Red Hat OpenShift vs. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

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
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a Linux distribution mainly used in commercial data centers.N/A
Pricing
Red Hat OpenShiftRed Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Red Hat OpenShiftRed Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Red Hat OpenShiftRed Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
Considered Both Products
Red Hat OpenShift
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Ocp integrates good with AAP as an operator

We also used ACS and ACM
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift was the product that my team has been using since I've joined so it has been the only product in this area that I have used. With that being said, I have really no complaints and love implemented Red Hat OpenShift in my work to help be more efficient with my …
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
It definitely has additional bells and vessels like SM, UI and monitoring/logging stack
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Tanzu is great as well, but I find Red Hat OpenShift more cost friendly and more Opensource apps available.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
AAP is one of the great deployment tool , it is the most efficient way to deploy apps by creating a quick self manage playbooks.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
They are all nice products, and they all have their place. But I'm convinced that from now on, instead of instantly just creating a Kubernetes cluster, I'm going to start seeing if Red Hat OpenShift is the best answer based on the project's overall needs. It's truly made that …
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
kubernaties falls a bit short where Red Hat OpenShift gives a batter way to manage
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
It is a great compliment to the other services.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
We have only used Red Hat OpenShift.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Our developer community is using Red Hat OpenShift for years and they are familiar and comfortable with the product. Red Hat OpenShift UI makes it easier for new developers to adopt without knowing much of Kubernetes. Our platform team feels it’s easy to mange the cluster and …
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
So far Red Hat OpenShift seems to be the superior Kubernetes platform manager.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
These were both stood up for separate products. Needless to say the workloads on CDP are going to be migrated to Red Hat OpenShift in the very near future.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
OpenShift offers a complete suite of plugins and services already set and configured. Saving time to connect with authentication services, monitoring, logs and CI/CD.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
Chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
Rocky Linux. CentOS, Arch about every distribution of Linux. Stability and reliability are king and the support. If something happens or you just hit a bug, that's why you go to Red Hat.
Chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
RHEL because of more wide adoption, stability, general knowledge on the platform and less nonsensical approach to various platform functionalities
Chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
About he same but is way more mature just because it has been around much longer
Chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
I feel that Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is more user friendly than SLES. There are slight differences and I think Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has the edge over SLES.
Chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the goto Linux operating system compared to Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux when you need / want an RPM based operating system, no questions asked. Some applications only support Debian based operating systems which is disappointing, and thus Ubuntu is the …
Chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
It helps and can be used in red hat open shift vms.
Chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
Containers vs not
Chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers us the flexibility to choose our flavor of virtualization. As our forecasts are inputted, we can either use OpenStack or OpenShift to suit our needs.
Chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
Our use of RHEL has been orthogonal to our exploration of OpenShift and Kubernetes. We have experimented with using minimal footprint RHEL instances inside containers to minimize the total size of our containers.
Chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
We selected due to easy and ustomers aready adoptoed
Features
Red Hat OpenShiftRed Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Red Hat OpenShift
8.3
263 Ratings
7% above category average
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
-
Ratings
Ease of building user interfaces8.1228 Ratings00 Ratings
Scalability9.1251 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform management overhead7.9233 Ratings00 Ratings
Workflow engine capability7.9211 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform access control8.6235 Ratings00 Ratings
Services-enabled integration8.2222 Ratings00 Ratings
Development environment creation8.7228 Ratings00 Ratings
Development environment replication8.5217 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification7.8230 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue recovery7.8227 Ratings00 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes8.5230 Ratings00 Ratings
Operating System
Comparison of Operating System features of Product A and Product B
Red Hat OpenShift
-
Ratings
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
8.2
3 Ratings
3% below category average
File Management00 Ratings6.02 Ratings
Software Application Management00 Ratings9.03 Ratings
System Update Frequency00 Ratings8.33 Ratings
Operating System Security00 Ratings9.33 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Red Hat OpenShiftRed Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
Small Businesses
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.3 out of 10
Ubuntu
Ubuntu
Score 8.5 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.6 out of 10
IBM AIX
IBM AIX
Score 9.6 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.6 out of 10
IBM AIX
IBM AIX
Score 9.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Red Hat OpenShiftRed Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
Likelihood to Recommend
9.1
(253 ratings)
9.2
(187 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.9
(25 ratings)
9.1
(3 ratings)
Usability
8.5
(10 ratings)
8.7
(79 ratings)
Availability
5.5
(1 ratings)
8.2
(1 ratings)
Performance
8.6
(125 ratings)
7.3
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
6.9
(9 ratings)
8.2
(9 ratings)
In-Person Training
7.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
7.0
(3 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
8.0
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
7.3
(1 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 OpenShiftRed Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
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.
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Red Hat
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is best suited for its stability, fast reboot time, and minimal resource requirements which reduce overall cost. The patch time for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is also extremely fast which benefits application up time. For environments or applications that require many changes, for a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) support person that is not well trained and experienced in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), this can be challenging.
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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
Red Hat
  • Virtualization, like the operating system level task. I see this product is very good and it blends very well with the middleware components like all the JBoss and other things. And other than that, either you install it or a virtual machine or physical servers, it works seamlessly anywhere. And if you want to go further, like Red Hat OpenShift or those things also work very nice with it.
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Cons
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.
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Red Hat
  • In the LEAP process. The upgrading process, which I'm hearing, like I said it before, prior that I was on rail seven, eight, and nine. Trying to get all of that to rail nine and stay current. The LEAP process from seven to eight is a little bit less than desired. I've talked to some people that from once you get on eight from eight to nine to nine to 10 is a breeze. So I'm looking forward to that.
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Likelihood to Renew
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
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Red Hat
We find RHEL to be a superior OS with stable operations and long life. It is also easier to use and fix then most other OS's.
Read full review
Usability
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
Read full review
Red Hat
The Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distro is the simplest enterprise version of Red Hat that is enterprise supported and when you deploy as many VMs as we do, it is vital to have that enterprise support. On top of the enterprise support, having access to a commercially supported backbone for updates and upgrades is a huge plus.
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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.
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Red Hat
Product support and regular patches.
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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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Red Hat
As with any OS enhanced testing will need to be done prior to application integration.
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Support Rating
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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Red Hat
Red Hat support has really come a long way in the last 10 years, The general support is great, and the specialized product support teams are extremely knowledgeable about their specific products. Response time is good and you never need to escalate.
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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
Red Hat
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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Red Hat
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Red Hat
No answers on this topic
Red Hat
Don't be afraid of it, its easy to install and configure for the tasks needed.
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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
Red Hat
So we in our company have used Ubuntu as well. Sometimes we have to use that because a certain application installer requires that we use that operating system, but we really don't prefer it just because it doesn't come with the same Add-on features that make Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) really great, like Red Hat Insights or Red Hat satellite, things like that. They come package with it. So that would be the main one. I've also used things like FreeBSD, but I think that's just too old at this point to care.
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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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Red Hat
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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Red Hat
Operational ease of use backed by support
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Return on Investment
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.
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Red Hat
  • RHEL provides a good base OS and additional tool sets for various deployments.
  • We are able to use Satellite to manage hundreds of OS's behind our corporate firewall. No other OS provides the level that RHEL does.
  • It is a known good quantity. Their support for the OS is amazing.
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