CentOS Linux Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 8.6 out of 10

Score

8.6 out of 10

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for CentOS Linux are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

High Security and Stability: Many users have expressed their satisfaction with the high level of security and stability provided by CentOS. They value the peace of mind that comes from using a reliable operating system straight out of the box.

Smooth Performance: Users consistently praise the performance of CentOS, even on average hardware. They appreciate its efficiency and optimization, which result in a smooth and responsive user experience.

Versatile Deployment: The ease and speed of deployment in various scenarios make CentOS a versatile choice for different projects. Users find it convenient for their needs, allowing them to quickly set up their development environment or host necessary network services.

Reviews

22 Reviews

CentOS Linux the best OS for you

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

November 4, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We need to Deploy a lot of different applications in a daily basis. We still running our servers locally since for our business cloud is not the best solution. So we have a lot of server running virtualization software and inside we deploy a big amount of CentOS Linux virtual machines to run a lot of applications, front-end, back-end, and scripts in different languages, Java, react, python, etc. CentOS Linux can run any of those without problem and the minimal install is just perfect since does not take a lot of space.

Pros

Minimal install
Run forever
Easy configuration
Run all different applications
Easy to install

Cons

Create minimal install for most used applications
Improve virtualization support
Create minimal install for docker deployment

Likelihood to Recommend

Any scenario where you need to easily deploy a software, no matter the technology you are using you can do it in a CentOS Linux. Also works great in both scenarios, install in a full size hardware server or install in a virtual machine. If business continuity is a must have for you softwavre CentOS Linux is your choice. You can run almost forever without restart you server.

Verified User

Manager in Engineering (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Centos review to the best of my knowledge

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

April 26, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As we have small clients we prefer to use CentOS, the installation is easier and it’s very stable and reliable. It’s recommended for faster security patching. The applications running on it don’t need to be updated as often and the cost is also very less than compared with other Linux essentials.

Pros

Applications doesn’t need to be updated often.
Reliable and scalable
User friendly

Cons

It should be made ready for bigger enterprises.
It should be faster for booting.
It should be a viable for daily use.

Likelihood to Recommend

It’s best suited for smaller organisations and not suited for companies that have the most number of clients. It should be made in a way that it can boot faster and also user friendly. The support should be better and have better features incorporated when compared with its rivals.

Verified User

Manager in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

CentOS Linux is a stable, mature operating system for rock-solid performance

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

July 2, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use CentOS Linux in almost every capacity except as an end user facing system. I use it as a mail server, web server, router, vpn endpoint, development system, high availability clustering node, virtual machine hypervisor, wireless access point, encryption appliance, and virtually every other kind of system, other than laptop or desktop. It excels at all of the server type roles that it is placed in.

Pros

CentOS Linux works extremely well as a development system. Development packages are readily available and 3rd party compatibility is very high.
CentOS Linux works extremely well for high availability clustering. It has native packages for DRBD which make it easy to provision high availability.
CentOS Linux has very little extra "nonsense" running, it can be slimmed down to a bare minimum system very easily to allow for maximum compute power to be devoted to the application.

Cons

It is extremely stable, however it could use a more robust "experimental" branch where new/different/updated code could be applied
It lacks end-user niceties. As a laptop/desktop system, it's absolutely awful. It would be very nice if there were better developed frontends for it

Likelihood to Recommend

In any role where you need raw server power, CentOS Linux is extremely well suited. It is extremely stable, and in my experience, probably the most stable of the Linux distros available. It has a very wide base of support from 3rd party sources for additional functionality that do not come already in the CentOS Linux distribution itself. It is not as appropriate for situations that are customer facing or end user facing. For those, I recommend Ubuntu Linux. But for everything server & compute related, I recommend CentOS Linux.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

Stay away from CentOS Stream

Rating: 2 out of 10

Incentivized

June 29, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use various CentOS systems in our organization on over two thousand servers all over the world. We write custom software for CentOS and rely on it to be a stable and secure platform for our needs. CentOS needs to be reliable for our business org to function properly and not introduce issues.

Pros

Stable
Reliable
Secure

Cons

Undoing the move to CentOS Stream.
Increasing the lifetime of CentOS.
Provide already tested updates to users.
Don't use the users as guinea pigs for testing.

Likelihood to Recommend

CentOS 7 has a longer support life than CentOS 8, and in that case, should be used in production environments until the support ends. Moving to CentOS 8 now would be a mistake with the switch to CentOS Stream, and the decreased support model for CentOS 8. Because of this, CentOS 8 is not a production stable environment.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

CentOS - Stable, secure, fast. What more could you ask for in an Operating System?

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

May 25, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

CentOS has been my Linux flavour of choice for many years. I use it both personally and professionally for multiple purposes. We have CentOS running for our corporate firewall filtering, network file storage, web application development and MySQL hosting. We primarily use the operating system on headless machines, accessed over SSH. We utilize the command line interface, not the GUI options.

Pros

Extremely Stability
Widely Used - Lots of reference material available
Runs fast, even on older hardware
FREE!

Cons

Moderate learning curve, not ideal for a Linux novice
Support for newest software updates may require installing unofficial distros
Support life cycle recently changed, pushing users away from traditional CentOS

Likelihood to Recommend

I have been a CentOS user for over 10 years and remain loyal to the core OS. When it comes to stability and speed, there's no other OS I'd recommend over it. I base this recommendation on my personal experience, as I have multiple development and production servers running the CentOS software today. It's running on newer and older hardware with ease, and the price is right!

Verified User

Manager in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

Server material

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

May 12, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use CentOS as the host OS for MongoDB servers in our analytics service. We also used to have it as the host for the user file Backup Service Front Ends. We use it both on bare metal and in virtual machines. We also have development and testing virtual machines setup with it as a host OS.

