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Azure Stack HCI vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 31, 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
3.8
Azure Stack HCI offers strong ROI by enhancing cost-efficiency, performance, stakeholder engagement, and understanding beyond IT domains.
Sentiment score
6.8
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance reduced costs, improved stability, and streamlined operations, quickly achieving substantial ROI and enhancing management efficiency.
There has been some return on investment in terms of just time usability and reduction of footprint.
Solution Architect DC at Natilik
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
4.8
Azure Stack HCI support receives mixed reviews, with excellent resolution praised but delays and expertise issues causing dissatisfaction.
Sentiment score
8.5
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's 24/7 customer service is praised for quick responses, proactive monitoring, and expertise despite language barriers.
They have more advantages than VMware, especially for containerization, and they provide good support as well.
Iinfrastructure Architect at Ministry Of Justice
Not every support team member is very knowledgeable about Azure Stack HCI, creating delays in resolution.
IT Solution Architect at a educational organization with 11-50 employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
5.3
Azure Stack HCI provides scalable, reliable cloud integration, supporting multiple nodes and configurations for efficient application scaling without performance issues.
Sentiment score
7.9
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance offers scalable options for SMBs, supporting expansion through nodes, RAM, or storage to align with cloud strategies.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
5.9
Azure Stack HCI is stable and scalable, built on Hyper-V, yet needs improved documentation and integration with some idiosyncrasies.
Sentiment score
8.7
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance offers exceptional stability, zero downtime, excellent support, and ease of use, ensuring reliable performance.
It does not feel like a well-oiled machine yet, with too many idiosyncrasies and insufficient documentation and integration, feeling more like software that is still in beta.
IT Solution Architect at a educational organization with 11-50 employees
After achieving good maturity, it became easier.
Iinfrastructure Architect at Ministry Of Justice
 

Room For Improvement

Azure Stack HCI needs enhancements in networking, integration, ease of use, pricing, encryption, and deployment process for better performance.
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance needs hardware, software, and management improvements, with focus on Linux support and streamlined scalability.
Hyper V seems to lag behind compared to VMware.
Solution Architect DC at Natilik
There are discrepancies between managing VMs through Azure Arc versus managing them directly, as changes made not using the Azure Arc integration are not easily reflected in Azure Arc.
IT Solution Architect at a educational organization with 11-50 employees
There could be improvements with Azure Stack HCI regarding the license and price, as they have significantly higher prices compared to other competitors.
Iinfrastructure Architect at Ministry Of Justice
 

Setup Cost

Azure Stack HCI costs mainly involve OS licenses and hardware, with potential cost offsets via Windows Server Datacenter rental.
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance offers competitive, cost-effective pricing, significantly cheaper than competitors like Nutanix, with transparent, all-inclusive fees.
 

Valuable Features

Azure Stack HCI enhances hybrid cloud with efficient networking, Kubernetes support, cloud integration, and cost-effective, robust edge computing.
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance provides ease of use, high availability, flexible deployment, and cost-effective, reliable performance with excellent support.
Azure Stack HCI has been very beneficial for disaster recovery operations.
Iinfrastructure Architect at Ministry Of Justice
The integration with Azure using Azure Arc is excellent.
Solution Architect DC at Natilik
 

Categories and Ranking

Azure Stack HCI
Ranking in HCI
13th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
StarWind HyperConverged App...
Ranking in HCI
15th
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
66
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2025, in the HCI category, the mindshare of Azure Stack HCI is 3.5%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is 1.2%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
HCI Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Azure Stack HCI3.5%
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance1.2%
Other95.3%
HCI
 

Featured Reviews

MC
IT Solution Architect at a educational organization with 11-50 employees
Experience with seamless cost-saving capacity, though integration and support need refinement
An area that could be possibly improved with Azure Stack HCI is the stretched cluster functionality, which was included in version 23H2 for disaster recovery purposes. However, this functionality has been put on hold for the next release, and Microsoft has decided to discontinue stretched cluster technology completely, which is disappointing. They promise to bring back a significant or similar solution in a future release, but currently, there is no such functionality for stretched clusters between two sites in the latest versions of Azure Stack HCI, which poses a problem as we were looking forward to utilizing it. The integration with Azure Arc provides a unified management experience, but I find it to be fairly clunky. The integration exists, but it is not smooth or very easy to use. While they've started to integrate the two, the integration lacks maturity and makes it difficult to manage effectively. There are discrepancies between managing VMs through Azure Arc versus managing them directly, as changes made not using the Azure Arc integration are not easily reflected in Azure Arc. For instance, if I have an Arc-enabled VM and make changes to it outside the Arc interface, those changes may not be registered directly in Azure Arc, leading to issues in fully viewing the status and configuration of VMs depending on the management tool used. You either manage VMs fully through Arc or not at all because mixing the two methods results in incomplete visibility and inconsistencies.
Russ Le Puill - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at St Peter's Church of England Aided School
Proactive support with improved speed and resilience
There was a long delay with shipping, which we weren't expecting, but we were kept updated throughout. It wasn't made clear to us that we needed to provide our own SFP modules to connect to our infrastructure, so that could have been a bit clearer. It would be amazing if there was, perhaps, a more automated process for updating the hosts themselves, although the maintenance mode works well. Our StarWind command center doesn't seem to have all the options available currently, which support is investigating for us.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Educational Organization
17%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business50
Midsize Enterprise22
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Stack HCI?
This solution costs €10 per core per month. The whole stack is free if you are renting Windows Server Datacenter.
What needs improvement with Azure Stack HCI?
There could be improvements with Azure Stack HCI regarding the license and price, as they have significantly higher prices compared to other competitors. The end-to-end encryption provided by Azure...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
It's not the cheapest, however, the solution works incredibly well and is so simple to licence and maintain.
What needs improvement with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
There was a long delay with shipping, which we weren't expecting, but we were kept updated throughout. It wasn't made clear to us that we needed to provide our own SFP modules to connect to our inf...
What is your primary use case for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
We desperately needed to update yet downsize our data centre. We had six hosts for only approximately 14 or so Virtual machines and two old SANs. All of this was running on 10+ year-old refurbished...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Sears Home and Franchise Business
Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Stack HCI vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
879,259 professionals have used our research since 2012.