IBM Cloud Foundry vs. IBM Cloud Functions

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
IBM Cloud Foundry
Score 6.0 out of 10
N/A
IBM Cloud Foundry is an IBM version of the open-source platform designed for building, testing, deploying, and scaling applications. Enterprises can run Cloud Foundry in a public isolated environment, while natively integrating with other IBM Cloud services, such as AI, Blockchain, and IoT.
$0.07
Per GBH
IBM Cloud Functions
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
IBM Cloud Functions is a PaaS platform based on Apache OpenWhisk. With it, developers write code (“actions”) that respond to external events. Actions are hosted, executed, and scaled on demand based on the number of events coming in. No servers or infrastructure to provision and manage.
$0
per second of execution
Pricing
IBM Cloud FoundryIBM Cloud Functions
Editions & Modules
Community Runtimes
$0.07
Per GBH
Basic Cloud Functions Rate
$0.00017
per second of execution
API Gateway Rate
Free
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM Cloud FoundryIBM Cloud Functions
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
IBM Cloud FoundryIBM Cloud Functions
Considered Both Products
IBM Cloud Foundry
Chose IBM Cloud Foundry
IBM Cloud Foundry is our first choice industry-standard platform as a service (PaaS) which has always provided us with quicker, simpler, and more consistent ways for the deployment of the cloud-native applications which in result saved us lots of time and money.
Chose IBM Cloud Foundry
IBM Cloud Foundry is easier and faster to get going and offers the same benefits we needed.
Chose IBM Cloud Foundry
Dynatrace Network Application Monitoring (NAM), formerly DCRUM, Azure Application Gateway and Azure App Service
Chose IBM Cloud Foundry
When I started with prototyping five months ago, I tried IBM Cloud Foundry and AWS, but finally I preferred IBM Cloud Foundry.

I selected IBM Cloud Foundry because IBM service CLI is quite simple to use in devops. It works with the recent versions of Python and it's not …
Chose IBM Cloud Foundry
Why I prefer IBM Cloud Foundry platform over AWS Elastic Beanstalk or Heroku Platform is the automation of development process and pushing of projects to cloud with clear step by step instructions - which is available on the documentation. I can say categorically, the terminal …
Chose IBM Cloud Foundry
IBM Cloud Foundry is easy to use and allows for fast and easy deployment of web apps.
Chose IBM Cloud Foundry
IBM Cloud Foundry provides many programming languages. It is a managed service and it allows us to use only the resouces without the managed overhead.
Chose IBM Cloud Foundry
Ease of use and all the capabilities we need are well built-in. Though we had to work around for p2p security and log draining which is not bad.
Chose IBM Cloud Foundry
Cloud Foundry has lot of benefits because platform as a service provided for the developers to implement applications based on the use cases. Different use cases required different buildpacks to run on. It has flexibility to code, push, and run flexibility. Provided ease of use …
Chose IBM Cloud Foundry
We have had to move our deployments to Kubernetes because we needed more reliability. We moved to Google because IBM rates and billing was so backward and expensive. Our client was also very angry at all the outages, lost revenue, production down time and inordinately expensive …
Chose IBM Cloud Foundry
IBM Cloud Foundry is among the services provided by our cloud provider. This is why we choose to go with Cloud Foundry.
Chose IBM Cloud Foundry
While we are still looking at kubernetes and other services, we will continue to use Cloud Foundry because of the advantages it provides. The support from IBM is good and take a lot of work that our developers and ops had to do away.
Chose IBM Cloud Foundry
AWS and Digital Ocean; Access to a larger pool of services; whatever your business needs, IBM provides it.
Chose IBM Cloud Foundry
It is a cloud-based solution and for all my customers that want to migrate to cloud, this is the solution that we are proposing to customers, as it provides a lot of benefits over private cloud. Scalability and resiliency are not a major challenge and it can be used with other …
Chose IBM Cloud Foundry
CF is what we initially went with to establish a development pipeline and start our cloud journey, now we are expanding this and although we are now pulling in many other tools and functions around CF, it is not being replaced. It stands out as having a key place working ‘with’ …
Chose IBM Cloud Foundry
IBM Cloud Foundry (CF) is simpler and there is a service model that fits most of our internal services. We are going to Loopback for API and Node.js and we have an easy path to go with Bluemix. It's a very easy way to start if you are moving to the cloud and mainly if you are …
Chose IBM Cloud Foundry
We chose to go with more bare metal options since Bluemix didn't really offer these at the time. It was simpler to get up and running with the bare metal service, and we felt that any problems we ran into would be a result of our own incompetence rather than problems with the …
Chose IBM Cloud Foundry
I have use EC2 and Microsoft's Azure. To me, both Azure and Bluemix were fantastic, but they each had some pros and cons. Azure had more services to offer, but their biggest flaw was in their inability to integrate and work with external platforms, APIs, Programs, etc.. Like …
Chose IBM Cloud Foundry
While IBM works well is when being used by large organizations, these other vendors work well with smaller organizations. We ended up being willing to pay more for Heroku, as they have such an easy-to-use service, and our deployments worked as expected every time.
Chose IBM Cloud Foundry
Used AWS and Azure.
AWS has more features and a far superior interface responsivesness. It's actually usable! That being said default configurations and menus in AWS are more cryptic then necessary.
Azure seems to be the gold standard for pre-configuration and ease of use. …
Chose IBM Cloud Foundry
Bluemix had a much easier route to get into the artificial intelligence side of things with Watson skills. It also seemed a lot more straightforward to use things like the Weather Channel data, sentiment analysis... etc., than the others. I'd also had a bad experience with AWS …
Chose IBM Cloud Foundry
Not even close--as noted in previous answers, we will likely use the competition before even considering IBM Bluemix.
