BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management vs OpenNebula comparison

BMC Helix and OpenNebula are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. BMC Helix is ranked #44, while OpenNebula is ranked #8 with an average rating of 7.5. BMC Helix holds a 0.9% mindshare in CM, compared to OpenNebula’s 3.7% mindshare. Additionally, 80% of BMC Helix users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of OpenNebula users who would recommend it.

BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management

Read 5 BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management reviews

734 Views
360 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

OpenNebula

Read 15 OpenNebula reviews

2,852 Views
2,738 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management

OpenNebula

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management and OpenNebula are competing cloud management platforms. BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management seems to have the upper hand due to its extensive support and scalable solutions, although OpenNebula's rich feature set and perceived value make it a strong contender.

Features: BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management includes predictive analytics, policy-driven resource allocation, and a multi-cloud portal. OpenNebula offers strong flexibility, hybrid and edge computing support, and a user-friendly UI.

Room for Improvement: BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management could enhance user interface design, simplify integration complexities, and reduce initial setup costs. OpenNebula could expand support documentation, enhance customer service response time, and optimize costs for larger scale deployments.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management provides structured deployment models, robust integration capabilities, and comprehensive support services. OpenNebula emphasizes a straightforward deployment process with agile customer support, catering to environments needing rapid deployment.

Pricing and ROI: BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management involves higher setup costs but offers substantial ROI with efficient resource management. OpenNebula provides cost-effective initial setups with quick returns due to its open-source model, saving costs over time.

To learn more, read our detailed BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management vs. OpenNebula Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management vs. OpenNebula

December 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

BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management

Ranking in Cloud Management

44th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

5.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Monitoring Software (48th)

OpenNebula

Ranking in Cloud Management

8th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management is 0.9%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenNebula is 3.7%, down from 8.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
OpenNebula	3.7%
BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management	0.9%
Other	95.4%

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

Entprssol67

Enterprise Solution Architect at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Helps design blueprints in a cloud environment but the support is a major problem

One of the major problems is that support is not so good. I used to have a support expert in Spain but they left two years ago. BMC doesn't invest a lot in network automation but network automation is a major point in CLM. There aren't any experts here in Europe, maybe they have in America, I don't know. The main problem is the support in Europe. We had a lot of problems with the people who got put on our cases. The agents that we were assigned to were not so capable. They wanted to replicate the problem. If you have an incident, it takes a lot of time to troubleshoot the problem. The incident support is not so good. The technicians don't know the platform well. BMC doesn't want to invest in CLM. Two years ago we had a lot of problems. Maybe BMC realized that CLM is an end of life product.

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FOURES Jean-Philippe

Products Manager at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Reliable, simple to manage, and offers great technical support

The support of VXLAN fits with our network management. Thanks to this we can propose mixed solutions using virtual resources on OpenNebula and bare metal servers hosted in our facilities linked to each other on the sale network. This use case is very useful when some applications need bare metal power (Kubernetes workers, huge databases, AI models computations, et cetera). The cluster management is very useful for splitting our different clusters (mutual vs dedicated). We can manage deployments and capacity planning without pain. The API is also really simple and it helped us to develop the Terraform provider to manage OpenNebula like any other cloud infrastructure.

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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

"Assesses change impact or completes an audit using multiple dashboard views."

"Automates Java EE Application Deployment from an SCM system."

"By allowing end users to request their own services, the request process for systems is much quicker and more accurate."

"You can tie together your public and private cloud infrastructure into a "single pane of glass"."

"Integrates role-based access control with pre-configured policies for CIS, DISA, HIPAA, PCI, SOX, NIST, and SCAP documentation and remediation."

"Supports unattended installs and image-based, script-based, or template-based provisioning."

"CLM has a multi-cloud portal because they have the resources to implement in various environments in various ports."

"The most valuable feature of OpenNebula is that it scales very well."

"It makes maintenance very easy and stress-free for our teams."

"What's best about OpenNebula that people like is that it's easy to deploy. It's also easy to manage. It's interesting because people choose OpenNebula over other solutions because of the ease of management."

"OpenNebula has very good integration with SAP Storage."

"The live migration feature has been great and is something we use very often."

"For the entire data center, as a private cloud, I believe that user management, expert management, and the virtual data center is completely magic for the users."

