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Amazon WorkSpaces vs Citrix DaaS (formerly Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service) comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 5, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
8.1
Users find Amazon WorkSpaces boosts ROI with easy setup, quick deployment, and enhanced productivity over on-premises solutions.
Sentiment score
7.1
Citrix DaaS reduces costs and boosts flexibility, efficiency, and continuity, offering long-term savings and environmental benefits.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.4
Amazon WorkSpaces customer service is praised for support quality but has occasional long response times, with faster help costing extra.
Sentiment score
6.6
Citrix DaaS' customer support receives mixed reviews, with praise for expertise but concerns about response times and support quality.
The first level often wastes time because I usually have to escalate to an engineer for proper support.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.4
Amazon WorkSpaces' scalability and pay-as-you-go model benefit diverse businesses, providing flexible user capacity and resource management.
Sentiment score
7.9
Citrix DaaS offers scalable, easy expansion, efficiently handling demands with flexible Azure integrations despite some expense concerns.
Citrix DaaS offers vast scalability options as workloads can be deployed across multiple data centers like Azure, Google, or AWS.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.0
Amazon WorkSpaces is stable and reliable, but performance depends on good internet connections and can be affected by latency.
Sentiment score
7.3
Citrix DaaS offers reliable, stable performance with high availability, ensuring user satisfaction for large-scale virtual desktop deployments.
Citrix DaaS allows for satisfactory stability by facilitating workload deployment in various data centers including Azure, Google, or AWS.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon WorkSpaces requires performance improvements, enhanced conferencing capabilities, simpler configurations, faster updates, better pricing, and user management features.
Citrix DaaS struggles with performance, setup complexity, high costs, and requires enhancements in integration, support, and user experience.
More direct access to engineers would speed up resolution.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon WorkSpaces pricing ranges from $85-$150 monthly, with additional costs for storage and services impacting overall expense.
Citrix DaaS pricing is costly yet competitive, with versatile licensing, complex management, and strategies needed for cost optimizations.
Citrix DaaS is considered expensive, especially for companies that do not require multi-cloud.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon WorkSpaces provides secure, scalable remote access with easy provisioning, supporting video conferencing and multimedia with low latency.
Citrix DaaS offers high-performance remote access with strong security, seamless app virtualization, and scalability for consistent user experiences.
With Citrix, all connections are outgoing, minimizing firewall vulnerability.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon WorkSpaces
Ranking in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
8th
Ranking in Desktop as a Service (DaaS)
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Citrix DaaS (formerly Citri...
Ranking in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
3rd
Ranking in Desktop as a Service (DaaS)
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
126
Ranking in other categories
Application Virtualization (1st), Remote Access (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) category, the mindshare of Amazon WorkSpaces is 0.7%, down from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Citrix DaaS (formerly Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service) is 10.0%, down from 14.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
 

Featured Reviews

Bhaskar Rao - PeerSpot reviewer
Management console is very easy to use, readily available infrastructure and easy to scale
It's very stable. There is a big difference between traditional physical servers and cloud servers. With physical servers, we need to plan for purchasing, procurement, capacity, storage, get quotations, and then procure them. That took some time. Maybe it would take more than one month or maybe two months to procure and then install. With AWS, it is readily available. Just pay and immediately create the VPC, network, and everything. It is very easy. Within two or three hours, we can implement any server or launch any application. Within five minutes, we can just spin up and publish our servers on the Internet.
Mohd Abdul Aziz Shah Sulaiman - PeerSpot reviewer
Delivers secure and unified access to apps, desktops, and content for enhanced productivity
Citrix Workforce is good, but it needs improvement in diagnosing network issues. When errors occur, it is difficult to determine if they're due to network issues, Workspace issues, or environment issues. The error messages are too vague, just stating "connection error" without specifying if it's an IP address issue, connectivity problem, or something else related to the network. This lack of detail makes troubleshooting difficult. We often have to reinstall everything in Workspace, without knowing the root cause. Even after engaging with Citrix and sending logs, the feedback is often unsatisfactory, not meeting my expectations. This trial-and-error approach isn't effective problem-solving. While these issues aren't everyday occurrences, when they do happen, they can be catastrophic for our operations team.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Government
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon WorkSpaces?
Performance and scalability are valuable features.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon WorkSpaces?
The pricing is based on consumption. You pay for each process based on the transactions you make. The investment is almost the same as having your own on-premises solution, with the added costs of ...
What needs improvement with Amazon WorkSpaces?
There is always scope of improvement in the stability.
What do you like most about Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops?
My focus has primarily been on publishing virtual applications.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops?
I rate the product’s pricing a seven out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive.
What needs improvement with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops?
I have found that Citrix DaaS is still a complex product, especially on the desktop side, which affects scalability. Although it works well on the apps side, the desktop aspect still has room for i...
 

Also Known As

WorkSpaces
XenDesktop, XenApp (Citrix Virtual Apps), Citrix Workspace
 

Interactive Demo

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

GrubHub, Endemol Shine Nederland, CMC Property Services
Exelon, Aeronamic, AIDS Healthcare Foundation, Alameda County Medical Center, Alaska Department of Fish & Game, Aloysius Stichting, Amarchand Mangaldas, AmBev, Amnet Technology Solutions, Arval
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon WorkSpaces vs. Citrix DaaS (formerly Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service) and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,900 professionals have used our research since 2012.