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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service

    Score7.4 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

    Score9.3 out of 10
    N/AOpenShift 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
    Chose IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
    OpenShift is AMAZING and the integration with IBM cloud is unique. OpenShift is more powerful than IBM Kubernetes for production workloads.
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
    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
    Incentivized
    Chose IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
    IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service is far more distributed around the world. Also it has lower costs.
    Incentivized
    Chose IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
    Just started using K8s service, haven't evaluated other products yet.
    Incentivized
    Red Hat
    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.
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    96%
    Would buy again
    22 Answers
    97%
    Would buy again
    261 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    20 Answers
    96%
    Delivers good value for the price
    217 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    23 Answers
    99%
    Happy with the feature set
    266 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    15 Answers
    96%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    174 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    21 Answers
    91%
    Implementation went as expected
    211 Answers
    Features
    IBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceRed Hat OpenShift
    Container Management
    Comparison of Container Management features of IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service and Red Hat OpenShift
    Feature
    IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
    7.5
    15 Ratings
    3% below category average
    Red Hat OpenShift
    -
    Ratings
    Security and Isolation7.315 Ratings00 Ratings
    Container Orchestration8.115 Ratings00 Ratings
    Cluster Management6.415 Ratings00 Ratings
    Storage Management7.915 Ratings00 Ratings
    Resource Allocation and Optimization7.915 Ratings00 Ratings
    Discovery Tools7.115 Ratings00 Ratings
    Update Rollouts and Rollbacks7.915 Ratings00 Ratings
    Self-Healing and Recovery7.314 Ratings00 Ratings
    Analytics, Monitoring, and Logging7.215 Ratings00 Ratings
    Platform-as-a-Service
    Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service and Red Hat OpenShift
    Feature
    IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
    -
    Ratings
    Red Hat OpenShift
    8.2
    192 Ratings
    3% above category average
    Ease of building user interfaces00 Ratings8.4164 Ratings
    Scalability00 Ratings9.2182 Ratings
    Platform management overhead00 Ratings7.8168 Ratings
    Workflow engine capability00 Ratings7.9151 Ratings
    Platform access control00 Ratings8.3170 Ratings
    Services-enabled integration00 Ratings8.3157 Ratings
    Development environment creation00 Ratings8.5166 Ratings
    Development environment replication00 Ratings8.4159 Ratings
    Issue monitoring and notification00 Ratings7.8168 Ratings
    Issue recovery00 Ratings7.5165 Ratings
    Upgrades and platform fixes00 Ratings8.3169 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    IBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceRed Hat OpenShift
    Small Businesses
    Mirantis Kubernetes Engine
    Score9.4 out of 10
    IBM Cloud Foundry
    Score6 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
    Score8.5 out of 10
    IBM Cloud Private
    Score9.6 out of 10
    Enterprises
    SUSE Rancher
    Score8 out of 10
    AWS Elastic Beanstalk
    Score7.3 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    IBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceRed Hat OpenShift
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.0
    (80 ratings)
    9.3
    (206 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.9
    (16 ratings)
    8.8
    (23 ratings)
    Usability
    8.7
    (16 ratings)
    7.6
    (8 ratings)
    Availability
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    5.5
    (1 ratings)
    Performance
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    8.7
    (128 ratings)
    Support Rating
    7.7
    (4 ratings)
    5.3
    (8 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    Online Training
    8.7
    (15 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    7.6
    (3 ratings)
    8.6
    (2 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.
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    IBM
    IBM's cloud is almost infallible.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Performance
    IBM
    IBM's cloud has a site in my conuntry (MEXICO) so the network latency was almost 0
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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)
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Incentivized
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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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Red Hat
    The learning curve is quite high but worth it.
    Incentivized
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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].
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
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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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
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