Pros

Enterprise ready
Stable packages
Great Online knowledge base

Cons

It's not as intuitive as it could be
Some packages can be quite old compared with other distributions
Breaking changes appear often when packages are obsoleted usually with no supported transition path (this is a general *NIX problem, but it's more accentuated in CentOS)

Likelihood to Recommend

CentOS is well suited as a server host OS, for web servers, databases and even container host. We found that NFS performance was better inside physical machines than in virtual ones, so for some critical IOPS bounded applications we used physical servers that ran CentOS and some of them were even Docker hosts with no noticeable performance degradation.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

15 years of experience

CentOS Free Alternative to Commercial Alternatives

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

February 21, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use CentOS currently for our server solutions.

Pros

Web Server
Database Server

Cons

Security
Hardened OOB

Likelihood to Recommend

CentOS is well suited for workstations and servers for web/application development.

Kaitlyn Delacruz

CEO (Chief Executive Officer) in Corporate at Yokai Sakura Limited (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

CentOS: stable, reliable, and secure Linux distribution

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

December 4, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use CentOS as the primary Linux distribution across all our instructional and research computing endeavors. It is used across all the IT infrastructure and supports many unique academic projects. The main problem that CentOS solves is that it provides a stable research platform that is easy to manage and most of all has a solid support path that extends well into the future.

Pros

Excellent "L" in the LAMP server.
CentOS is a total workhorse and very stable distribution.
Security and other updates are a breeze with YUM.
The community support and documentation is as good as it gets.

Cons

Sometimes we have to add some esoteric repositories to YUM, and that is a bit of a pain.
Sometimes we fight with SE Linux if it is enabled.
I wish I could get a CentOS t-shirt.

Likelihood to Recommend

Here is where CentOS really excels. If you have a shop where there are seasoned Linux administrators who do not need to have their hand held to do this and that, CentOS does really well. Since it is community oriented there are no funny license hoops to jump through or administration to waste your time. CentOS is well suited in our academic environment.

Jason Smith, DPA

Instructional Technologist in Information Technology at Pomona College (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

12 years of experience

Cheap RPM support, not much else

Rating: 5 out of 10

Incentivized

October 31, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As our organization looked to shift to cloud development, we need to standardize on a cloud-friendly Linux distribution. We evaluated CentOS for this purpose within my development team with the idea being that CentOS offered compatibility with rpm packages, and could largely mirror an expensive Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) server, without the cost. Unfortunately, we found that CentOS 8 was not fit for this purpose.

Pros

Barebones user-interface - CentOS doesn't aim to be flashy, and takes a no-nonsense approach to the user interface. Unfortunately, this is also one of its downsides.
RPM package compatibility - CentOS can readily use most RPMs making it trivially easy to set up a machine for development that you'll want to mirror for production.
Command Line Customization - CentOS is easier than other distributions for customizing from the command line, making it easier to automate the deployment of a new instance.

Cons

Ugly User Interface - I can deal with a simple and barebones interface, but that doesn't mean it needs to look like it was designed in the early 90s.
Smaller user base than other distributions - CentOS, while well established as a viable Linux distribution, lacks as strong of a user base as other distributions, making it more difficult to get support on user forums.
Drive compatibility - CentOS lacks as robust driver support as other distributions. For instance, in my most recent install, I still needed to install networking support packages, rather than having in-built support.

Likelihood to Recommend

CentOS is ideal if you need to replicate a Red Hat Enterprise Linux server setup for cheap/free, as you can use most, if not all, of the same packages you use on your RHEL set-up. It's also ideal if you need something that you can easily customize from the command line (such as in a virtualized environment.) It's less ideal if you want user community support or a user-friendly desktop environment.

Verified User

Engineer in Research & Development (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

CentOS - Absolutely the best value for the money

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

October 24, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use CentOS for all of our Linux hosts and Linux containers, for webservers as well as application servers, and addresses the need for a solid platform to run generic code, without worrying about licensing or justifying initial cost.

Pros

As it is derived from the commercial Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution, most instructions for installing enterprise software on Red Hat also work on CentOS, including the package manager.
CentOS lags behind Fedora (the other free Red Hat derivative supported by Red Hat), which makes it a solid choice for the enterprise (or even SMBs - stability is universally appreciated!).

Cons

CentOS isn't (and may never be) a strong contender for a desktop (GUI) Linux distribution.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you need a Linux host for running server software, you almost can't go wrong by installing CentOS - the Red Hat ecosystem is one of the most highly-supported Linux distributions.

Bear Golightly

IT Operations Manager / IT Service Manager in Information Technology at Nashville Wraps (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

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Reviews and Ratings

Cheap RPM support, not much else

Rating: 5 out of 10

Incentivized

October 31, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Barebones user-interface - CentOS doesn't aim to be flashy, and takes a no-nonsense approach to the user interface. Unfortunately, this is also one of its downsides.
RPM package compatibility - CentOS can readily use most RPMs making it trivially easy to set up a machine for development that you'll want to mirror for production.
Command Line Customization - CentOS is easier than other distributions for customizing from the command line, making it easier to automate the deployment of a new instance.

Cons

Ugly User Interface - I can deal with a simple and barebones interface, but that doesn't mean it needs to look like it was designed in the early 90s.
Smaller user base than other distributions - CentOS, while well established as a viable Linux distribution, lacks as strong of a user base as other distributions, making it more difficult to get support on user forums.
Drive compatibility - CentOS lacks as robust driver support as other distributions. For instance, in my most recent install, I still needed to install networking support packages, rather than having in-built support.

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

Engineer in Research & Development (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience