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Cisco CloudCenter [EOL] vs VMware Aria Automation 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
VMware Aria Automation
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
172
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (3rd), Configuration Management (8th), Network Automation (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (20th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (6th)
 

Featured Reviews

ZT
Director Of Technology at a non-profit with 11-50 employees
Useful features for configuring down to ports but extremely expensive
Our company uses the solution's GUI interface to configure and monitor ports. We look at usage and determine if there are any issues.  Cisco is a very qualified company and has been in business for many, many years.  The solution is useful because you can configure all the way down to ports.  You…
VasilisGiannitsiotis - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT at ITSolutions
Automation has streamlined complex financial workflows but still needs more intuitive orchestration
Something to improve in VMware Aria Automation would be related to VCF 9, as I do not know what it is trying to bring because they exposed it as the solution of everything. So VCF 9 will bring VCF Automation and VCF Operations, the new product line of VMware. I have not seen what this brings or what else it includes. Maybe in the area of vRealize Orchestrator, this would be beneficial because VRO can do everything. Perhaps a more user-friendly way to use that tool would be helpful because the possibilities there are endless. I am looking for more user-friendly navigation in VMware Aria Automation.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The initial setup process is straightforward."
"However, for the rest of the solution, the product is doing a great job for what we require."
"The solution is very, very stable, it doesn't crash or freeze, and it's very reliable."
"The initial setup is fairly straightforward if you have a basic setup."
"I can define all components and create a blueprint for consumption across all services."
"The tool is really at the center of our whole digital transformation."
"The solution includes a lot of features and is useful because you can configure all the way down to ports."
"The solution is agile and it has APIs for integration."
"In terms of recovery, it takes only a tenth of the time that's required compared to a human element."
"If you're looking to deploy virtual machines through a self-service portal, this product works well."
"Upgrades have been extremely simple with their Lifecycle Manager product."
"We had a lot of config drift before, and this really helps us keep it on track. Speed to provision is probably our biggest, significant gain."
"Valuable features include integration with Infoblox, for IP management; and three-tier app deployment as one unified Blueprint."
"I personally spend a lot of time in vRealize Orchestrator, so being able to directly tie into the back end on the APIs, I find that to be what really is the most advantageous thing for me."
"The most valuable features are how it takes what we used to do in the same process as manual steps and automates them, such as creating servers, and it's self-service for creating your own virtual machine."
"The feature of automated balancing which implemented between two data centers solely for the purpose of a recovery plan is valuable."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"They can add some of those features to make the platform more usable for different backgrounds and developer skills."
"The solution needs to be more simple."
"Cisco can improve their product by being agnostic, not just specific to Cisco components but also supportive of other vendors."
"The product is very expensive."
"We're moving away from it due to the fact that they discontinued the product and introduced something new that does not fit our purpose."
"SaltStack's features are minimal."
"The stability needs a lot of work. The troubleshooting component of vRealize is a pain. The administration and the upgrades are not up to the mark. If they were able to improve on that, that would be the best thing and would make it much easier to run it in the enterprise."
"It needs to be more dynamic with variable customization to make new workloads more reliable. It also needs to be faster. We are exploring vRA version 8 right now and maybe what I'm requesting is available in the new version, but we haven't yet explored it fully."
"Minion-based deployment is not very smooth. Most of the time, many minions were in a stale state and didn't respond to the salt-master."
"The solution could be lighter. As an administrator, I would like to simplify the number of services I need to deploy. They took a significant step in that direction by removing all the Windows dependencies that we had in the past, but there are still a lot of services consuming resources."
"With distributed, installation is a pain. I have always gotten into errors when employing a distributed environment, which provides High Availability."
"This appeared by early estimation over engineered and under tested, and lost momentum."
"I would like to see more automation, more ways to automate automation tasks."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is extremely expensive and has additional fees for things like monitoring."
"The tool's pricing is expensive."
"The tool's pricing is balanced with the market."
"We have seen significant ROI. We used to have physical servers, it took 90 days to get a server, order it, buy it, and get it in. We have it down to 10 minutes, building a server with virtualization, and now that's too slow. So, we let the customer do it at their speed. Therefore, it is pretty much up in a couple of minutes and they have a server."
"I would rate it high because, compared to other solutions, VMware’s pricing is quite expensive. VMware products have become significantly more costly in recent years, leading to higher costs."
"From a budget point of view, the pricing is a bit on the higher side."
"The tool is expensive since it is an enterprise product."
"The solution is pretty expensive but provides good workload management."
"It is an expensive product. After VMware's acquisition by Broadcom, there was a rise in the price of VMware Aria Automation."
"vRealize automation really should be a front door to the whole VMware suite of products."
"The cost of the solution is reasonable for us. Although it is relatively high, we prioritize stability and integration over cost."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Construction Company
14%
Media Company
7%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
7%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise131
 

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...
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 ...
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 ...
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

NTT, Baylor College of Medicine (BCM), CollabNet, Pratt & Miller, PZFlex
Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
Find out what your peers are saying about Broadcom, Nutanix, IBM and others in Cloud Management. Updated: June 2026.
900,838 professionals have used our research since 2012.