IBM Cloud Managed Istio vs. Red Hat OpenShift

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
IBM Cloud Managed Istio
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
The IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service provides the Managed Istio installation add on, designed to provide additonal control over clusters and the microservices they comprise via automatic updates and lifecycle management of control plane components, and integration with platform logging and monitoring tools.N/A
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.1 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.N/A
Pricing
IBM Cloud Managed IstioRed Hat OpenShift
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM Cloud Managed IstioRed 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
IBM Cloud Managed IstioRed Hat OpenShift
Considered Both Products
IBM Cloud Managed Istio
Chose IBM Cloud Managed Istio
Amazon API Gateway and MuleSoft Anypoint Platform
Chose IBM Cloud Managed Istio
[IBM Cloud Managed] Istio is cost-effective compared overall with and provides better Kubernetes environments.
Chose IBM Cloud Managed Istio
1) One-stop solution for all the complex network connectivity managed by [IBM Cloud Managed Istio].
2) Nice dashboard to understand the flow.
3) Easy to troubleshoot the service if any one of the APIs is not responding.
Chose IBM Cloud Managed Istio
The ease of use and the scalability have been major factors in the decision making. We like that there is not a lot of repetitive work that must be done in order to bring in existing concepts and ideas into different work streams that have similar but not the same challenges. …
Chose IBM Cloud Managed Istio
It's a cost effective solution for my organization.
Red Hat OpenShift
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat maintains a consistent user interface across their products, and their feature sets facilitate easy and rapid adoption. Configuration as code is the optimal approach for all of them, and they all provide a level of command-line access that ensures teams can work in the …
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Cost effective and does they job at a cheaper price point and better. Highly recommend swapping off of VMware ESXI. Especially with the price point.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
More complex but more features
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
OCP and OpenShift Virtualization are better for a code based infrastructure our organization is attempting to move towards shortly. VMware has also been acquired which has added instability with their future. We are planning to move all VMware workloads to OpenShift …
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
I don't have as much experience with the other two, I have heard of them and know they are container management systems. I have the most experience with Red Hat OpenShift.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
only used for Virt. Red Hat OpenShift has more offerings
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Red Hat Data Grid, Red Hat Integration, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
As a specialized partner in container platform Red Hat OpenShift is our preffered solution. It provides a supported kubernetes platform which contains all the required tools to make the life of customers easier and offer them the same experience accross all hyperscalers, …
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
I find OpenShift opinionated but also requiring less configuration to be functional than the other platforms that I've mentioned, and Tanzu requires Faustian contracts to be signed.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
K3s Lightweight Kubernetes and Canonical Enterprise Kubernetes
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
In my experience, Red Hat OpenShift is Much much easier to provision
Features
IBM Cloud Managed IstioRed Hat OpenShift
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cloud Managed Istio
8.0
Ratings
3% above category average
Red Hat OpenShift
8.4
Ratings
8% above category average
Ease of building user interfaces6.90 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Scalability7.90 Ratings9.30 Ratings
Platform management overhead7.80 Ratings8.20 Ratings
Workflow engine capability8.00 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Platform access control8.70 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Services-enabled integration8.60 Ratings8.40 Ratings
Development environment creation8.00 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Development environment replication8.00 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification8.00 Ratings7.90 Ratings
Issue recovery8.90 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes7.20 Ratings8.40 Ratings
Best Alternatives
IBM Cloud Managed IstioRed Hat OpenShift
Small Businesses
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.2 out of 10
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.1 out of 10
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.6 out of 10
Enterprises
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.1 out of 10
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
IBM Cloud Managed IstioRed Hat OpenShift
Likelihood to Recommend
8.7
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.2
(0 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
8.5
(0 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
5.5
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
8.9
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
6.4
(0 ratings)
6.9
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM Cloud Managed IstioRed Hat OpenShift
Likelihood to Recommend
It is a perfect application when you have multiple users and/or developers and you want to create rules and standards for access and the ability to change access levels. The reporting of usage is good, but adding more granularity into the metrics that have been used to measure are not specific enough. They provide detail but drilling into the detail would be more appropriate i.e. access to the baseline data.
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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.
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Pros
  • Debug issues
  • Monitoring
  • allows many services form many different sources
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  • One of the big advantages of Red Hat OpenShift is, especially over Kubernetes itself, is that it provides a lot of built-in operators for doing a lot of different things right out of the box that you don't have to worry about trying to configure. So one of the big ones is, I mean, right in your face is that user interface and being able to work with it inside of a browser. And I think that works very, very well.
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Cons
  • Still missing functionalities for a full usage as traffic director.
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  • I would say that's the logging part because Red Hat OpenShift write tons of locks and if most time in the finance industry, we cannot use the built in logging infrastructure for compliance reasons. And we have to forward the logs out of the system and this is, it's too much, which we forward from one cluster. Most time we'll build up multi clusters, so we speak about 10 or more clusters. And if you send log files from 10 or more clusters, the logging systems are not prepared to take that much load. And then really often you have license problems with the logging system, so that's not really, really fun. So logging could be improved.
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
Going to stay with this platform for the unforeseeable future. It matches our Target Architecture 2030 strategy internally to adopt more modularized platforms with Open Source on the back-end so that if needed containerized workloads can move to a different platform. With open-source based application telemetry collection being utilized on the back-end, integrating our already existing oTeL observability based platform makes it easier for our apps to be monitored
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Usability
No answers on this topic
As I said before, the obserability is one of the weakest point of OpenShift and that has a lot to do with usability. The Kibana console is not fully integrated with OpenShift console and you have to switch from tab to tab to use it. Same with Prometheus, Jaeger and Grafan, it's a "simple" integration but if you want to do complex queries or dashboards you have to go to the specific console
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Reliability and Availability
No answers on this topic
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.
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Performance
No answers on this topic
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.
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Support Rating
Training and usage support available
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Their customer support team is good and quick to respond. On a couple of occassions, they have helped us in solving some issues which we were finding a tad difficult to comprehend. On a rare occasion, the response was a bit slow but maybe it was because of the festival season. Overall a good experience on this front.
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In-Person Training
No answers on this topic
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.
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Online Training
No answers on this topic
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.
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Alternatives Considered
1) One-stop solution for all the complex network connectivity managed by [IBM Cloud Managed Istio]. 2) Nice dashboard to understand the flow. 3) Easy to troubleshoot the service if any one of the APIs is not responding. 4) We can integrate it with Azure Kubernetes service and other cloud provider Kubernetes services. 5) Monitoring the health of the pods can be easily configured and alerts can be triggered very accurately with this tool.
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We utilized the Thycotic Secret Service to manage all our application secrets, resulting in seamless integration with our applications. We developed all the applications using Red Hat Fuse (currently migrated to Quarkus). We used the built-in Kali Linux support of OpenShift to manage and configure the services and API. Additionally, the Red Hat Developer Studio facilitates faster development.
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Scalability
No answers on this topic
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
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Return on Investment
  • Management burden is reduced resulting in positive ROI.
  • Application is being seamlessly instrumented with good impact on business.
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  • When you talk about ROIs, I don't have any negative impacts I wanted to call out here. There is no negative impacts. In fact, it's all positive impacts what we set as our milestones towards achieving our goals, towards achieving our greater vision. Red Hat OpenShift has got a big role in it and it is certainly helping us.
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ScreenShots