BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

BMC and VMware are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. BMC is ranked #39, while VMware is ranked #1 with an average rating of 7.8. BMC holds a 0.7% mindshare in CM, compared to VMware’s 11.8% mindshare. Additionally, 80% of BMC users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of VMware users who would recommend it.

BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management

Read 5 BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management reviews

239 Views
117 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Automation

Read 170 VMware Aria Automation reviews

4,998 Views
2,182 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management

VMware Aria Automation

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management and VMware Aria Automation are competing in the cloud automation and management space. VMware Aria Automation has an upper hand due to its comprehensive feature set, although BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management may offer advantages in pricing and support satisfaction.

Features: BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management is noted for its robust integration capabilities, effective resource management, and strong multi-cloud portal, which makes it suitable for resource optimization. VMware Aria Automation, on the other hand, provides advanced orchestration, integration with several platforms, and a versatile automation framework, focusing on extensibility and detailed automation.

Room for Improvement: BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management could enhance its automation capabilities and integration with newer third-party applications. It may also benefit from an intuitive user interface and expanded reporting features. VMware Aria Automation could improve by simplifying its deployment processes, enhancing its UI for administrators, and expanding support for more hybrid cloud solutions.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management is appreciated for its straightforward deployment process and reliable customer service, making it ideal for organizations seeking a quick setup. VMware Aria Automation provides extensive customization support, though its deployment can be more complex, appealing to those needing detailed setup options.

Pricing and ROI: BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management is considered cost-effective due to lower initial setup costs and favorable ROI outcomes. VMware Aria Automation, despite higher upfront costs, offers substantial long-term returns owing to its advanced automation capabilities and feature-rich offerings.

To learn more, read our detailed BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management vs. VMware Aria Automation Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management vs. VMware Aria Automation

June 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

39th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

5.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Monitoring Software (44th)

VMware Aria Automation

Ranking in Cloud Management

1st

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

170

Ranking in other categories

Configuration Management (7th), Network Automation (3rd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (17th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (4th)

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management is 0.7%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 11.8%, up from 11.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

Entprssol67

Enterprise Solution Architect at Engineering Ingegneria Informatica SPA

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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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.

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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

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

"It is also intuitive and user-friendly... With vRealize, we can have a Help Desk individual, who might not be that techy, provision the different elements quite easily, with no almost training at all."

"vRealize automation stability is pretty good. They are always fixing bugs. The product team is doing a great job of addressing any issues that we might have."

"The automation functionality has been most valuable. With a click of a button, we are able to automate provisioning, the build of new hardware and apply patches. These are all extremely important and differentiated tasks that can be automated in SaltStack."

"The most valuable features are that it's multi-tenant and the ability for scale."

"Scalability is probably the best part about it. You can take things that you've already defined, that you've already built once, and build them again multiple times, without significant effort."

"The most valuable feature is, instead of doing the VMotion manually, we have automated everything with a script, using vRealize. That means I don't need to think about things like compatibility. The system will do everything for me and just give me a report."

"The most valuable feature is the portal where you can assign permissions to specific people to request specific items in the catalog and allow them to provision things for themselves. Or it enables them to request different services that you can create through vRO and vRA."

"The setup is getting better with each version."

More VMware Aria Automation pros

Cons

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

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

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

"Normally, on the first call to technical support, you don't get the right person. The log analysis takes a long time. This is something which should be improved."

"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."

"vRO can get out of sync with vRA. We've run into every once in a while."

"The high price of the tool is an area of concern where improvements are required."

"Our primary challenge is upgrading the product to the latest version. This process requires careful communication with the vendor to mitigate risks."

"Most of the time the upgrade experience has been good but sometimes things break after upgrading. For example, some API codes stopped working."

"The stability on the 6.2 version is very bad. It crashes. VMware tech support knows the IIS component is a bit buggy."

"It's not a smooth upgrade process. For a DTA environment, which is very simple, it is a smooth process, but for our production environment, which is quite enhanced and has a lot of dependencies, it's not easy at all, and it results in a lot of errors... It takes a lot of retries to upgrade which ends up being costly."

More VMware Aria Automation cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"SaltStack is an open-source product."

"VMware Aria Automation is expensive."

"The solution has helped to increase infrastructure, agility, speed, and provisioning in the time to market."

"I would rate the pricing a ten out of ten, with ten being very expensive."

"It is an expensive product. After VMware's acquisition by Broadcom, there was a rise in the price of VMware Aria Automation."

"The solution is free of cost."

"A simplified version for small businesses would be good."

"I'm very interested in the integration with Puppet. However, my organization doesn't have the funding for something like Puppet right now. If VMware would integrate that feature set (Puppet) into vRA. That would be very awesome."

More VMware Aria Automation pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

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Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

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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Compared 6% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Management

May 2025

Download BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Automation

May 2025

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Also Known As

BMC CLM

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

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

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

JDA Software, Morningstar, Orange Business Services, Wipro

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

Buyer's Guide

BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management vs. VMware Aria Automation

June 2025

Free Report: BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management vs. VMware Aria Automation

Find out what your peers are saying about BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management vs. VMware Aria Automation and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.

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