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AWS Control Tower vs Cloudify comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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

AWS Control Tower
Ranking in Cloud Management
23rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Cloudify
Ranking in Cloud Management
41st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of AWS Control Tower is 1.4%, down from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cloudify is 1.4%, down from 1.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
AWS Control Tower1.4%
Cloudify1.4%
Other97.2%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Sharkrit Impat - PeerSpot reviewer
Head Of Platform Engineering at Ascend Group Co., Ltd.
Streamlines governance and security management but requires effort in managing hidden costs
I believe AWS Control Tower could be improved. I compare it with Huawei Cloud's enterprise project, which is a similar concept but different implementation. In Huawei Cloud, you partition in one single account, but in AWS, you have to separate many accounts. You end up with maybe 20 or 30 accounts if you try to separate. It has limitations; you pay a fixed amount for 15 accounts, but if you exceed that, you have to pay more. It could be useful for implementing a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) for multiple organizations, but for one organization, I would advise against it; it is too much overhead and adds hidden costs. There are limitations on the Landing Zone feature as well. If we implement AWS Control Tower, we need to implement Landing Zone and the security policy, guardrails, and Account Factory; it is not one single product. Using another cloud's enterprise project, you can just create the project and manage it already. It requires some learning curve to get hands-on. For pricing and licensing of AWS Control Tower, it has hidden costs. The Control Tower itself does not cost much, but the child accounts created from AWS Control Tower add costs for checking all configurations, logging, and metrics.
Mark Wittling - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Architect at Cox communications
Works very well for advanced service chaining requirements and has extremely advanced engineers for support
We had a manager who thought that Cloudify could be used as a replacement for Horizon in OpenStack, but we found that Cloudify lacked the user interface or GUI for doing multitenancy and basic platform management tasks. Cloudify was really good at launching, for example, firewalls and configuring them and doing service chaining and rather advanced things like that, but it didn't meet the requirements for a basic platform management solution. It is something that seems to work better as a bolt-on or an augmented solution. It is a bit mis-marketed as a Cloud Management solution. It is not that. It is more of a service orchestration and automation tool. It is very good at doing that, but it fails to meet basic platform management requirements. Once you have it running, you can't really do anything with it without writing code and scripts. It requires a full-time DevOps person to use it. We deployed a Palo Alto firewall with it. That's basically what the project was for us, and it worked flawlessly once we got it finished, but it took another 12 weeks to get all of the automation and everything else coded, tested, and working. There is certainly a place for this technology, but when we got rid of OpenStack and moved to VMware, we either had to go with the vRealize Automation Suite to do this kind of automation, or we had to find an alternative solution to manage the private cloud. So, we put Cloudify in, but we really couldn't find it useful for basic platform administration tasks.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It provides a central point for account management, access control, and compliance monitoring."
"The solution's initial setup was easy for me."
"The most significant benefit of Control Tower is its capability to align with our organization's standards."
"It aligns well with the customer's needs and it ultimately fosters a strong customer-company relationship."
"AWS Control Tower is a tool specifically designed for multi-account management. It offers the advantage of highly granular management."
"The most intriguing feature is the automatic generation of user accounts. Leveraging Active Directory and global company settings, AWS Cloud Tower enables the creation of AWS user accounts based on job descriptions in Active Directory. This establishes a direct correlation between the user's name, job definition, and the corresponding rules applied to each account."
"The advantages of AWS Control Tower that stand out for me include centralized management and easy governance control."
"There are two features in Control Tower which are the most valuable. One is the guardrails because it has preventive and detective guardrails."
"No need to change the existing application code base."
"Cloudify provides the infrastructure-as-code, as well as operational action capabilities (orchestrated startups or upgrades, and more)."
"Even with the learning curve, the solution is an interesting concept and reminds me of Vagrant Terraform with its own difficulties and easiness."
"Has great extendability which means you can build your own custom logic."
"We have found that this is not an undue burden, and the extra work gives immense flexibility and portability."
"You can use only what you need. You can remove certain Cloudify functions from the framework to create a "minified" version of what you need. This might only consist of the messaging delivery system, and the orchestration functions."
"Cloudify works in cases where you have very advanced service chaining requirements. It really works well there, and it fits the best. They have a standardized markup that's based on TOSCA, which is a standard. I like the fact that they're standards-based. Their solution works extremely well if you have the talent and the manpower to write TOSCA descriptors to deploy and interchange services or to automate the configuration and turn up of services."
"Extensible internal functions and plugins. Can implement custom plugins to fit your scenario. Python based plugins."
 

