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

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    IBM Cloud Private

    Score9.6 out of 10
    N/AIBM Cloud Private is a Kubernetes-based container platform allowing users to build cloud-native applications on their own infrastructure. In addition, it offers common services for self-service deployment, monitoring, logging and security, as well as middleware, data and analytics.N/A

    IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service

    Score8 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

    Score9.1 out of 10
    N/AOpenShift 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 PrivateIBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceRed Hat OpenShift
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    IBM Cloud PrivateIBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceRed Hat OpenShift
    Free Trial
    NoNoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYesYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoYesNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptionalNo setup fee
    Additional Details
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    IBM Cloud PrivateIBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceRed Hat OpenShift
    Considered Multiple Products
    IBM
    No answer on this topic
    IBM
    Chose IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
    OpenShift is AMAZING and the integration with IBM cloud is unique. OpenShift is more powerful than IBM Kubernetes for production workloads.
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
    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
    Incentivized
    Chose IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
    IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service is far more distributed around the world. Also it has lower costs.
    Incentivized
    Chose IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
    Just started using K8s service, haven't evaluated other products yet.
    Incentivized
    Chose IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
    IBM Cloud has a lot of benefits for deploying containerized applications and compared with other cloud products IBM is cheaper.
    Incentivized
    Chose IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
    Due to the features of IBM Cloud we get benefits of deploying Docker containers using the Kubernetes Cluster.
    Incentivized
    Red Hat
    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.
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    No answers on this topic
    96%
    Would buy again
    27 Answers
    97%
    Would buy again
    315 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    25 Answers
    96%
    Delivers good value for the price
    268 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    28 Answers
    99%
    Happy with the feature set
    322 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    19 Answers
    97%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    218 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    26 Answers
    90%
    Implementation went as expected
    255 Answers
    Features
    IBM Cloud PrivateIBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceRed Hat OpenShift
    Platform-as-a-Service
    Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of IBM Cloud Private and IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service and Red Hat OpenShift
    Feature
    IBM Cloud Private
    9.7
    5 Ratings
    23% above category average
    IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
    -
    Ratings
    Red Hat OpenShift
    8.4
    324 Ratings
    8% above category average
    Ease of building user interfaces10.03 Ratings00 Ratings8.6275 Ratings
    Scalability10.05 Ratings00 Ratings9.3309 Ratings
    Platform management overhead10.04 Ratings00 Ratings8.3290 Ratings
    Workflow engine capability10.04 Ratings00 Ratings8.5262 Ratings
    Platform access control9.04 Ratings00 Ratings8.3291 Ratings
    Services-enabled integration9.04 Ratings00 Ratings8.5273 Ratings
    Development environment creation10.04 Ratings00 Ratings8.6283 Ratings
    Development environment replication10.04 Ratings00 Ratings8.3270 Ratings
    Issue monitoring and notification9.04 Ratings00 Ratings7.9284 Ratings
    Issue recovery10.03 Ratings00 Ratings8.1279 Ratings
    Upgrades and platform fixes10.03 Ratings00 Ratings8.5285 Ratings
    Container Management
    Comparison of Container Management features of IBM Cloud Private and IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service and Red Hat OpenShift
    Feature
    IBM Cloud Private
    -
    Ratings
    IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
    8.1
    20 Ratings
    1% below category average
    Red Hat OpenShift
    -
    Ratings
    Security and Isolation00 Ratings8.120 Ratings00 Ratings
    Container Orchestration00 Ratings8.520 Ratings00 Ratings
    Cluster Management00 Ratings7.820 Ratings00 Ratings
    Storage Management00 Ratings8.020 Ratings00 Ratings
    Resource Allocation and Optimization00 Ratings8.020 Ratings00 Ratings
    Discovery Tools00 Ratings7.819 Ratings00 Ratings
    Update Rollouts and Rollbacks00 Ratings7.720 Ratings00 Ratings
    Self-Healing and Recovery00 Ratings8.418 Ratings00 Ratings
    Analytics, Monitoring, and Logging00 Ratings8.220 Ratings00 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    IBM Cloud PrivateIBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceRed Hat OpenShift
    Small Businesses
    IBM Cloud Foundry
    Score8.5 out of 10
    Mirantis Kubernetes Engine
    Score8 out of 10
    IBM Cloud Foundry
    Score8.5 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    AWS Elastic Beanstalk
    Score8.6 out of 10
    Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
    Score8.6 out of 10
    IBM Cloud Private
    Score9.6 out of 10
    Enterprises
    AWS Elastic Beanstalk
    Score8.6 out of 10
    SUSE Rancher
    Score9.4 out of 10
    AWS Elastic Beanstalk
    Score8.6 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    IBM Cloud PrivateIBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceRed Hat OpenShift
    Likelihood to Recommend
    10.0
    (5 ratings)
    8.0
    (86 ratings)
    9.1
    (339 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.9
    (16 ratings)
    9.3
    (26 ratings)
    Usability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.7
    (16 ratings)
    8.5
    (10 ratings)
    Availability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    5.5
    (1 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    9.0
    (125 ratings)
    Support Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.7
    (4 ratings)
    7.0
    (9 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)
    7.0
    (3 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 PrivateIBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceRed Hat OpenShift
    Likelihood to Recommend
    IBM
    IBM Cloud Private is an ideal platform for companies to accelerate their business growth. It helps in reducing the cost of IT and operations while delivering a great customer experience. With IBM Cloud Private, you can gain agility and security with a flexible hybrid model that fits your needs. It's highly recommended to my colleagues from me.
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    IBM
    • Capacity On Demand to scale up and down environments
    • SaaS model allows our team to have less involvement in managing or controlling the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, storage, or even individual application capabilities.
    • SaaS model allows our team to worry less about upgrades, fix packs, environment support etc.
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    IBM
    • Bluemix/IBM Cloud UI can be better
    • Changing Brand name from Bluemix to IBM Cloud, as we are habituated to Bluemix more
    Incentivized
    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
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Red Hat
    This is the current strategy for the company, most of the products in the organisation are aligning to Openshift and various use cases it support. Also lot of applications are being developed for AI use case, openshift.AI provides opportunity to host and leverage the AI capabilities for these applications
    Incentivized
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    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.
    Incentivized
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    Red Hat
    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
    Incentivized
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    Reliability and Availability
    IBM
    No answers on this topic
    IBM
    IBM's cloud is almost infallible.
    Incentivized
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    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.
    Incentivized
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    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
    Incentivized
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    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.
    Incentivized
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    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)
    Incentivized
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    Red Hat
    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.
    Incentivized
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    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.
    Incentivized
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    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.
    Incentivized
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    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.
    Incentivized
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    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.
    Incentivized
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    Red Hat
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    IBM
    With VMware cloud, each VMware Cloud customer must have an SDDC account(VMC) as well as a general AWS account. The two accounts must be linked for the service to work which is a tiresome thing to do for some clients but with IBM Cloud Private all these issues are solved.
    Incentivized
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    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].
    Incentivized
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    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.
    Incentivized
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    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.
    Incentivized
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    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
    Incentivized
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    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
    Incentivized
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    Return on Investment
    IBM
    • IBM Cloud has helped us start using the cloud and migrating old services to the cloud.
    Incentivized
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    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.
    Incentivized
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    Red Hat
    • That is a complicated question and one that's not easy for me to answer. There's a lot of factors that go into all of the stuff that we just don't have an easy way of measuring. And we realize that while we're implementing Red Hat OpenShift, we've tried to start measuring some of that stuff, but we don't have a baseline to go on. So it's hard to say. What I can tell you is general experience with the platform has been extremely positive from the development aspect. Teams have been very, very happy with the speed at which they're able to do stuff. They've been happy with that. The way it works in one environment is exactly the way it works in the next environment because we don't have configuration drift, that type of thing, and has had very positive impacts. But we didn't have a baseline to start with. So I can't talk about getting there faster or anything like that.
    Incentivized
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