IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service vs. Red Hat OpenShift

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Score 8.2 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 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 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.
Features
IBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceRed Hat OpenShift
Container Management
Comparison of Container Management features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
8.0
19 Ratings
1% below category average
Red Hat OpenShift
-
Ratings
Security and Isolation7.719 Ratings00 Ratings
Container Orchestration8.319 Ratings00 Ratings
Cluster Management7.819 Ratings00 Ratings
Storage Management7.819 Ratings00 Ratings
Resource Allocation and Optimization8.219 Ratings00 Ratings
Discovery Tools7.918 Ratings00 Ratings
Update Rollouts and Rollbacks8.119 Ratings00 Ratings
Self-Healing and Recovery8.317 Ratings00 Ratings
Analytics, Monitoring, and Logging8.119 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
8.2
279 Ratings
5% above category average
Ease of building user interfaces00 Ratings8.1241 Ratings
Scalability00 Ratings9.0267 Ratings
Platform management overhead00 Ratings7.8249 Ratings
Workflow engine capability00 Ratings7.8227 Ratings
Platform access control00 Ratings8.3251 Ratings
Services-enabled integration00 Ratings8.1236 Ratings
Development environment creation00 Ratings8.5244 Ratings
Development environment replication00 Ratings8.4231 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification00 Ratings7.8244 Ratings
Issue recovery00 Ratings7.6241 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes00 Ratings8.3244 Ratings
Best Alternatives
IBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceRed Hat OpenShift
Small Businesses
Portainer
Portainer
Score 9.1 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
IBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceRed Hat OpenShift
Likelihood to Recommend
7.8
(85 ratings)
9.1
(270 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.9
(16 ratings)
8.8
(27 ratings)
Usability
8.7
(16 ratings)
8.3
(13 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(1 ratings)
5.5
(1 ratings)
Performance
9.1
(1 ratings)
8.7
(131 ratings)
Support Rating
7.7
(4 ratings)
6.8
(10 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Online Training
8.7
(15 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
7.6
(3 ratings)
6.7
(4 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(3 ratings)
Product Scalability
1.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 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
IBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceRed Hat OpenShift
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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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.
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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
  • 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.
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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
  • OpenShift virtualization has a little room for improvement. I'm coming from it as a Rev customer. There's some things in that OpenShift virtualization that were in Rev that I would like to see in OpenShift virtualization. I realized that they're chasing the VMware crowd and that's fine, but from us old Rev customers, we'd like to see some things that was in Rev around via migration and things of that nature that could be in OpenShift virtualization, I hope is being planned to be put in.
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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
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
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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
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
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Reliability and Availability
IBM
IBM's cloud is almost infallible.
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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.
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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
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
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
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
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In-Person Training
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.
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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
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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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
The learning curve is quite high but worth it.
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Alternatives Considered
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].
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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.
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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
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
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.
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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.
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ScreenShots