"The solution provides templates for configurations that can easily be exchanged to VMs."

"It's easy to integrate OpenNebula with our IT systems."

More OpenNebula pros

Cons

"One of the major problems is that support is not so good."

"The installation and configuration can be tricky due to it being built on Remedy."

"Needs integrations with other providers to provide a custom public cloud environment."

"The front-facing API can be improved to support lots of requests when the platform is huge with lots of virtual resources."

"Most of the competitors are offering some sort of billing software to transform their installation to work as a small-sized public cloud, but those offerings from OpenNebula are still missing."

"It should have a simple REST API like most other tools. It's the industry standard format. An XML-RPC API gives you an XML document that you have to convert and then do something with that. REST API endpoint provides outputs in a JSON document. I would also like to see support for user data or heat templates, which OpenStack offers, but OpenNebula doesn't have this yet."

"As with all enterprise software licensing, the pricing is not intuitive and must be negotiated; grandfathered contracts are better than anything offered today."

"The web interface could be better. It's not very difficult to use, but there's room for enhancement."

"An area for improvement in OpenNebula is the number of features it has. The solution doesn't have that many cloud features compared to other solutions. You'd say, "Okay, simplicity over a rich feature list?" Some say, "No, I need a big machine or a cloud interface for my customers to manage resources. I don't have to go and do it for them." Some people do it that way, and it works, but I'd like to improve the limited features in OpenNebula."

"They have been saying for the past two and a half years that they would develop a feature to hot-add RAM and CPU, but it does not work."

"There are small things that are hard. For example, making sure that it is going to be installable on public clouds."

More OpenNebula cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"The solution is open source so is free."

"We use the Community Edition, rather than the Enterprise Edition."

"OpenNebula gives good value for money."

"The licensing for OpenNebula used to be free, but now it's no longer free. A customer contacted me asking to move to another provider because of the changes in the licensing terms for OpenNebula. I have no information on how much the OpenNebula license is because the customer pays for it, and I only do the integration."

"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."

"OpenNebuoa has recently come up with a new subscription model that is economical and a lot of new customers are choosing this as it is an easy subscription model."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

10%

University

10%

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	7
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	3

Questions from the Community

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Earn 20 points

What do you like most about OpenNebula?

The live migration feature has been great and is something we use very often.

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What needs improvement with OpenNebula?

The web interface could be better. It's not very difficult to use, but there's room for enhancement. Another area for improvement is the integration with hardware to manage the lower layer of the n...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for OpenNebula?

Previously, we were using VMware, but recently, we've started using OpenNebula for cloud management. As a big cloud provider, it helps give customers increased control over their clusters. We use L...

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Comparisons

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Compared 19% of the time

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Compared 15% of the time

Pandora FMS vs BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management

Compared 15% of the time

CloudSphere vs BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management

Compared 12% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management

Compared 10% of the time

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CloudStack vs OpenNebula

Compared 34% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs OpenNebula

Compared 13% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs OpenNebula

Compared 7% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs OpenNebula

Compared 7% of the time

Morpheus vs OpenNebula

Compared 7% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Management

January 2026

Download BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management product report

Buyer's Guide

OpenNebula

January 2026

Download OpenNebula product report

Also Known As

BMC CLM

No data available

Overview

BMC's cloud management platform drives digital innovation with agile, full-stack service provisioning across cloud and traditional platforms. BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management scales easily while integrating with essential compliance and governance policies to reduce risk.

BMC Helix

OpenNebula provides the most simple but feature-rich and flexible solution for the comprehensive management of virtualized data centers to enable private, public and hybrid IaaS clouds. OpenNebula interoperability makes cloud an evolution by leveraging existing IT assets, protecting your investments, and avoiding vendor lock-in.

OpenNebula is a turnkey enterprise-ready solution that includes all the features needed to provide an on-premises (private) cloud offering, and to offer public cloud services.

OpenNebula

Sample Customers

JDA Software, Morningstar, Orange Business Services, Wipro

Akamai, BBC, Fermilab, Terradue, Surf Sara, Produban, Netways, ESA, China Mobile, BlackBerry, Deloitte, Fuze, Telefonica, Trivago, Nokia, Encore Tech, Beeks.

Buyer's Guide

BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management vs. OpenNebula

December 2025

Free Report: BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management vs. OpenNebula

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