The short answer: EKS has the lowest entry cost, Tanzu is cheapest only if it is already bundled in a VCF subscription you pay for, and OpenShift has the highest sticker price but the most included tooling. The right choice is a total-cost question, not a list-price one.
Three Platforms, Three Pricing Units
The first reason buyers struggle to compare these platforms is that none of them is priced the same way. VMware Tanzu is licensed per core as an annual subscription, almost always sold inside VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). Red Hat OpenShift is licensed per core-pair. Amazon EKS is priced per cluster per hour, with all the real compute billed separately as EC2. A like-for-like comparison has to convert all three onto the same workload, and that is where the surprises start. For the wider context of how Broadcom reshaped Tanzu pricing, see our complete guide to VMware licensing and the focused breakdown in VMware Tanzu licensing and Kubernetes alternatives.
The Numbers Side by Side
| Platform | Pricing unit | Indicative 2026 cost | Biggest hidden cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| VMware Tanzu (in VCF) | Per core / year | Bundled in VCF; standalone 2x–5x old perpetual at quote | 16-core-per-CPU minimum (+20–40%) |
| Red Hat OpenShift | Per core-pair / year | €2,000–€5,000 per core-pair; ~$15K–$20K for a 12-core cluster | Premium support on idle capacity |
| Amazon EKS | Per cluster / hour | $0.10/hr (~$74/mo) + EC2; small prod cluster ~$250–$300/mo | Inter-AZ + egress data transfer |
Read across the table and the pattern is clear: the visible price tells you almost nothing. The 16-core minimum on Tanzu, the bundled-but-idle tooling on OpenShift, and the data-transfer leakage on EKS each move the real bill by double-digit percentages.
Tanzu: The VCF Bundle Question
Under Broadcom, Tanzu is no longer a standalone product you casually adopt — Broadcom's preferred commercial motion is to sell Tanzu Platform as a component of VCF, billed per core. If you already run VCF, Tanzu can be close to free at the margin. If you do not, expect opening quotes of 2x to 5x the old perpetual cost, inflated further by Broadcom's rule of billing a minimum of 16 cores per physical CPU — which adds 20–40% on hosts with 8- or 12-core CPUs. Whether to absorb that bundle or negotiate Tanzu separately is the central question we cover in the planned guide to negotiating Tanzu inside a VCF bundle and in Tanzu Application Platform pricing and licensing.
OpenShift: Sticker Price vs Bundled Value
OpenShift carries the highest headline number — a core-pair (2 physical cores, or 4 vCPUs on a hyperscaler) runs roughly €2,000–€5,000 per year with Premium support, putting a modest six-node, 12-core cluster at $15,000–$20,000 a year on Standard support. But the price includes an integrated registry, monitoring, CI/CD, and security tooling you would otherwise license separately. OpenShift is genuinely good value if you use the bundle; if you only need a Kubernetes runtime, you are paying Premium support on capability you do not touch. Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) and Azure Red Hat OpenShift change this maths again by folding the licence into a managed hyperscaler bill.
EKS: Cheap Control Plane, Expensive Everything Else
EKS looks like the bargain: $0.10 per cluster per hour, about $74 a month, for a fully managed control plane. The catch is that the control plane is the cheapest line on the invoice. You pay full EC2 rates for worker nodes whether or not your applications use the capacity, plus EBS volumes, $0.005/hr per public IPv4 address, and cross-AZ traffic. EKS Auto Mode adds roughly 12% on top of EC2 — and Savings Plans discount only the underlying EC2, not the Auto Mode surcharge. Let a cluster fall out of standard support and the control-plane rate jumps 6x to $0.60/hr. Industry analyses put a typical EKS bill 30–50% above what it needs to be, mostly from idle capacity and avoidable network charges. The discipline that fixes this lives on the EC2 side, which is why we treat it as an AWS commercial problem in our AWS vendor intelligence hub.
Negotiating Each Platform Down
All three are negotiable, but through different doors. Tanzu/VCF is the most movable: Broadcom's 2x–5x opening quotes typically settle at 1.3x–2x after a structured negotiation, and the core-count minimums can be challenged on bespoke estates — the playbook we set out in the VMware Broadcom Survival Guide. OpenShift core-pair pricing discounts materially with committed volume and three-year terms; the lever is total core commitment, not per-unit haggling. EKS control-plane pricing is fixed, but the EC2 spend underneath it — the part that actually matters — is negotiable through Reserved Instances, Compute Savings Plans, and an AWS Enterprise Discount Program commitment. Before you choose, model the three-year total cost of ownership for your real workload, not the per-unit sticker. To pressure-test that model against live deal data, request a confidential briefing or start with the VMware/Broadcom vendor hub.