Chose IBM Cloud Foundry
We have used Red Hat which does not do business in Australia with people like us. They were a promising service (PaaS) while we were able to use the free version but as soon as we needed access to serious mobile-first services we had to pay and their policy meant we had to …
Chose IBM Cloud Foundry
I like when the provider offers cloud deployment via standard orchestration mechanisms (like Docker, Kubernetes, DCOS) This is currently well covered by Azure. Amazon also has good flexibility (supports Kubernetes, DCOS). It's good that Bluemix added support for Docker and …
IBM Cloud Functions
Chose IBM Cloud Functions
AWS Lambda is 100 times more robust than IBM cloud functions. They essentially do the same thing, but AWS works. AWS is stable. we have had epic failures with cloud functions. Support was horrible. We literally had an open ticket with them for 2 months and it literally went …
Chose IBM Cloud Functions
IBM Cloud Functions are native to IBM Cloud and are easy to integrate into other IBM Cloud applications.
Chose IBM Cloud Functions
  • ICF is a lightweight service and does not require runtime configurations
  • Scalable on demand and hence there is no need to pay for runtime costs
Chose IBM Cloud Functions
AWS Lambda might be more suited for larger scaled companies looking to consistently access similar features at a higher volume/frequency, but for smaller teams with a limited budget, IBM's Cloud Functions are a competitive choice
Features
IBM Cloud FoundryIBM Cloud Functions
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cloud Foundry
7.6
Ratings
5% below category average
IBM Cloud Functions
-
Ratings
Ease of building user interfaces7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Scalability8.50 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform management overhead8.50 Ratings00 Ratings
Workflow engine capability8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform access control10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Services-enabled integration7.50 Ratings00 Ratings
Development environment creation7.70 Ratings00 Ratings
Development environment replication6.40 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification4.70 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue recovery7.50 Ratings00 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes7.50 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
IBM Cloud FoundryIBM Cloud Functions
Small Businesses
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.6 out of 10
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises
Red Hat OpenShift
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Score 9.3 out of 10
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Score 9.3 out of 10
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User Ratings
IBM Cloud FoundryIBM Cloud Functions
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(0 ratings)
3.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM Cloud FoundryIBM Cloud Functions
Likelihood to Recommend
IBM Cloud Foundry is a solid service from the IBM Cloud platform. It is easy to learn, and does not usually require you to make drastic changes to your existing applications. It is especially good for new applications that are cloud native, or micro-services, that can be easily updated and deployed. With its blue/green deployment, you can achieve 0 downtime for your customers.
Read full review
IBM Cloud Functions [is] not the worse product on the IBM cloud. I decided to write this review as I thought it would be balanced. I would still use functions to set up a serverless architecture where execution time is pretty quick and the code is relatively simple. I wouldn't use IBM Cloud Functions for async calls obviously, as costs could be higher. The functions documentation is lacking in terms of CI/CD, and there are unexplainable errors occurring - like the network connection that I mentioned. So I wouldn't just rely on IBM Cloud Functions too much for the entire system, but make sure it's diversified.
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Pros
  • Intuitive user interface makes it easy for anyone to use, regardless of their professional background.
  • A lot of the services integrate well with external platforms, APIs, and programs, not just IBM services. A lot of the competitors in this space lack this ability.
  • Maybe it is just our contract in particular, but support and help is always made available.
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  • Validate raw data files - check the validity of raw data input to the system, to make sure we analyze only the relevant data. The raw data stream rate is hard to be predicted, since it depends on real world activities.
  • Analyze raw data - analyzing of valid raw data, described above.
  • Insert data to LOCAL data base.
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Cons
  • Sometimes the API Connect GUIs don't cleanly disengage after attaching models or updating schema and it is hard to know what has been written successfully and which (if any) models or tables were missed. I shouldn't have to manually check through a list of 377 models to find the ones in and out of a list on either models, folder or database tables. Printing a summary even in logs which did a "diff" sort of thing between 'task-set' and 'task-completed' (referring to attaching models or updating schema as tasks here as 'tasks').
  • Provide access to Postgres Database in Sydney datacentre for Australia.
  • Clearer documentation around setting up a secure (referring to SSL and certificate setup here) server on eg, chubby1.au-sydney.mybluemix.net.
  • Allow a ramp in pricing onto the Blockchains. We will not be able to afford it until quite a few years into production, even if we launch successfully.
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  • Billing can be a hassle, not the most responsive customer service/support team
  • Handles & executes most functionalities, but other platforms offer more scalability if you're seeking consistent and stable growth
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Alternatives Considered
IBM Cloud Foundry is our first choice industry-standard platform as a service (PaaS) which has always provided us with quicker, simpler, and more consistent ways for the deployment of the cloud-native applications which in result saved us lots of time and money.
Read full review
AWS Lambda is 100 times more robust than IBM cloud functions. They essentially do the same thing, but AWS works. AWS is stable. we have had epic failures with cloud functions. Support was horrible. We literally had an open ticket with them for 2 months and it literally went nowhere. They said it could do 100 calls a minute. We proved over and over that we couldn't get above 20 without getting failures. They had NO explanation whatsoever. The ticket got closed because we were tired of asking them questions and getting no understandable or usable response.
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Return on Investment
  • This was the founding solution used to allow us to move in to and test out a cloud pipeline. This is what paved the way for a full production cloud solution to be possible.
  • Having Cloud Foundry at the base of our development and sandpit environment, segregated away from our standard on premise solution has moved away red tape and ensured an agile way forward.
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  • Definitely has positive impact due to the pay only when used feature
  • Lightweight cloud services help with scaling without high investment in infrastructure
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ScreenShots