Docker vs. Red Hat OpenShift

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Docker
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Docker Enterprise was sold to Mirantis in 2019; that product is now sold as Mirantis Kubernetes Engine. But Docker now offers a 2-product suite that includes Docker Desktop, which they present as a fast way to containerize applications on a desktop; and, Docker Hub, a service for finding and sharing container images with a team and the Docker community, a repository of container images with an array of…
$0
unlimited public repositories
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.N/A
Pricing
DockerRed Hat OpenShift
Editions & Modules
Free
$0
unlimited public repositories
Pro
$5.00
per month per user
Team
$7.00
per month per user
Business
$21
per month per user
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DockerRed Hat OpenShift
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
DockerRed Hat OpenShift
Considered Both Products
Docker
Chose Docker
Our team uses Lando which is built on top of Docker. This makes using Docker even easier.
Chose Docker
It is easy to use. we can manage multiple images in docker hub. Docker desktop is for accessing images in our desktop. It is very much user friendly as compare to podman.
Chose Docker
Docker is by far the industry leader and mainstay when it comes to virtual machines, its really hard to justify using another service like Vagrant. The upcoming monetization of Docker desktop should make things interesting though.
Chose Docker
We need a solution where initially we can use an OS to trigger our pipeline to be used by terraform and then later in ansible. After doing all work it automatically get exited and we can reclaim the space of our VM. So we created a gitlab pipeline and at the initial stage we …
Chose Docker
The features and capabilities provided by Docker are incomparable and much vast in nature. Docker is much light weight and easy to onboard into the tech stack. It is also well supported by Container orchestration systems like Kubernetes which will be critical when applications …
Chose Docker
Did use containerd or LXC for brief evaluation in the past, but settled on Docker and only see Docker as the mainstay for most organizations I worked in, as the container tool of choice so far. Docker is matured, feature-rich, and reliable enough to be the main choice all …
Chose Docker
The reason why we are still using Docker right now is due to that is the best among its peers and suits our needs the best. However, the trend we foresee for the future might indicate Amazon lambda could potentially fit our needs to code enviornmentless in the near future.
Chose Docker
Podman has been used within our Red Hat environment, and although it supports deployments outside of RHEL, it's not as easy as Docker.
Chose Docker
Docker provides is effective container management and orchestration platform. It is highly suitable for Linux environments and allows the easy and quick deployment of production applications Other alternatives use replication and management of the virtual machines. Docker …
Red Hat OpenShift
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Nothing like OpenShift. Actually, this was our first one. We toyed with maybe doing raw Kubernetes, but with an enterprise company you need an enterprise product.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Comparing the 2, open source Kubernetes is quicker to setup by about 75%, less restrictive, and free of course, but it lacks the security and support of Red Hat, and deploying features is much harder compared to with operators. For buisiness purposes, OpenShift is just more …
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
It definitely has additional bells and vessels like SM, UI and monitoring/logging stack
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
To benefit from premium support.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Quay
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
had troubles with the stability of the whole cluster system. Red Hat OpenShift worked from the beginning
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
It's a fairly different experience compared to the other environments due to the additional security
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Even though Red Hat OpenShift has more overhead than many other Kubernetes flavors, we have selected Red Hat OpenShift because of it's focus on Security and because of it's excellent vendor support.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
It was microsoft hypervisor and vmware.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service (ECS)
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
scalability and ease of managing deployments
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
At agency there is no other competitor that can accomplish what we've been able to put together with a partnership with Red Hat.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift has a better security posture than EKS. I enjoy the console on Red Hat OpenShift more as well. I believe there is greater observability for 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
Ease of use and stability in one vendor support
Features
DockerRed Hat OpenShift
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Docker
-
Ratings
Red Hat OpenShift
8.2
Ratings
3% above category average
Ease of building user interfaces00 Ratings8.40 Ratings
Scalability00 Ratings9.20 Ratings
Platform management overhead00 Ratings7.80 Ratings
Workflow engine capability00 Ratings7.90 Ratings
