Apstra Operating System vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

Juniper and VMware are both solutions in the Network Automation category. Juniper is ranked #13, while VMware is ranked #3 with an average rating of 7.9. Juniper holds a 1.7% mindshare in NA, compared to VMware’s 8.7% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Juniper users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of VMware users who would recommend it.

Apstra Operating System

Read 1 Apstra Operating System review

344 Views
344 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Automation

Read 171 VMware Aria Automation reviews

8,035 Views
1,366 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Apstra Operating System

VMware Aria Automation

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Apstra Operating System and VMware Aria Automation based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat, Cisco, VMware and others in Network Automation.

To learn more, read our detailed Network Automation Report (Updated: August 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Network Automation

August 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Apstra Operating System

Ranking in Network Automation

13th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VMware Aria Automation

Ranking in Network Automation

3rd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

171

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Management (2nd), Configuration Management (6th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (16th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (5th)

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Network Automation category, the mindshare of Apstra Operating System is 1.7%, down from 2.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 8.7%, down from 12.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
VMware Aria Automation	8.7%
Apstra Operating System	1.7%
Other	89.6%

Network Automation

Featured Reviews

Hezio Fernandes

Works at wolterskluwer

Highly secure, useful AB test, and stable

I am using Apstra Operating System for some classes and for my personal use Apstra Operating System's most important features are the security and AB test to define what approach we need to take in my company. Additionally, the solution does not take a lot of maintenance. The report data could…

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Le Quang Long

Cloud Engineer at BIDV - Ngân hàng TMCP Đầu tư & Phát triển Việt Nam

Significantly streamlined operations with good automation that helps with simplifying workflows

It helps me build a big catalog and provide it to my end users. It helps us automate the workflow of creating many VMs and the TensorFlow key method. I do not meet many people to operate it live beforehand. It operates for both of my products, but as a product, it is complicated to integrate and automate with other products.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Apstra Operating System's most important features are the security and AB test to define what approach we need to take in my company. Additionally, the solution does not take a lot of maintenance."

"We've seen that typically, the people who are provisioning VDIs and server VMs can now utilize most of their time towards other projects and moving the environment forward, instead of just hammering out virtual machines all day."

"The DevOps for infrastructure capabilities has saved time for our developers by automating processes and reducing provisioning time. Task time has been reduced by 40 percent."

"Today, if I want to provision one VM, it takes me five minutes. Earlier, it would take a minimum of 30 minutes to go and choose everything. Now, I can just do one click and it can provision my whole VM. We also integrated with our Alexa, so even through voice functionality, I can create a VM. One of the guys at VMware, along with our partner, deployed that in our environment. If I say, "Hey, Alexa, I need a VM with four gigs of RAM," it will go and start creating it."

"The whole VMR ecosystem allows us to serve multiple customers, multiple organizations and also multiple units per customer. We can cover every level without using the whole VRA and the rest of the ecosystem. We don't need to use a separate product to provide separate functionalities for the customer. We can cover all the use cases using only one product on our side which is really helpful. T"

"The preset policies and templates are useful. I would say that vRA is one of the best solutions we have. The CI/CD features also look helpful even though we aren't using them at the moment. We plan to get more involved and train our customers as much as possible."

"vRA provides that single pane of glass for our cloud tenants to deploy, monitor, access, and manage their VMs/guest operating systems."

"VMware Aria Automation has made a lot of things easier. It has really helped the operations team to spin up the virtual machines."

"The product is stable."

More VMware Aria Automation pros

Cons

"The report data could improve in Apstra Operating System."

"The connectivity between VMs is easy, but they can be made more effective if we have a single proof point where we can configure all the biggest data at a single point."

"Deploying and configuring the solution takes a lot of time."

"It has some limitations for scalability, especially for remote data center management. For some components, everything need to be centralized."

"The stability is why I rated it a seven and not higher. There were several cases where we had to restart some services because it wasn't working correctly anymore. People cannot extend their machine or replay their machine. There is no alert to say that there is a problem and that we should stop the service. The monitoring system is not very good."

"There is an area of improvement. For example, you are migrating from a customer's existing data center to a new target data center. To facilitate this transition, you'll initially need to evaluate the customer's aging hardware hosting VMware, which is nearing the end of its operational life. The customer expresses the intention to upgrade to a newer version, necessitating an overhaul of everything in the new data center. As a Systems Integrator (SI), consultant, or architect, your recommendation would be to acquire the latest hardware with a specified configuration and then install VMware on top of it. However, there's a crucial aspect related to the infrastructure requirements for VMware to run seamlessly on that hardware. If there's an opportunity to potentially reduce these infrastructure prerequisites, it would be highly beneficial."

"The setup is difficult. You need a technical person to help you set it up."

"Broadcom has acquired the tool, which could lower its pricing. Many customers are moving away from VMware infrastructure towards enterprise systems like Azure or AWS. This shift could be due to two main reasons: pricing and uncertainty about the future, especially regarding how Broadcom will handle licenses and strategy."

"It needs to be more dynamic with variable customization to make new workloads more reliable. It also needs to be faster. We are exploring vRA version 8 right now and maybe what I'm requesting is available in the new version, but we haven't yet explored it fully."

More VMware Aria Automation cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of the solution is competitive."

