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Amazon WorkSpaces vs Horizon 8 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
7.0
Users find Amazon WorkSpaces boosts ROI with easy setup, quick deployment, and enhanced productivity over on-premises solutions.
Sentiment score
7.1
Users report positive ROI with Horizon 8 through reduced hardware needs, better efficiency, and cost savings in administration.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.8
Amazon WorkSpaces customer service is praised for support quality but has occasional long response times, with faster help costing extra.
Sentiment score
5.8
Horizon 8 support is praised for proficiency but faces concerns about delays, complexity, and off-hours accessibility.
Resolving issues is often complicated due to it being a complex product.
Our support from VMware expired last December.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.5
Amazon WorkSpaces' scalability and pay-as-you-go model benefit diverse businesses, providing flexible user capacity and resource management.
Sentiment score
8.2
Horizon 8 offers exceptional scalability and adaptability but requires technical expertise and may encounter budget constraints for large deployments.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Amazon WorkSpaces is stable and reliable, but performance depends on good internet connections and can be affected by latency.
Sentiment score
7.9
VMware Horizon 8 is stable with few issues, with ratings between 8-9, but requires strong infrastructure and proper configuration.
Especially with the integration of NVIDIA, we experience multiple problems including crashing applications, crashing desktops, spontaneous logoffs, black screens, and systems that no longer respond or cannot reconnect.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon WorkSpaces requires performance improvements, enhanced conferencing capabilities, simpler configurations, faster updates, better pricing, and user management features.
Horizon 8 needs better pricing, integrations, documentation, Linux support, analytics, security, NVIDIA integration, and simplified deployment.
I would like to see improvements in Horizon 8, specifically integration with NVIDIA for graphical performance upgrades because it creates many issues such as crashing and black screen systems, causing users to lose access to their current desktop and work.
We have limited capabilities since we are not using a multi-instance solution, just single instances.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon WorkSpaces pricing ranges from $85-$150 monthly, with additional costs for storage and services impacting overall expense.
Horizon 8 pricing is high but may offer long-term savings and value, especially with bundled options.
After VMware was bought by Broadcom, the pricing was ridiculous, but now that Onmises has VMware Horizon 8, the pricing is back to an acceptable level.
I rate the cost-effectiveness of GenApp of Citrix equal to our CMS; it is quite cost-effective.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon WorkSpaces provides secure, scalable remote access with easy provisioning, supporting video conferencing and multimedia with low latency.
Horizon 8 offers centralized management, rapid provisioning, seamless remote access, strong security, and efficient scalability for virtual desktops.
From a security point of view, security in Horizon 8 is one of the main points in keeping the system resources from the company away from bad actors. You can keep the desktops completely isolated, and you don't need to share your file shares or database with the end-user system.
The solution has data leak prevention features that ensure data is not copied from the base machine to VDI.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon WorkSpaces
Ranking in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
9th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Desktop as a Service (DaaS) (2nd)
Horizon 8
Ranking in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
114
Ranking in other categories
User Virtualization (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) category, the mindshare of Amazon WorkSpaces is 1.0%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Horizon 8 is 7.8%, down from 13.9% 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.
Muhammad JunaidJawed - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps ensure data leaks do not occur from the base machine to VDI while multi-instance capabilities remain limited
I have been using Horizon for two years. It provides my DevOps team access to PAM and server through the provider The solution has helped ensure data leaks do not occur from the base machine to VDI, and it saves data through API copyright. The solution has data leak prevention features that…
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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solutions are best for your needs.
860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Government
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

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.
How does VMware Workspace One compare with VMware Horizon 7?
VMware Workspace One has a powerful set of helpful features. The solution offers very good documentation, the initial setup is easy, and the product is very stable and reliable. I think the fact th...
What do you like most about VMware Horizon 7?
VMware offers a friendly environment, and it's easy to provide the user with the package. It is a bundled solution that is readily deployable. The advantage lies in its simplicity, it requires mini...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware Horizon 7?
We paid a lot of money for software that is not really fully operational out of the box. We had to have patches from VMware to get it into production. Hence, we lost a lot of time implementing the ...
 

Also Known As

WorkSpaces
VMware Horizon, VMware Horizon View, Mware Dynamic Environment Manager
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

GrubHub, Endemol Shine Nederland, CMC Property Services
LCMC Health
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon WorkSpaces vs. Horizon 8 and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.