. We are looking for opportunities wherein this can be leveraged to help our users and partners.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Red Hat
OpenShift is really easy of use through its management console. OpenShift gives a very large flexibility through many inbuilt functionalities, all gathered in the same place (it's a very convenient tool to learn DevOps technics hands on) OpenShift is an ideal integrated development / deployment platform for containers
Read full review
Usability
Microsoft
As already said, the UI/CLI and even terraform are perfectly fine, but certain details could be documented better. For instance, if I want to secure the whole Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) with my own managed keys, then it is very complex and hard to get there. Not really a single source that gives you the whole picture. Besides that, it is still good to use, in most cases intuitive but details mentioned as above can be tricky.
Read full review
Red Hat
The virtualization part takes some getting used to it you are coming from a more traditional hypervisor. Customization options are not intuitive to these users. The process should be more clear. Perhaps a guide to Openshift Virtualization for users of RHV, VMware, etc. would ease this transition into the new platform
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Red Hat
Redhat openshift is generally reliable and available platform, it ensures high availability for most the situations. in fact the product where we put openshift in a box, we ensure that the availability is also happening at node and network level and also at storage level, so some of the factors that are outside of Openshift realm are also working in HA manner.
Read full review
Performance
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Red Hat
Overall, this platform is beneficial. The only downsides we have encountered have been with pods that occasionally hang. This results in resources being dedicated to dead or zombie pods. Over time, these wasted resources occasionally cause us issues, and we have had difficulty monitoring these pods. However, this issue does not overshadow the benefits we get from Openshift.
Read full review
Support Rating
Microsoft
Microsoft support was really good, whenever we raise any ticket they come back to us within a couple of hours.
Read full review
Red Hat
Every time we need to get support all the Red Hat team move forward looking to solve the problem. Sometimes this was not easy and requires the scalation to product team, and we always get a response. Most of the minor issues were solved with the information from access.redhat.com
Read full review
In-Person Training
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Red Hat
I was not involved in the in person training, so i
can not answer this question, but the team in my org worked directly
with Openshift and able to get the in person training done easily, i did not
hear problem or complain in this space, so i hope things happen
seamlessly without any issue.
Read full review
Online Training
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Red Hat
We went thru the training material on RH webesite, i think its very descriptive and the handson lab sesssions are very useful. It would be good to create more short duration videos covering one single aspect of openshift, this wll keep the interest and also it breaks down the complexity to reasonable chunks.
Read full review
Implementation Rating
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Red Hat
The learning curve is quite high but worth it.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Microsoft
Amazon EKS stacked up very well and had better performance in some areas. However, Azure Kubernetes Service was a better fit given our Azure environment.
Read full review
Red Hat
The Tanzu Platform seemed overly complicated, and the frequent changes to the portfolio as well as the messaging made us uneasy. We also decided it would not be wise to tie our application platform to a specific infrastructure provider, as Tanzu cannot be deployed on anything other than vSphere. SUSE Rancher seemed good overall, but ultimately felt closer to a DIY approach versus the comprehensive package that Red Hat OpenShift provides.
Read full review
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Red Hat
It's easy to understand what are being billed and what's included in each type of subscription. Same with the support (Std or Premium) you know exactly what to expect when you need to use it. The "core" unit approach on the subscription made really simple to scale and carry the workloads from one site to another.
Read full review
Scalability
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Red Hat
This is a great platform to deployment container applications designed for multiple use cases. Its reasonably scalable platform, that can host multiple instances of applications, which can seamlessly handle the node and pod failure, if they are configured properly. There should be some scalability best practices guide would be very useful
Read full review
Return on Investment
Microsoft
  • We had to spend more time on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) than on AWS and GCP to get our kubernetes cluster up and running
  • The resources on nodes need to be left out unused, so effectively it is wasting money there
  • It definitely made us spend more time into maintaining kubernetes
Read full review
Red Hat
  • All of the above. Red Hat OpenShift going into a developer-type setting can be stood up very quickly. There's a very short period to have developers onboard to it and they're able to become productive much faster than a grow your own type solution.
Read full review
ScreenShots