IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service vs. Red Hat OpenShift

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Score 9.2 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 8.6 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 Kubernetes ServiceRed Hat OpenShift
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceRed Hat OpenShift
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
IBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceRed Hat OpenShift
Considered Both Products
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.
Red Hat OpenShift
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.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
IBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceRed Hat OpenShift
Container Management
Comparison of Container Management features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
7.5
14 Ratings
5% below category average
Red Hat OpenShift
-
Ratings
Security and Isolation7.514 Ratings00 Ratings
Container Orchestration8.214 Ratings00 Ratings
Cluster Management7.714 Ratings00 Ratings
Storage Management7.514 Ratings00 Ratings
Resource Allocation and Optimization7.414 Ratings00 Ratings
Discovery Tools6.814 Ratings00 Ratings
Update Rollouts and Rollbacks7.614 Ratings00 Ratings
Self-Healing and Recovery7.713 Ratings00 Ratings
Analytics, Monitoring, and Logging7.014 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
-
Ratings
Red Hat OpenShift
7.9
90 Ratings
4% below category average
Ease of building user interfaces00 Ratings8.274 Ratings
Scalability00 Ratings8.790 Ratings
Platform management overhead00 Ratings7.382 Ratings
Workflow engine capability00 Ratings7.573 Ratings
Platform access control00 Ratings8.484 Ratings
Services-enabled integration00 Ratings7.876 Ratings
Development environment creation00 Ratings8.082 Ratings
Development environment replication00 Ratings8.077 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification00 Ratings7.780 Ratings
Issue recovery00 Ratings7.979 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes00 Ratings7.883 Ratings
Best Alternatives
IBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceRed Hat OpenShift
Small Businesses
Portainer
Portainer
Score 9.3 out of 10
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Docker
Docker
Score 9.2 out of 10
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.5 out of 10
Enterprises
Docker
Docker
Score 9.2 out of 10
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
IBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceRed Hat OpenShift
Likelihood to Recommend
8.1
(79 ratings)
8.6
(99 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.9
(16 ratings)
8.9
(9 ratings)
Usability
8.7
(16 ratings)
8.7
(7 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(1 ratings)
5.5
(1 ratings)
Performance
9.1
(1 ratings)
8.4
(19 ratings)
Support Rating
7.7
(4 ratings)
7.3
(8 ratings)
Online Training
8.7
(15 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
7.6
(3 ratings)
8.6
(2 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
7.4
(2 ratings)
Product Scalability
1.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Professional Services
-
(0 ratings)
7.3
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceRed Hat OpenShift
Likelihood to Recommend
IBM
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service is ideal for deploying modern applications on a microservices architecture -- where easy scaling and ability to update are important. IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service also handles automated deployments and load balancing very well, particularly if you're already working in the IBM Cloud ecosystem. There are applications less suited to IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service -- such as very small applications, where managing an IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service cluster would be overkill. Also, users not familiar with container organization might find IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service to be a challenge to manage effectively.
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Red Hat
Well, in our case, because I have two use cases, one is with the operator, which obviously is super easy with OpenShift because it's just click, click start aside from the issue from the operator. But that's a different interview. And the other point is for the web portal that our portal team uses, it's very easy. Two perform a task needed for them to do their deployment, their pipelines, and their daily Java.
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Pros
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.
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Red Hat
  • Scales very well.
  • It provides you with a landing pad to modernize what you have in a phased approach so you don't have to do it all at once, right? You can take small pieces of work and implement those on OpenShift over time. It enables us to be able to implement things like GI ops configuration as a service, and infrastructure as a service using the tools that are native to OpenShift, which gives us far greater reliability and consistency as far as monitoring for any kind of drift and configuration or unauthorized changes. So it pretty much gives us a lot of visibility on things that are otherwise relatively difficult to see using the old means of doing what we do. So it provides us with a modern set of tools to accomplish all those objectives.
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Cons
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
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Red Hat
  • Network of observability, so having one single screen to see to have some network-related metrics for the pod levels. Also at the cluster itself level and more importantly is ease of use for troubleshooting when there's any timeout. This has been the single kind of issue I've been facing for my three years of experience with OpenShift and it hasn't been an easy task for such troubleshooting.
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Likelihood to Renew
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.
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Red Hat
Leverage OpenShift Online constantly at both the free and paid tiers. While AWS is convenient, it often brings more administration than I want to deal with for a quick application (i.e. Drupal or Wordpress blog). OpenShift also simplifies the DNS registration and ability to share application environments with team members
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Usability
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.
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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
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Reliability and Availability
IBM
IBM's cloud is almost infallible.
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Red Hat
No answers on this topic
Performance
IBM
IBM's cloud has a site in my conuntry (MEXICO) so the network latency was almost 0
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Red Hat
Applications deployed to OpenShift clusters stay responsive when peak load hits or when the traffic dies down - since the platform reacts by scaling out or scaling in the deployed applications elastically - achieved through' policy sense and response automation - leveraging monitoring, measuring (metrics), auto-scaling to meet SLAs, SLOs, and SLIs. This approach works for stateless or stateful business logic hosting applications. The deployed applications perform consistently, stably, and securely across many deployment platforms - public clouds, private data centers, at the edge, or on factory floors - hosted by bare metal or virtual environments.
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Support Rating
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)
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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.
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Online Training
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.
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Red Hat
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
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.
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Red Hat
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
IBM
The IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service is quite flexible platform with profitable Cloud functions performance and the data security through IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service is nice. To manage container easily and process huge amount of data at the same time, the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service is amazing ad the platform deployment is very easy after training.
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Red Hat
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-specific ones. I particularly liked the built-in security and its focus on rapid and automated deployments. Moreover, our cloud strategy isn't set in stone. OpenShift's flexibility means we could deploy on-prem, in multiple public clouds, or use a hybrid approach - something other products couldn't offer as expected.
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
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.
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Scalability
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
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Red Hat
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
IBM
  • IKS can provide around 30% savings when it comes to operational costs since Kubernetes is designed to run applications in most machines in the most efficient manner possible.
  • Managed Kubernetes can save a company time by 45% since Managed Kubernetes usually is seamlessly updated, without any interruptions with the workload. IKS fall into this benefit.
  • We heard people had saved in maintenance downtimes when it comes to Kubernetes by a factor of 10 so IKS can contribute to more flexible and distributed services with virtually no downtime.
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Red Hat
  • I'll say a lot of positive impact because when we started making this product aware to all the application domains in our business, they saw how easy to use. I mean we are giving a lot of control to the development team, how they can scale their application, how can they check the health of the application, and what action they can take if they are in any kind of failure or even meeting the business's SLA. So there are a lot of capabilities and those are really new features they can use. Those I think are a good use of OpenShift.
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