Platform access control00 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Services-enabled integration00 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Development environment creation00 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Development environment replication00 Ratings8.40 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification00 Ratings7.80 Ratings
Issue recovery00 Ratings7.50 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes00 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Best Alternatives
DockerRed Hat OpenShift
Small Businesses
Git
Git
Score 10.0 out of 10
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Git
Git
Score 10.0 out of 10
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.6 out of 10
Enterprises
Git
Git
Score 10.0 out of 10
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
DockerRed Hat OpenShift
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(0 ratings)
9.3
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.1
(0 ratings)
8.8
(0 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(0 ratings)
7.6
(0 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(0 ratings)
5.5
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.0
(0 ratings)
8.7
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
5.3
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.6
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
DockerRed Hat OpenShift
Likelihood to Recommend
You are going to be able to find the most resources and examples using Docker whenever you are working with a container orchestration software like Kubernetes. There will always some entropy when you run in a container, a containerized application will never be as purely performant as an app running directly on the OS. However, in most scenarios this loss will be negligible to the time saved in deployment, monitoring, etc.
Read full review
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
Pros
  • Kubernetes context switching - very handy
  • Integrate well and seamless - No complicated setup and or UX
  • Ease of updating images and etc - very important
Read full review
  • 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.
Read full review
Cons
  • It will be nice to see an admin UI for configuration of images
  • Container networking can be simplified
  • Data storage/volume management can be simplified
Read full review
  • 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."
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
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
Read full review
Usability
I have been using Docker for more than 3 years and it really simplifies the modern application development and deployment. I like the ability of Docker to improve efficiency, portability and scalability for developers and operations teams. Another reason for giving this rating is because Docker integrates CI/CD pipelines very well
Read full review
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
Reliability and Availability
Haven't seen any outages, fatal/unrecoverable errors in my usage so far. Enough said.
Read full review
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
Performance
Docker Desktop. The CPU high usage is a known issue. Needs fixing. Otherwise, it is great overall. Would not use anything else still.
Read full review
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
Support Rating
No answers on this topic
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
In-Person Training
No answers on this topic
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
Online Training
No answers on this topic
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
Implementation Rating
No answers on this topic
The learning curve is quite high but worth it.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
We need a solution where initially we can use an OS to trigger our pipeline to be used by terraform and then later in ansible. After doing all work it automatically get exited and we can reclaim the space of our VM. So we created a gitlab pipeline and at the initial stage we defined a docker file which will be our base image and we performed all our activities inside that image to build infrastructure using terraform. Integration we have done in our gitlab pipeline and finally we remove the docker image so that the space can be reclaimed immediately.
Read full review
We utilized the Thycotic Secret Service to manage all our application secrets, resulting in seamless integration with our applications. We developed all the applications using Red Hat Fuse (currently migrated to Quarkus). We used the built-in Kali Linux support of OpenShift to manage and configure the services and API. Additionally, the Red Hat Developer Studio facilitates faster development.
Read full review
Scalability
It is the only tool in our toolset that has not [had] any issues so far. That is really a mark of reliability, and it's a testimony to how well the product is made, and a tool that does its job well is a tool well worth having. It is the base tool that I would say any organisation must have if they do scalable deployment.
Read full review
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
Return on Investment
  • With Docker adoption, were able to reduce 40% of the time taken to complete workspace setup
  • Provided the environment packaging / configurability capability which enabled resource sharing and interoperability across teams
  • Were able to leverage off the shelf images provided by leading product companies which increased reliability and security exponently
Read full review
  • It has allowed us to see where we need to be in the container world. I'm going to call it a net neutral impact, not negative or positive. It has given us a sense of what we are ready for and what we're not ready for. You know where you stand.
  • You don't know what you don't know, so it helps us know what we want to know.
Read full review
ScreenShots