StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Platform as a Service
  4. Platform As A Service
  5. Rancher vs Red Hat OpenShift

Rancher vs Red Hat OpenShift

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Stacks1.6K
Followers1.4K
Votes517
GitHub Stars885
Forks510
Rancher
Rancher
Stacks952
Followers1.5K
Votes644

Rancher vs Red Hat OpenShift: What are the differences?

Introduction

Rancher and Red Hat OpenShift are both popular container management platforms. While they share some similarities, there are key differences that set them apart.

  1. Architecture: Rancher follows a lightweight and modular architecture design, allowing it to work seamlessly with different container runtimes, such as Docker and Kubernetes. On the other hand, Red Hat OpenShift is built on top of Kubernetes, offering a more integrated and opinionated platform for containerized applications.

  2. Ease of Use: Rancher provides a user-friendly web-based GUI for managing and orchestrating containers. It offers a simplified user experience with intuitive workflows and visualizations. In contrast, Red Hat OpenShift embraces a more developer-centric approach, focusing on CLI tools and command-driven interactions for greater flexibility and control.

  3. Platform Maturity: Rancher has been in the market for a longer period of time and has gained a reputation for stability and reliability. Its users appreciate its robustness and battle-tested features. Red Hat OpenShift, being backed by a renowned enterprise software company, brings enterprise-grade support and additional security features to the table.

  4. Commercial Support: Rancher offers commercial support plans, but it is primarily an open-source platform with a vibrant community. Red Hat OpenShift, on the other hand, is a commercial product that includes enterprise support from Red Hat. This support includes technical assistance, security updates, and access to training resources.

  5. Scalability and Extensibility: Rancher is known for its scalability, allowing users to manage large-scale container deployments across multiple clusters and environments. It also offers a wide range of built-in integrations and plugins to extend its functionality. Red Hat OpenShift focuses on providing a comprehensive platform for building, deploying, and managing applications in a multi-cloud environment, with additional ecosystem tools and services.

  6. Licensing: Rancher is an open-source project licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. This means users can freely modify and distribute the software. Red Hat OpenShift, however, is based on the Kubernetes open-source project but includes additional proprietary components. It follows a subscription-based licensing model.

In summary, Rancher offers a lightweight, modular, and user-friendly container management platform with strong community support. Red Hat OpenShift, backed by a renowned enterprise software company, provides a more integrated and mature platform with enterprise-grade support and additional security features for building, deploying, and managing containerized applications in a multi-cloud environment.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Detailed Comparison

Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Rancher
Rancher

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.

Rancher is an open source container management platform that includes full distributions of Kubernetes, Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm, and makes it simple to operate container clusters on any cloud or infrastructure platform.

Built-in support for Node.js, Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, and Java (the standard in today's Enterprise);OpenShift is extensible with a customizable cartridge functionality that allows developers to add any other language they wish. We've seen everything from Clojure to Cobol running on OpenShift;OpenShift supports frameworks ranging from Spring, to Rails, to Play;Autoscaling- OpenShift can scale your application by adding additional instances of your application and enabling clustering. Alternatively, you can manually scale the amount of resources with which your application is deployed when needed;OpenShift by Red Hat is built on open-source technologies (Red Hat Enterprise Linux- RHEL);One Click Deployment- Deploying to the OpenShift platform is as easy a clicking a button or entering a "Git push" command
Manage Hosts, Deploy Containers, Monitor Resources;User Management & Collaboration;Native Docker APIs & Tools;Monitoring and Logging;Connect Containers, Manage Disks, Deploy Load Balancers;Docker App Catalog; Included Kubernetes Distribution;Included Docker Swarm Distribution; Included Mesos Distribution;Infrastructure Management
Statistics
GitHub Stars
885
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
510
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
1.6K
Stacks
952
Followers
1.4K
Followers
1.5K
Votes
517
Votes
644
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 99
    Good free plan
  • 63
    Open Source
  • 47
    Easy setup
  • 43
    Nodejs support
  • 42
    Well documented
Cons
  • 2
    Decisions are made for you, limiting your options
  • 2
    License cost
  • 1
    Behind, sometimes severely, the upstreams
Pros
  • 103
    Easy to use
  • 79
    Open source and totally free
  • 63
    Multi-host docker-compose support
  • 58
    Load balancing and health check included
  • 58
    Simple
Cons
  • 10
    Hosting Rancher can be complicated
Integrations
No integrations available
Jenkins
Jenkins
Datadog
Datadog
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine
Docker Compose
Docker Compose
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean
GitHub
GitHub
Docker
Docker
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
Drone.io
Drone.io

What are some alternatives to Red Hat OpenShift, Rancher?

Heroku

Heroku

Heroku is a cloud application platform – a new way of building and deploying web apps. Heroku lets app developers spend 100% of their time on their application code, not managing servers, deployment, ongoing operations, or scaling.

Clever Cloud

Clever Cloud

Clever Cloud is a polyglot cloud application platform. The service helps developers to build applications with many languages and services, with auto-scaling features and a true pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.

Google App Engine

Google App Engine

Google has a reputation for highly reliable, high performance infrastructure. With App Engine you can take advantage of the 10 years of knowledge Google has in running massively scalable, performance driven systems. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow.

Docker Compose

Docker Compose

With Compose, you define a multi-container application in a single file, then spin your application up in a single command which does everything that needs to be done to get it running.

Docker Swarm

Docker Swarm

Swarm serves the standard Docker API, so any tool which already communicates with a Docker daemon can use Swarm to transparently scale to multiple hosts: Dokku, Compose, Krane, Deis, DockerUI, Shipyard, Drone, Jenkins... and, of course, the Docker client itself.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Once you upload your application, Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.

Tutum

Tutum

Tutum lets developers easily manage and run lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers from any application. AWS-like control, Heroku-like ease. The same container that a developer builds and tests on a laptop can run at scale in Tutum.

Render

Render

Render is a unified platform to build and run all your apps and websites with free SSL, a global CDN, private networks and auto deploys from Git.

Portainer

Portainer

It is a universal container management tool. It works with Kubernetes, Docker, Docker Swarm and Azure ACI. It allows you to manage containers without needing to know platform-specific code.

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot