AWS Control Tower vs Cloudify comparison

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AWS Control Tower

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Cloudify and AWS Control Tower compete in the cloud management space. Cloudify holds an advantage in pricing and support, appealing with its customization and cost-effectiveness, while AWS Control Tower excels in features with its robust suite of AWS services.

Features: Cloudify supports orchestration across multi-cloud environments, extendibility for custom logic through plugins, and seamless infrastructure integration. AWS Control Tower offers centralized multi-account management, preventive and detective guardrails, and service catalog features for provisioning centralized solutions.

Room for Improvement: Cloudify could enhance usability by simplifying complex configurations and improving initial deployment processes, requiring less technical expertise for setup. Furthermore, a more intuitive interface could aid user navigation. AWS Control Tower could expand its feature set for non-AWS environments, reduce setup complexity for less AWS-dependent users, and offer more competitive pricing structures.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cloudify’s deployment is more involved, demanding expertise for customization, but provides agile and responsive customer service. AWS Control Tower benefits from preconfigured blueprints for deployment within AWS environments, and its support is robust, tailored specifically for AWS services, simplifying its setup for AWS-specific applications.

Pricing and ROI: Cloudify presents a low-cost setup option, making it attractive for budget-conscious enterprises seeking flexibility and customization, providing a strong ROI with multi-cloud deployments. AWS Control Tower involves higher initial investments, but its ROI is strong over time for organizations heavily reliant on AWS, justified by its premium AWS-specific capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS Control Tower vs. Cloudify Report (Updated: June 2025).

AWS Control Tower vs. Cloudify

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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

AWS Control Tower

Ranking in Cloud Management

7th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Cloudify

Ranking in Cloud Management

29th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of AWS Control Tower is 1.4%, down from 1.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cloudify is 1.9%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

MuhammadAzhar Khan

Senior DevOps Engineer at Alibaba Group

Unified security management ensures comprehensive compliance for account safety

Control Tower offers many valuable features for managing all account security. I can manage user security and user IAM, firewall, and other security-related tasks via Control Tower. The unified security management is a crucial aspect, and whenever an AWS organization is used, Control Tower is typically included to ensure comprehensive compliance fulfillment.

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Mark Wittling

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.

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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."

"It is incredibly user-friendly and functions seamlessly."

"One of the standout advantages is the fine-grained control it offers in terms of permissions and privileges."

"It offers automated recommendations for security and policies, creating a landing zone and providing a list of policies."

"It aligns well with the customer's needs and it ultimately fosters a strong customer-company relationship."

"AWS Control Tower helps companies save costs."

"AWS Control Tower helps to save a lot of work and manage multiple accounts."

"The most significant benefit of Control Tower is its capability to align with our organization's standards."

More AWS Control Tower pros

"Extensible internal functions and plugins. Can implement custom plugins to fit your scenario. Python based plugins."

"Has great extendability which means you can build your own custom logic."

"It enables a single platform to communicate with the entire infrastructure."

"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."

"Valuable features are auto-scaling and load balancing."

"TOSCA model allows modeling the application rather than the automation. It is a machine-readable representation of the application and its infrastructure, which can be used for other things too, not just for the orchestration (e.g. enterprise architecture big picture, who connects to whom)."

"Cloudify provides the infrastructure-as-code, as well as operational action capabilities (orchestrated startups or upgrades, and more)."

More Cloudify pros

Cons

"AWS should provide more resources, examples, and tutorials."

"There is a sync issue within the organization. It is important that the system syncs automatically instead of requiring me to manually choose sync options."

"The integration with other AWS functions has room for improvement."

"The process of closing an AWS account using Control Tower needs improvements to simplify it, especially when managing multiple accounts."

"There aren't any additional features that I feel are missing. However, it's worth noting that Control Tower seems to function as a layer utilizing standard AWS products in the background. Occasionally, the interface may appear less streamlined, with changes in layout based on the underlying products being used. While this doesn't impact functionality, having a more standardized user interface, irrespective of the background products, could enhance the user experience."

"There is a sync issue within the organization."

"The tool's setup is very technical. Its pricing can be cheaper."

"By making APIs and organizational units more centralized, it would be simpler to pinpoint the source of issues in case of a breach and would ultimately benefit everyone involved."

More AWS Control Tower cons

"Error handling could be improved; GUI is lacking with respect to user privileges and connectivity."

"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."

"Install of the product itself could be improved and I would like to see better event monitoring."

"The solution is a bit of a headache because mistakes happen in the blueprint every time we deploy and they require modifications."

"Unlike the Docker environment, Cloudify takes time for configuration and its learning curve."

"The upgrading process could be simplified."

"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 cost is reasonable, but there are opportunities for improvement in terms of pricing for larger enterprises."

"AWS Control Tower is not really that expensive."

"The solution is free."

"It operates on a pay-as-you-go model, meaning we are charged only for the services we actively use within it."

"The pricing is efficient, not overly expensive but also not very cheap."

"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."

"It is expensive but it is an investment in my opinion."

"The pay-as-you-go model ensures you're only charged for what you use, which offers great flexibility for different types of companies."

More AWS Control Tower pricing and cost advice

"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

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Educational Organization

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Retailer

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about AWS Control Tower?

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...

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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.

See all answers

What needs improvement with AWS Control Tower?

There is a sync issue within the organization. It is important that the system syncs automatically instead of requiring me to manually choose sync options.

See all answers

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Comparisons

AWS Trusted Advisor vs AWS Control Tower

Compared 37% of the time

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control vs AWS Control Tower

Compared 36% of the time

OpenNebula vs AWS Control Tower

Compared 14% of the time

Morpheus vs AWS Control Tower

Compared 14% of the time

More AWS Control Tower Competitors

Morpheus vs Cloudify

Compared 45% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs Cloudify

Compared 26% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Cloudify

Compared 16% of the time

IBM Turbonomic vs Cloudify

Compared 13% of the time

More Cloudify Competitors

Product Reports

AWS Control Tower

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Overview

AWS Control Tower offers the easiest way to set up and govern a new, secure, multi-account AWS environment. It establishes a landing zone that is based on best-practices blueprints, and enables governance using guardrails you can choose from a pre-packaged list.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Cloudify is an open-source orchestration-first cloud management platform. The solution allows applications to efficiently run across multiple cloud or data center platforms for premium multi-cloud infrastructure automation and orchestration. It provides infrastructure automation using environment as a service (EaaS) technology to deploy and continuously manage any cloud, private data center, or Kubernetes service from one central point while leveraging existing toolchains.

Cloudify Product Highlights

Fully customizable (white label, add, and modify widgets)
Create a custom view per business units, groups, user role
Easy integration with any 3rd-party/homegrown portal
Identify and eliminate task execution failures via a visual interface
Easy service composition that allows you to create new or update existing services
Switch between code and topology views
Import existing automation templates and scripts into Cloudify and automatically convert them into certified environments.
Intelligent and declarative engine that automates the entire lifecycle management
Intuitive UX and dashboards allowing complete visibility and control over usage, behavior, faults, and events of application/network services.

Cloudify Features

Cloudify has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Elastic caching
Post-deployment automation
Deployment monitoring
Service catalog
Real-time code validation
Plugins (Kubernetes, Ansible, AWS Cloud Formation, Azure ARM, Terraform)
Advanced Kubernetes management UI
Multi cluster action
Governance and compliance
Self-serve experience

Cloudify Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing Cloudify. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Operation agility: Cloudify gives your organization and DevOps teams the ability to react to resource needs, evolve, and adapt quickly over time.

Self-service: Cloudify provides a self-service catalog and portal framework for cloud automation and cloud orchestration to provide a helpful and intuitive experience for environments, apps, and services setup and management.

Real-time visibility: Cloudify enables you to visually track all task executions. By implementing Cloudify, you can monitor progress and status of each execution step on Cloudify’s cloud orchestration platform, identify and eliminate task execution failures via a visual interface, and you can also apply management actions, such as stop, correct, and resume, quickly.

Reduce design and configuration time: The Cloudify solution has a visual editor, allowing greater visibility into blueprint structure and dependencies, and drag-n-drop service composition that helps you leverage shared resources and components for ultimate open-source infrastructure and cloud orchestration.

Fast deployment: Another benefit of Cloudify is that it helps speed up deployments of your test/dev/production environments from your CI/CD.

Enables continuous updates: With Cloudify, you have continuous updates for your production environments. Cloudify enables your organization to monitor health, heal failures, update patches, and scale resources without any environment downtime.

Governance: By using the Cloudify solution, you can accommodate governance changes and can scale and update operations according to your certified architecture.

Easier to manage Kubernetes: Cloudify makes it simple for you to manage multi Kubernetes clusters via service orchestration, enabling you to manage the application service itself rather than just its infrastructure.

Cost optimization: With Cloudify, you can control costs by employing end-to-end modeling of the entire infrastructure. The solution offers cost-saving policies, which include the decommissioning of formerly complex services and resources.

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers

Proximus Partner Communications (Israel) VMware NTT Data Metaswitch Spirent Communications Lumina Networks Atos Fortinet

AWS Control Tower vs. Cloudify