Red Hat OpenShift vs. Podman.io

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
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
Podman
Score 9.5 out of 10
N/A
Podman is a daemonless container engine for developing, managing, and running OCI Containers on Linux Systems. Containers can either be run as root or in rootless mode. Podman is open source and free, supported and maintained by the Containers organization, with code available from GitHub.N/A
Pricing
Red Hat OpenShiftPodman.io
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Red Hat OpenShiftPodman
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Red Hat OpenShiftPodman.io
Considered Both Products
Red Hat OpenShift
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
We've done work on Docker and we've done work in Podman, which aren't really apples to apples as far as OpenShift because they're just purely containerization tools. They're not necessarily platforms. We did an evaluation on a tool, another Kubernetes-based tool, and I don't …
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
It is better from the point of view of costs, but also provides a better management and extended features.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
OpenShift can host most of them, and most come pre-packed with the OpenShift installation.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
K3S supports constrained resource environments but does not have the governance controls needed for our company Rancher RK2 is being actively developed for constrained environments where Red Hat OpenShift is too heavy.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
The biggest reason we chose Red Hat OpenShift is because of our partnership and contract agreement with them. With our needs, were able to get assistance when we need it which is imperative in our area of work.
Podman

No answer on this topic

Features
Red Hat OpenShiftPodman.io
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Red Hat OpenShift
8.2
279 Ratings
5% above category average
Podman.io
-
Ratings
Ease of building user interfaces8.1241 Ratings00 Ratings
Scalability9.0267 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform management overhead7.8249 Ratings00 Ratings
Workflow engine capability7.8227 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform access control8.3251 Ratings00 Ratings
Services-enabled integration8.1236 Ratings00 Ratings
Development environment creation8.5244 Ratings00 Ratings
Development environment replication8.4231 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification7.8244 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue recovery7.6241 Ratings00 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes8.3244 Ratings00 Ratings
Container Management
Comparison of Container Management features of Product A and Product B
Red Hat OpenShift
-
Ratings
Podman.io
10.0
1 Ratings
21% above category average
Security and Isolation00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Red Hat OpenShiftPodman.io
Small Businesses
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.3 out of 10
Portainer
Portainer
Score 9.1 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.6 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.6 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Red Hat OpenShiftPodman.io
Likelihood to Recommend
9.1
(270 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.8
(27 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.3
(13 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
5.5
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.7
(131 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
6.8
(10 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
7.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
6.7
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
8.0
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Professional Services
7.3
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Red Hat OpenShiftPodman.io
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
Read full review
Open Source
While it always depends on your use case, I believe security concerns of need for root user is a concern, so it is worth considering daemonless container service over Docker, which works just as good and has support for docker compose. Another good reason is the licensing for enterprise usage, which podman has no restrictions for. It’s also a great choice for OpenShift integration, which is seamless and works well with Rancher as well.
Read full review
Pros
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.
Read full review
Open Source
  • It’s daemonless, so somewhat more secure.
  • It works exceptionally well and is compatible with Docker compose
  • Podman Desktop actually makes individual usage also pretty easy.
  • It can be used as Docker alternative with almost no additional steps
Read full review
Cons
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.
Read full review
Open Source
  • Podman desktop is getting more stable with each version, but does need more UX friendliness as well.
  • Official support for development tools and IDEs is missing for most tools
  • It works well with Kubernetes, but I wouldn’t mind additional improvements
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
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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Open Source
No answers on this topic
Usability
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
Read full review
Open Source
No answers on this topic
Reliability and Availability
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.
Read full review
Open Source
No answers on this topic
Performance
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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Open Source
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
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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Open Source
No answers on this topic
In-Person Training
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.
Read full review
Open Source
No answers on this topic
Online Training
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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Open Source
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Red Hat
The learning curve is quite high but worth it.
Read full review
Open Source
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
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.
Read full review
Open Source
Podman is Daemonless, lightweight and doesn’t charge us for commercial usage, so it’s a relief for startups. Minikube and Rancher are a bit more complex for our use cases; so we keep things simple, fast and secure with Podman that can easily be managed with Podman Desktop and other works with our docker-compose based projects without issues.
Read full review
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
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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Open Source
No answers on this topic
Scalability
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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Open Source
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
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.
Read full review
Open Source
  • We definitely feel more secure.
  • We do not suffer from memory or cpu overuses as it uses fedora coreOS which is lightweight
  • We do not have to worry about license payments for our basic usages.
  • It’s open source so quick fixes imminent with maximum transparency.
Read full review
ScreenShots