CentOS 7 vs RHEL 7. What is the right choice?

If someone asks you, hey should I go with RHEL 7 or CentOS 7? Probably you will not have the clear answer, landing on with may be answer. But believe me; this confusion is normal because of their unbelievably similar characters.

To answer this question in an easier way and make the confusion clear, we will dig some basic differences between CentOS & RHEL 7. I hope, you can decide more easily between these two distros after reading this post. Let’s get started.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is Red Hat’s official distribution for the commercial market. On other hand, Community Enterprise Operating System (CentOS) is a community supported free Linux distribution. 

Looking little bite deeper, you will notice that RHEL Servers are extremely stable & secure with ELS (enterprise level support) up to 10 years. On other hand, CentOS has lifecycle ranging from 6 to 7 years.

But everything comes up with cost for RHEL. The support package can range from few hundred dollars up to thousands of dollars. If you are not ready for this price, CentOS is the right option.

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Now, it is more confusing right? Well, let’s keep it simple and time to decide the winner. For the normal users, who are not willing to spend the money, CentOS is the perfect solution. But if you are willing to pay and your systems are running in a productive environment, RHEL wins the race.

However, you are the boss of your own decision. So, make a wise decision between price, flexibility & security.