Red Hat OpenShift vs. SUSE Rancher

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
SUSE Rancher
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Developed by Rancher Labs and now from SUSE, Rancher is open-source software that enables organizations to deploy and manage Kubernetes at scale, on any infrastructure across the data center, cloud, branch offices, and the network edge. Rancher centrally manages Kubernetes clusters across the organization in order to ensure security and accelerate transformation. Rancher is also available hosted. Hosted Rancher is a fully managed Rancher control plane - presented as the fastest, most cost…
$7,594.99
per year up to 500 nodes
Pricing
Red Hat OpenShiftSUSE Rancher
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Subscription license
7,594.99
per year up to 500 nodes
Standard Subscription
11,234.99
per year 10 nodes
Priority Subscription
30,514.99
per year 10 nodes
Management Server Priority Subscription
41,830.99
per year 1 instance
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Red Hat OpenShiftSUSE Rancher
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 OpenShiftSUSE Rancher
Considered Both Products
Red Hat OpenShift
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
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 …
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
It's a fairly different experience compared to the other environments due to the additional security
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
We choose Red Hat OpenShift because of the core Open Source values behind Red Hat and the ability for a seasoned company to support the product.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Better support, better UI, and Operators make things easier.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
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. …
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift is a more complete and integrated platform, with lots of out of the box components that the other platforms don't have, and customers need to stack lots of other software in order to have monitoring, cost management, log management, user policies governance, …
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Kubernetes is powerful, but managing it yourself takes time. Red Hat OpenShift offers a user-friendly interface, built-in developer tools, and security features, all on top of Kubernetes. It simplifies management and gets you developing faster with all best practices and …
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
Rancher has an easier install, but less responsive controls.
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.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
We are a Red Hat shop, so it does help to keep the environment consistent and the relationship we have with Red Hat and their support.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift combines Kubernetes with additional features, streamlining management by avoiding the need to handle separate services.Enterprise. Users appreciate the blend of enterprise-grade support and community collaboration.
Efficiency wise Some users find that Red …
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Openshift is less complex as far as implementation and deployment. Also, better support with RedHat.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
OpenShift is the clear winner. It contains all components necessary to deliver a truly Enterprise ready K8s solution and developer experience.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift's differentiator is the Infrastructure Management (CoreOS) that brings a high level of stability of the platform.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Openshift obviously is for high-importance workloads; we're using rancher for more tier 2 and 3 workloads.
SUSE Rancher
Chose SUSE Rancher
SUSE Rancher has a great GUI, and seems to be a little bit mor open than the competitors.
Features
Red Hat OpenShiftSUSE Rancher
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Red Hat OpenShift
8.1
278 Ratings
4% above category average
SUSE Rancher
-
Ratings
Ease of building user interfaces8.1240 Ratings00 Ratings
Scalability9.0266 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform management overhead7.7248 Ratings00 Ratings
Workflow engine capability7.7226 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform access control8.3250 Ratings00 Ratings
Services-enabled integration8.1235 Ratings00 Ratings
Development environment creation8.4243 Ratings00 Ratings
Development environment replication8.4230 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification7.8243 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue recovery7.5240 Ratings00 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes8.2243 Ratings00 Ratings
Container Management
Comparison of Container Management features of Product A and Product B
Red Hat OpenShift
-
Ratings
SUSE Rancher
7.6
7 Ratings
6% below category average
Security and Isolation00 Ratings8.06 Ratings
Container Orchestration00 Ratings8.77 Ratings
Cluster Management00 Ratings7.57 Ratings
Storage Management00 Ratings6.86 Ratings
Resource Allocation and Optimization00 Ratings7.66 Ratings
Discovery Tools00 Ratings6.66 Ratings
Update Rollouts and Rollbacks00 Ratings7.27 Ratings
Self-Healing and Recovery00 Ratings7.96 Ratings
Analytics, Monitoring, and Logging00 Ratings8.07 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Red Hat OpenShiftSUSE Rancher
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 OpenShiftSUSE Rancher
Likelihood to Recommend
9.2
(270 ratings)
8.6
(17 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.8
(27 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
8.3
(13 ratings)
8.0
(3 ratings)
Availability
5.5
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.7
(131 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
6.8
(10 ratings)
6.8
(2 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)
4.5
(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 OpenShiftSUSE Rancher
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
SUSE
SUSE Rancher as a management tool becomes useful on a larger scale. Small deployments not so much. If someone also requires Kubernetes capacity or storage, Rancher is an excellent choice. Also, without Kubernetes' skills, it is unlikely that Rancher deployment is going to be a success. Then again if someone else is managing your Kubernetes capacity, setting up the software's capacity will yield greater control. Rancher is not a very integrated solution similar to others in the market.
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
SUSE
  • Public and private cloud infrastructure providers based on K8s CAPI
  • REST API that can be used to integrate company services with Rancher
  • GUI that is easy to learn and use in daily operations
  • Builtin GitOps automation solution based on Fleet project
  • It is fully open source
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
SUSE
  • No possibility to snapshot Projects. You can snapshot and restore the whole Kubernetes cluster, but not a Project or Namespace. For this, you have to use external tools.
  • You cannot detach the Rancher-created Kubernetes clusters from Rancher management.
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
Read full review
SUSE
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
SUSE
Overall it deserves an 8 out of 10. The platform is very easy to use as long as the UI is stable. We have had a few buggy versions in the past. However the CLI is excellent and the platform is simple to manage and maintain. It is easy to deploy and offer for company wide use which increases utilization and ROI.
Read full review
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
SUSE
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.
Read full review
SUSE
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
Read full review
SUSE
The documentation is quite complete and there is a very active community that is willing to collaborate and answer questions for those who are just starting out.
Read full review
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
SUSE
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.
Read full review
SUSE
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Red Hat
The learning curve is quite high but worth it.
Read full review
SUSE
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
SUSE
We started using SUSE Rancher in the early days and spent a large amount of time getting to know and love it. This was before the days of some of the likes of Amazon Web Services who may now provide a cheaper but less feature-rich alternative to SUSE Rancher, however we have yet to explore this.
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.
Read full review
SUSE
The investment for small environments is quite significant. There has to be a compelling case to enhance the areas where SUSE Rancher brings in value to make such a financial leap. There is also a free version to test the value propositions, which will help support the user's buying decisions. More clusters, more volume, more tasks and more complexity in the environment equals more value that Rancher can provide.
Read full review
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
Read full review
SUSE
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
SUSE
  • Shortens "Time-to-Market" factor for new business applications or implementing new functionalities. From 1 to 50 microservices-based business applications in 6 years.
  • 24/7 availability, generates more money. There are many infrastructure components that are regularly powered-off for maintenance or upgrade, bur we rarely are turning off our downstream Kubernetes clusters where our business applications lives.
  • Single Point of Contact with platform maintenance and development Team, eases implementation of new business applications
Read full review
ScreenShots