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Cisco CloudCenter [EOL] vs Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Cisco CloudCenter [EOL]
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
110
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (3rd), Cloud Management (1st), Virtualization Management Tools (2nd), Cloud Cost Management (2nd), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (6th)
 

Featured Reviews

Boingotlo Molefhe - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps with data management and has a straightforward initial setup process
We use the product for demonstration, device provisioning, and data management They should provide an entire cloud offering, from architecture to network security features. We have been using Cisco CloudCenter for a couple of months. I rate the product’s stability a nine out of ten. I rate the…
Phani Venkata Sai BKD - PeerSpot reviewer
Manages hybrid infrastructure seamlessly with flexible cluster scaling and comprehensive oversight
The most important aspect of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is that it helps us manage the infrastructure as a hyperconverged infrastructure in HCI mode. If I have different physical servers, I can map them into a cluster and manage the storage together. It provides flexibility to make use of storage in a clustered format instead of using it in an individual storage endpoint. We have the flexibility to have Nutanix-based licensing based on the core model, instead of having a specific cost on the cluster. The costing on a core model gives customers flexibility to add multiple cores to a single physical host and adjust the infrastructure accordingly, and we can scale up the cluster as needed. While other cloud providers, AWS or Azure, are mostly into cloud-based solutions, and Azure has introduced Azure Stack HCI for managing on-premises infrastructure, Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) provides flexibility from day one. We can manage both on-premises and Azure solutions using a single pane of glass, eliminating the need to navigate different windows or screens. It provides a comprehensive view of the infrastructure and highlights specific areas through alerts, giving us good visibility of infrastructure conditions.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution includes a lot of features and is useful because you can configure all the way down to ports."
"Cisco CloudCenter's scalability is good."
"The initial setup process is straightforward."
"The initial setup is fairly straightforward if you have a basic setup."
"Cisco has a lot of published information and documentation that helps users understand the product and its offering very well."
"The solution is agile and it has APIs for integration."
"You can scale it easily."
"Upgrades are very simple as well because they've allowed us to get updates directly in the CloudCenter Suite manager. If you need to do an upgrade to your setup afterward, you just push a button and it rolls out the parts and retires the old ones. It's seamless and very simple compared to what we've done before."
"The product is pretty intuitive and easy to learn."
"In six years, I can recall just a couple instances, three in total, where we've experienced outages due to hardware or firmware issues during upgrades, but none of these incidents noticeably affected us."
"The tool is easy to use."
"There is less management for the team than before, so there is a complete gain of time. It freed up our staff's time for other work. This is something that is important for our company."
"The self-service capabilities allow us to orchestrate our deployments without writing code, and they also use artificial intelligence to improve our security posture."
"The fact that these are non-technical people — they're experts in their fields but they're definitely not technical — and they can just log in to the portal and select the resource that they believe they need, and manage it themselves, speaks to the ease of use. It shows them their live costs, etc., as they're spending. The fact that they can do that without any problems, or having to engage the IT teams, is a true testament to it. There's no need for any user training at all."
"The customer service and technical support of the platform has been great."
"You can see the health status of the clusters in one view. There is one view of the health of your systems which helps you to have an overview any time you have a problem. You can dig into the tools that Prism Pro has to give you all the options to take on the problem. You can monitor things and manage the cluster really easily."
 

Cons

"For many clients, the main problem with the solution is the price. Cisco is very expensive. If they could somehow make the pricing more competitive, that would be a big draw."
"The improvement I would like to see is not one thing particular to CloudCenter. I'd say it's more of a message that the system is still using a lot of the different products and if they would all just fit better together, they all could be faster together."
"Improvements are needed in UI and multi-tenancy for this solution."
"The solution needs to be more simple."
"They can add some of those features to make the platform more usable for different backgrounds and developer skills."
"You don't get all the solution's benefits if you have older switches."
"The tool should improve its security on the XDR part."
"I'm not a big fan of CloudCenter. I don't have anything against it, however, the on-premise version has been so hard to upgrade and maintain."
"I still remember it was a struggle when we configured the initial network setup, that part was a little bit confusing about how exactly it works, we have two different Nutanix technicians who were on-site to help on the configuration. But both of them could not get right the first time, and we had to reset and start over again on both systems."
"We have had our fair share of issues while upgrading early on, but the process now is working flawlessly."
"In terms of how Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) can be improved, there are some functionalities in the newer releases and upgrades that are not available in Prism Central, which lacks the newest versions."
"There is room for improvement in making the solution easier still. If you don't know Calm, it's not so easy to use... It is a really good solution for doing simple tasks, but it's not a good solution for complex tasks."
"NCM's analytics could be better because we're not getting an accurate analysis of our virtual machines, and we're over-provisioning some of them."
"The machine learning can be improved. There are a lot of false positives at times. For example, I'm actually looking at some alerts right now, that some service was restarted multiple times. It is like the same alert, spammed over and over again. But really, it turns out that that event didn't happen."
"The solution's virtualization could be even better."
"NCM's pricing structure is confusing and difficult to understand."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's pricing is expensive."
"The tool's pricing is balanced with the market."
"The solution is extremely expensive and has additional fees for things like monitoring."
"Don't unlicense your Prism licensing. Pro is the strict minimum for real infrastructure. Go with at least Pro and not with the starter. Ultimate was the best choice for me."
"We have the ultimate license, so I don't know what it would cost individually."
"Its price is correct."
"Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is cheaper than VMware and other products."
"Nutanix Cloud Manager is an expensive solution."
"It's cost-effective. It's not necessarily cheap, but it's also not inordinately expensive. It comes down to how much you use it to offset some of the costs."
"Nutanix is really smart to understand that the most important fact is the value to the customer, not the price tag. While you do get some sticker shock sometimes, as soon as you show this and you prove the value, all of a sudden, it looks exceptionally affordable."
"The tool is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Computer Software Company
29%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
Government
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise23
Large Enterprise64
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cisco CloudCenter?
The initial setup process is straightforward.
What needs improvement with Cisco CloudCenter?
They should provide an entire cloud offering, from architecture to network security features.
What is your primary use case for Cisco CloudCenter?
We use the product for demonstration, device provisioning, and data management.
Which set of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) features do you find to be the most useful?
For me, the features related to cost savings are the best part of NCM. Of course, the whole product is worth using and when it comes to cloud management, there is a reason why it is favored by so m...
Are the setup process and further maintenance of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) difficult?
When I came into my current organization, NCM was already set up. According to the team that dealt with it, the product was fairly easy to set up. Compared to other products, our IT rates are set u...
Is Nutanix Cloud Manager’s Intelligent Operations feature effective?
Yes, this is a highly effective feature and the rebranding only made things better as they introduced more improvements. You can benefit from Zero coding task automation Automated optimization Tic...
 

Also Known As

CliQr, CliQr CloudCenter
Nutanix Cloud Manager Intelligent Operations, Nutanix Cloud Manager Self-Service, Nutanix Cloud Management Cost Governance, Nutanix Cloud Manager Security Central
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

NTT, Baylor College of Medicine (BCM), CollabNet, Pratt & Miller, PZFlex
JetBlue, International Speedway Corporation, Volkswagen SAIC, Brighton and Hove City Council, Foresters Financial, Janus International Group, Cloud Comrade, Serco
Find out what your peers are saying about Nutanix, Broadcom, IBM and others in Cloud Management. Updated: October 2025.
873,003 professionals have used our research since 2012.