IBM Cloud Foundry vs. IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service vs. Red Hat OpenShift

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
IBM Cloud Foundry
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
IBM Cloud Foundry is an IBM version of the open-source platform designed for building, testing, deploying, and scaling applications. Enterprises can run Cloud Foundry in a public isolated environment, while natively integrating with other IBM Cloud services, such as AI, Blockchain, and IoT.
$0.07
Per GBH
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Score 7.9 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service is a managed Kubernetes offering, delivering user tools and built-in security for rapid delivery of applications that users can bind to cloud services related to IBM Watson®, IoT, DevOps and data analytics. As a certified K8s provider, IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service provides intelligent scheduling, self-healing, horizontal scaling, service discovery and load balancing, automated rollouts and rollbacks, and secret and configuration management. The Kubernetes…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
IBM Cloud FoundryIBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceRed Hat OpenShift
Editions & Modules
Community Runtimes
$0.07
Per GBH
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM Cloud FoundryIBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceRed Hat OpenShift
Free Trial
YesNoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesYesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
IBM Cloud FoundryIBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceRed Hat OpenShift
Considered Multiple Products
IBM Cloud Foundry
Chose IBM Cloud Foundry
IBM Cloud Foundry is easy to use and allows for fast and easy deployment of web apps.
Chose IBM Cloud Foundry
IBM Cloud Foundry (CF) is simpler and there is a service model that fits most of our internal services. We are going to Loopback for API and Node.js and we have an easy path to go with Bluemix. It's a very easy way to start if you are moving to the cloud and mainly if you are …
Chose IBM Cloud Foundry
We have had to move our deployments to Kubernetes because we needed more reliability. We moved to Google because IBM rates and billing was so backward and expensive. Our client was also very angry at all the outages, lost revenue, production down time and inordinately expensive …
Chose IBM Cloud Foundry
IBM Cloud Foundry is among the services provided by our cloud provider. This is why we choose to go with Cloud Foundry.
Chose IBM Cloud Foundry
While we are still looking at Kubernetes and other services, we will continue to use Cloud Foundry because of the advantages it provides. The support from IBM is good and take a lot of work that our developers and ops had to do away.
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Chose IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
IBM Cloud is simple to use and has no custom requirements to start, Other products are not cost-efficient compared to IBM IKS.
Chose IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Well, as we were in a state to compulsory implement this service, but then it is very suited for deployment of a service that has higher fault tolerance. And maintaining the lifecycle of custom made resources. And the ability to integrate other services also
Chose IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service is far more distributed around the world. Also it has lower costs.
Chose IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
I say IKS still has a more to work, while it benefits in being an early adopter like GKE, most of these services are easier to work on when it comes to web management, something the IKS lacks and needs to improve since its release because of how well-established the management …
Chose IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
We went with IBM because it had a very competitive pricing model.
Chose IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
We are already using Bluemix for other deployments, so it was easy to incorporate Cloud Kubernetes service into our app. Cloud Foundry does not have the CPU options that we needed.
Chose IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Due to the features of IBM Cloud we get benefits of deploying Docker containers using the Kubernetes Cluster.
Red Hat OpenShift
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
When we evaluated PCF, it was just running application as containers. Managing applications and workloads were not that easy. Ecosystem wise PCF was quite small. Just few resources to create and manage. But Red Hat OpenShift was based on K8s, any k8s capabilities' will able to …
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
We had some existing apps and were looking for a platform to modernize our app deployments and scale for future growth. Based on Kubernetes, OpenShift offers more flexibility and customization. We could deploy any type of containerized application, not just Cloud Foundry-specifi…
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift is best in the standardization of container orchestration tech and developer tooling. High security by inbuilt security features.
