NGINX vs. Red Hat OpenShift

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
NGINX
Score 9.3 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
NGINX, a business unit of F5 Networks, powers over 65% of the world's busiest websites and web applications. NGINX started out as an open source web server and reverse proxy, built to be faster and more efficient than Apache. Over the years, NGINX has built a suite of infrastructure software products o tackle some of the biggest challenges in managing high-transaction applications. NGINX offers a suite of products to form the core of what organizations need to create…N/A
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 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
NGINXRed Hat OpenShift
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
NGINXRed Hat OpenShift
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
NGINXRed Hat OpenShift
Considered Both Products
NGINX
Chose NGINX
Nginx's cache mechanism is better than Apache and HAProxy. Also Nginx is very light weight and works for multiple sites with much less work. i.e. As front end proxy server configuration is very easy as compared to other applications. Apache sometimes crashes and is not able to …
Red Hat OpenShift

No answer on this topic

Features
NGINXRed Hat OpenShift
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
NGINX
7.9
23 Ratings
2% below category average
Red Hat OpenShift
-
Ratings
IDE support7.111 Ratings00 Ratings
Security management7.919 Ratings00 Ratings
Administration and management7.119 Ratings00 Ratings
Application server performance8.019 Ratings00 Ratings
Installation9.920 Ratings00 Ratings
Open-source standards compliance7.117 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
NGINX
-
Ratings
Red Hat OpenShift
8.2
199 Ratings
2% above category average
Ease of building user interfaces00 Ratings8.4169 Ratings
Scalability00 Ratings9.1188 Ratings
Platform management overhead00 Ratings7.8174 Ratings
Workflow engine capability00 Ratings7.8157 Ratings
Platform access control00 Ratings8.3177 Ratings
Services-enabled integration00 Ratings8.2164 Ratings
Development environment creation00 Ratings8.4172 Ratings
Development environment replication00 Ratings8.3165 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification00 Ratings7.8175 Ratings
Issue recovery00 Ratings7.6171 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes00 Ratings8.3174 Ratings
Best Alternatives
NGINXRed Hat OpenShift
Small Businesses
Apache HTTP Server
Apache HTTP Server
Score 8.4 out of 10
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 8.1 out of 10
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.6 out of 10
Enterprises
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 8.1 out of 10
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
NGINXRed Hat OpenShift
Likelihood to Recommend
9.2
(50 ratings)
9.3
(213 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.1
(1 ratings)
8.7
(24 ratings)
Usability
8.8
(3 ratings)
8.0
(8 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
5.5
(1 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
8.6
(131 ratings)
Support Rating
8.1
(4 ratings)
5.8
(8 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.6
(2 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(3 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
NGINXRed Hat OpenShift
Likelihood to Recommend
F5
[NGINX] is very well suited for high performance. I have seen it used on servers with 1k current connections with no issues. Despite seeing it used in many environments I've never seen software developers use it over apache, express, IIS in local dev environments so it may be more difficult to setup. I've also seen it used to load balance again without issues.
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Red Hat
As a Red Hat OpenShift, it is a good container platform orchestration tool as it has Kubernetes built in. Where recommended is the UI, which is experiencing minor issues, but if they were improved, that would be great, like drop-down menus. The operators are good, but should separate from the container image and move on to platform images.
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Pros
F5
  • Very low memory usage. Can handle many more connections than alternatives (like Apache HTTPD) due to low overhead. (event-based architecture).
  • Great at serving static content.
  • Scales very well. Easy to host multiple Nginx servers to promote high availability.
  • Open-Source (no cost)!
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Red Hat
  • One thing is the way how it works with the GitHubs model on an enterprise business, how the hub and spoke topology works. Hub cluster topology works the way how there is a governance model to enforce policies. The R back models, the Red Hat OpenShift virtualization that supports the cube board and developer workspace is one big feature within. So yes, these are all some features I would call out.
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Cons
F5
  • Customer support can be strangely condescending, perhaps it's a language issue?
  • I find it a little weird how the release versions used for Nginx+ aren't the same as for open source version. It can be very confusing to determine the cross-compatibility of modules, etc., because of this.
  • It seems like some (most?) modules on their own site are ancient and no longer supported, so their documentation in this area needs work.
  • It's difficult to navigate between nginx.com commercial site and customer support. They need to be integrated together.
  • I'd love to see more work done on nginx+ monitoring without requiring logging every request. I understand that many statistics can only be derived from logs, but plenty should work without that. Logging is not an option in many environments.
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Red Hat
  • So I don't know that this is a specific disadvantage for Red Hat OpenShift. It's a challenge for anything that Kubernetes face is. There's an extremely large learning curve associated with it and once you get to the point where you're comfortable with it, it's really not bad. But beating that learning curve is a challenge. I've done a couple presentations on our implementation of Red Hat OpenShift at various conferences and one of the slides I always have in there is a tweet from years ago that said, "I tried to teach somebody Kubernetes once. Now neither of us knows what it is."
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Likelihood to Renew
F5
Great value for the product
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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
F5
Front end proxy and reverse proxy of Nginx is always useful. I always prefer to Nginx in overall usability when you have application server and database or multiple application servers and single database i.e. clustered application. Nginx provides really good features and flexibility which helps the system administrator in case of troubleshooting and also from the administration perspective. Also, Nginx doesn't delay any request because of internal performance issues.
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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
F5
No answers on this topic
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
F5
No answers on this topic
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
F5
Community support is great, and they've also had a presence at conferences. Overall, there is no shortage of documentation and community support. We're currently using it to serve up some WordPress sites, and configuring NGINX for this purpose is well documented.
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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
F5
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
F5
No answers on this topic
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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Alternatives Considered
F5
We have used Traffic, Apache, Google Cloud Load Balancing and other managed cloud-based load balancers. When it comes to scale and customization nothing beats Nginx. We selected Nginx over the others because
  • we have a large number of services and we can manage a single Nginx instance for all of them
  • we have high impact services and Nginx never breaks a sweat under load
  • individual services have special considerations and Nginx lets us configure each one uniquely
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Red Hat
Some of the various other Kubernetes out there, including Rancher, is probably one of the biggest one. Rancher has a reputation for being very easy to implement. I've found that Red Hat OpenShift is just as easy to implement as Rancher. People just don't really know about it. Nutanix is another hypervisor out there competing with Red Hat OpenShift. Again, I think OpenShift virtualization but maybe isn't as old as Nutanix. I do feel it's more mature.
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
F5
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
F5
No answers on this topic
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
F5
  • Nginx has decreased the burden of web server administration and maintenance, and we are spending less time on server issues than when we were using Apache.
  • Nginx has allowed more people in our company to get involved with configuring things on the web server, so there's no longer a single point of failure ("the Apache guy").
  • Nginx has given us the ability to handle a larger number of requests without scaling up in hardware quite so quickly.
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Red Hat
  • Positive: Reduction in physical and virtual machine footprint
  • Negative: Lack of native end to end o11y has caused a great deal of focus from our enterprise monitoring folks
  • Positive: OCP has allowed developers to have a quick and easy space to experiment
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ScreenShots

NGINX Screenshots

Screenshot of Overview of the NGINX Application PlatformScreenshot of NGINX Controller - MonitoringScreenshot of NGINX Controller - Configuration