Cons

"AWS Control Tower should improve its fast execution. It also needs more tools for triggering and monitoring AWS services. AWS Control Tower needs more tracking as well."
"There is a sync issue within the organization."
"The sole drawback is its restriction to enable only one Control Tower."
"There should be more automation security tools in the Control Tower."
"The reason I do not give it a 10 is that larger enterprises sometimes require more flexibility and customization than the service currently provides."
"AWS should provide more resources, examples, and tutorials."
"The initial setup is complex."
"While using the solution recently, it broke a certain activity. So, AWS Control Tower needs to consider making the solution better."
"Cloudify is not a turn-key solution, nor designed as such."
"It lacked the user interface for multitenancy and basic platform management tasks. It is a leader in the niche area that they like to perform in, but it only does about 30% of top-tier advanced functions of platform management. It doesn't meet about 70% of what you need to manage a private cloud platform."
"I'd like to see a more simplified upgrade process so it can be completed in one step rather than multiple steps (snapshot backup + snapshot restore)."
"Install of the product itself could be improved and I would like to see better event monitoring."
"The solution could be improved with respect to error handling. If we want to troubleshoot further and deep dive, we don't have access to admin privileges to extract those errors."
"The solution is a bit of a headache because mistakes happen in the blueprint every time we deploy and they require modifications."
"There were some issues with deploying the solution on OpenStack Mitaka."
"Certainly the UI could use some intensive work, but nevertheless, overall, it’s a complete product with its 3.4 version and much better features are available with 4.0."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is free."
"It is cost-effective and the associated cost is quite minimal."
"The product's affordability depends on the value it brings to specific organizations."
"I believe it's free of charge or comes at a very low cost. It's an additional feature. Even if there is a fee, it's minimal. AWS seems to assist customers in gaining a comprehensive view of their security setups within AWS. Using Control Tower is highly recommended, especially as your company grows and involves Active Directory, various departments, and different architectural aspects. It becomes more advisable to leverage Control Tower rather than managing these aspects manually, especially for larger organizations."
"The cost is reasonable, but there are opportunities for improvement in terms of pricing for larger enterprises."
"It operates on a pay-as-you-go model, meaning we are charged only for the services we actively use within it."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price and ten is a high price, I rate the pricing an eight."
"The pricing is efficient, not overly expensive but also not very cheap."
"I wasn't involved in the pricing of it because we were just doing prototype work with it, but I was told by the upper management team that it was quite expensive. That was another reason we switched to Morpheus."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Insurance Company
7%
Outsourcing Company
15%
Construction Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Large Enterprise6
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS Control Tower?
Control Tower within the AWS Organization does not have a charge. It is free and does not incur additional charges.
What needs improvement with AWS Control Tower?
I would like to see greater customization and flexibility for the landing zone, easier integration with existing enterprise environments, more advanced reporting and governance dashboards, and expa...
What is your primary use case for AWS Control Tower?
My primary use case for AWS Control Tower is multi-account governance, as it provides a standardized landing zone that allows us to provision accounts consistently, enforce security guardrails, cen...
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
Proximus Partner Communications (Israel) VMware NTT Data Metaswitch Spirent Communications Lumina Networks Atos Fortinet
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Control Tower vs. Cloudify and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.