Features
IBM Cloud FoundryIBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceRed Hat OpenShift
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cloud Foundry
7.6
24 Ratings
2% below category average
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
-
Ratings
Red Hat OpenShift
8.2
277 Ratings
5% above category average
Ease of building user interfaces7.010 Ratings00 Ratings8.1239 Ratings
Scalability8.524 Ratings00 Ratings9.0265 Ratings
Platform management overhead8.512 Ratings00 Ratings7.9247 Ratings
Workflow engine capability8.020 Ratings00 Ratings7.9225 Ratings
Platform access control10.01 Ratings00 Ratings8.4249 Ratings
Services-enabled integration7.523 Ratings00 Ratings8.2234 Ratings
Development environment creation7.722 Ratings00 Ratings8.6242 Ratings
Development environment replication6.49 Ratings00 Ratings8.5229 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification4.711 Ratings00 Ratings7.8242 Ratings
Issue recovery7.520 Ratings00 Ratings7.7240 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes7.522 Ratings00 Ratings8.4243 Ratings
Container Management
Comparison of Container Management features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cloud Foundry
-
Ratings
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
8.0
20 Ratings
2% below category average
Red Hat OpenShift
-
Ratings
Security and Isolation00 Ratings7.920 Ratings00 Ratings
Container Orchestration00 Ratings8.420 Ratings00 Ratings
Cluster Management00 Ratings7.720 Ratings00 Ratings
Storage Management00 Ratings7.820 Ratings00 Ratings
Resource Allocation and Optimization00 Ratings8.120 Ratings00 Ratings
Discovery Tools00 Ratings7.719 Ratings00 Ratings
Update Rollouts and Rollbacks00 Ratings7.820 Ratings00 Ratings
Self-Healing and Recovery00 Ratings8.318 Ratings00 Ratings
Analytics, Monitoring, and Logging00 Ratings8.220 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
IBM Cloud FoundryIBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceRed Hat OpenShift
Small Businesses
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.3 out of 10
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
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
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 alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
IBM Cloud FoundryIBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceRed Hat OpenShift
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(32 ratings)
7.8
(85 ratings)
9.1
(266 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.0
(1 ratings)
8.9
(16 ratings)
8.9
(27 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
8.7
(16 ratings)
8.4
(12 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
5.5
(1 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
8.7
(131 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.7
(4 ratings)
6.9
(10 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.7
(15 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.6
(3 ratings)
6.7
(4 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(3 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
1.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Professional Services
-
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
7.3
(1 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM Cloud FoundryIBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceRed Hat OpenShift
Likelihood to Recommend
IBM
As it is an open-source platform as a service, it is very easy to operate, scale, and deploy regardless of what programming language and framework it's written in. However, it could be improved in terms of scalability. There should be proper documentation for easier and clearer understanding to make the process smooth.
Read full review
IBM
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service also stands out in environments where the workloads vary continuously and require befitting scale. The product excels particularly in microservices structures, wherein the companies would harness the capacity for container orchestration and automated scaling. Still, it may face the challenges due to monolith applications that have not been originally developed for using container technology.
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
IBM
  • Simplicity - the command line tool provided can get you up and running within minutes.
  • Resourceful - IBM Cloud Foundry is built on top of the open source Cloud Foundry technology, so any resources you find online about Cloud Foundry generally can be applied.
  • Feature rich - provides all the necessary features for a cloud based platform, such as auto-scaling, 0 downtime deployment.
Read full review
IBM
  • IBM has a strong focus on serverless and Kubernetes. This shows in the platform. Deploying containers to Kubernetes was very easy.
  • Deploying a Kubernetes cluster through the GUI is very easy and quick. On top of that, IBM Cloud offers a single node cluster for Free.
  • Container Registry is a very good product for managing container images. Integration with Kubernetes was seemless.
  • Portability. To transition from Google Cloud Kubernetes to IBM Cloud Kubernetes took almost no effort. We mostly use the CLI and the standard tools such as kubectl were present.
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
IBM
  • Need: VISUALIZATION CAPABILITIES! Particularly with the Conversation Service.