"As far as value is concerned, it has been essential to our environment. We have been able to deploy VMs quickly and the developers have their own sandbox, so they can spin up and destroy VMs at their own will."

"VMware Aria Automation is expensive."

"The tool is expensive since it is an enterprise product."

"There is confusion between licensing levels. There are three different licensed versions of vRealize Automation, and there are different things which can happen in each of them."

"From the customer perspective, the value was worth it."

"It is pricey for what you get."

"Customers say this solution is costlier compared to its competitors."

"The solution is free of cost."

More VMware Aria Automation pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

21%

University

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	32
Midsize Enterprise	24
Large Enterprise	130

Questions from the Community

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What's the difference between VMware vRA (automation) and vROps (operations)?

vROP is a virtualization management solution from VMWare. It is efficient and easy to manage. You can find anything you need from the software interface. It provides complete visibility over applic...

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Is there any way to try VMware Aria Automation for free?

When it comes to VMware Aria Automation, you have three choices for free runs: Hands-on Lab (HOL) Advanced lab A free trial I cannot describe in detail the second and third options as my company ...

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Which sectors can benefit the most from VMware Aria Automation?

I was looking at VMware Aria Automation case studies recently and I got the impression that three main kinds of companies were using it most often: Social organizations Financial institutions and ...

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Comparisons

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Compared 60% of the time

VMware NSX vs Apstra Operating System

Compared 40% of the time

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Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 17% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 14% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 10% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 8% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 6% of the time

More VMware Aria Automation Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Network Automation

August 2025

Download Apstra Operating System product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Automation

August 2025

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Also Known As

Apstra OS, AOS

VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack

Overview

The Apstra Operating System (AOS) is a turn-key automation solution that dramatically simplifies the process of designing, deploying and operating data center networks. Apstra AOS provides a singular view into the relationships and interdependencies of millions of data center elements. With real continuous validation, Apstra AOS enables you to instantly pinpoint and quickly resolve issues across all infrastructure silos, regardless of vendor or hardware.

Juniper

VMware Aria Automation is a cloud management tool that allows companies to simplify their cloud experience through a modern automation platform. The solution is designed to deliver self-service clouds, multi-cloud automation with governance, and DevOps-based security and infrastructure management. It helps organizations improve IT agility, efficiency, and productivity through its various features.

VMware Aria Automation has multiple use cases that include the following:

Self-service multi-cloud: VMware Aria Automation can be used to deliver consistent self-service consumption. Another use case in this area is for delivering infrastructure across VMware Clouds as well as public clouds.
Multi-cloud governance: The solution can be used to manage cost, performance, networking, configuration, and security at scale for multi-cloud environments. VMware Aria Automation offers all this with an everything-as-code approach.
DevOps for infrastructure: Through VMware Aria Automation, companies can enable a powerful infrastructure as code platform with support for iterative development and infrastructure pipelining.
Kubernetes automation: Users can utilize VMware Aria Automation to automate the management of Kubernetes clusters and namespaces with support for vSphere with Tanzu.
Security operations: VMware Aria Automation facilitates event-driven automation to deliver full-service IT system compliance enforcement and vulnerability remediation.

VMware Aria Automation Features

VMware Aria Automation has various features that allow users to easily perform operations. Some of the solution's capacities include:

VMware Cloud agnostic template: This feature allows organizations to use a single cloud template to deploy with Infrastructure as a Code. Deployment options include VMware Cloud as well as major public cloud platforms such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and more.
Extensibility and customization: This VMware Aria Automation feature allows users to get full extensibility and customization. This can be achieved through Aria Automation Orchestrator, Action-Based Extensibility (ABX), and built-in integrations with common third-party tools.
Self-service multi-cloud: This feature enables users to request and provision infrastructure resources. It can be done across clouds using a unified and consistent Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) consumption layer, idempotent REST API, and self-service catalog.
Centralized policies and governance: VMware Aria Automation offers a feature for users to manage multiple clouds with templatized cloud and policy definition, automated remediation, and cloud environment visibility.
Configuration management: Through this feature of the product, day 1 and 2 control can be achieved for virtualized and cloud environments. This can be done with intuitive configuration automation, compliance enforcement, and vulnerability remediation.
Infrastructure pipelining: Through this feature, organizations can access user-friendly release automation pipelines. They can be specifically tailored for CI/CD in infrastructure use cases.

VMware Aria Automation Benefits

VMware Aria Automation offers its users various benefits. Some of the biggest advantages that the solution brings to companies that utilize it include:

VMware Aria Automation provides faster time to market for companies through offloading manual tasks with advanced workflows and agile templating.
The solution offers high levels of security and control.
This product is suitable for beginners, as it offers a self-service consumption experience for users.
VMware Aria Automation accelerates innovation through Infrastructure as Code and DevOps principles.
The product provides users with flexibility, as it is compatible with the most popular public cloud solutions.
The solution offers fast deployment because of all natively integrated functions.

Reviews from Real Users

Awais J., CTO/CEO at a tech services company, likes VMware Aria Automation because it saves a lot of time, provides more visibility, and has extensive automation capabilities.

An IT consultant at a government rates VMware Aria Automation highly because the product gives you flexibility to analyze and consume resources.

VMware

Sample Customers

Bloomberg Television, Energy Corporation, A mid-sized financial services company

Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual

Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat, Cisco, VMware and others in Network Automation. Updated: August 2025.

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