  • Need: Annotation capabilities for dialog nodes in Conversation Service.
  • Need: Search/querying capabilities in Conversation Service
  • Need: Clearer documentation of the S2T service. I had to use a third party website for an understanding of how to use this.
Read full review
IBM
  • I constantly get this error even when everything is well configured prefect.exceptions.AuthorizationError: [{'path': ['auth_info'], 'message': 'AuthenticationError: Forbidden', 'extensions': {'code': 'UNAUTHENTICATED'}}]
  • Then sometimes the error disapear without changine anything, happened twice to me. Should there be an issue with the authentication service? Please let's improve or let users know why this may be happening.
  • Improve the UX in the browse console when removing many images at once
  • UX on the process of installing KeyCloack operator
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
IBM
No answers on this topic
IBM
We have our application running on a CentOS compartment on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service. We have been utilizing the help since IBM Cloud initially dispatched. We liked the adaptability and versatility that IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service give us. Since we are tiny, the Kubernetes administration is just utilized at present inside my venture bunch.
Read full review
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
IBM
No answers on this topic
IBM
We actually haven't had any real problems in our clusters recently and the results we have gotten from adopting IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service have been beyond even our greatest expectations. The community has helped optimize the use of the system and make it relatively simpler to use.
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
IBM
No answers on this topic
IBM
IBM's cloud is almost infallible.
Read full review
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
IBM
No answers on this topic
IBM
IBM's cloud has a site in my conuntry (MEXICO) so the network latency was almost 0
Read full review
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
IBM
No answers on this topic
IBM
The self-guided support was solid, and there are plenty of online videos to guide first time users, but I think one area of improvement is a faster way to transfer a large quantity of files from our local machine to the cloud for storage (Aspera)
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
IBM
No answers on this topic
IBM
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
IBM
No answers on this topic
IBM
Online training is really an important resource for using these tools. IBM's help center is rich in useful information and tips. Also, external guides and tutorials are available (e.g. on youtube), but I followed only IBM ones and I had no difficulties.
Read full review
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
IBM
No answers on this topic
IBM
Ease of use. Very intuitive. We have been looking for a product that allows us to orchestrate our docker containers in a way where it allows us to effectively scale our applications to production. It also provides us a way of monitoring all our infrastructure in a very clear concise way.
Read full review
Red Hat
The learning curve is quite high but worth it.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
IBM
CF is what we initially went with to establish a development pipeline and start our cloud journey, now we are expanding this and although we are now pulling in many other tools and functions around CF, it is not being replaced. It stands out as having a key place working ‘with’ git, Kubernetes, IBM cloud etc, not against or segregated from it.
Read full review
IBM
We mainly selected [IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service] because IBM fabric blockchain service is mostly compatible with it. To have all the infrastructure in a single cloud to get the best output we selected the [IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service].
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
IBM
No answers on this topic
IBM
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
IBM
No answers on this topic
IBM
IBM's CKS does not offers automatic autoscaling nor vertical scaling (automatic). Other services like Google Kubernetes Engine scales up and down very well
Read full review
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
IBM
  • IBM Bluemix is mainly a foundation enabler at this stage, although our business plan does look promising.
  • The low cost of development on Bluemix for a start-up like us is so helpful......we had no spare cash for this project besides what we could save or borrow at first, and that wasn't much. We are still trying to attract venture capital to cover the main Cordova Coding effort plus the launch "Cash Burn".
  • Features like push notifications, mobile-back end, and world-beating security help us to sell our SaaS products/services.
  • The pure (usually!) functionality of IBM products and services is very rewarding to work with.They are so insightful and thoughtful, to say naught of clever!
Read full review
IBM
  • Increased development speed and agility allows to build features faster and more economically.
  • Improved resource utilization helps keep applications running very efficiently, which saves on cloud service expenses.
  • Scalability and resilience allows for scaling up or down based on demand, which keeps applications running efficiently and more economically.
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