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Cisco Crosswork Network Automation vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

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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 Crosswork Network Aut...
Ranking in Network Automation
8th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Aria Automation
Ranking in Network Automation
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
172
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (3rd), Configuration Management (10th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (27th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (7th)
 

Featured Reviews

Thu Al-Faqar Salah - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at V2X
Automation has simplified multi-vendor VPN provisioning and protects changes with safe rollback
I have performed automation for Layer 2 and Layer 3 VPN services provisioning during routing changes. In the data center, I completed provisioning tasks for Cisco switches using scripting in the YANG model and APIs. I deployed configuration remotely for approximately 400 to 500 switches, implementing automation instead of configuring devices individually. I also use Cisco Crosswork Network Automation Health Insights and change for streaming telemetry and KPI monitoring. The features have significantly helped decrease the complexity of using CLI commands. Using the YANG model and other tools for Cisco monitoring has been invaluable. Closed-loop automation and Health Insights have provided tremendous value through multi-vendor abstractions, including network elements and NEDs on YANG and NETCONF models. This has benefited my Layer 3 VPN configuration, and for the underlying commands, whether the target device is running Cisco IOS XR, Junos, or another platform, there are no restrictions between IOS types. Transactional rollback and multi-vendor support with closed-loop telemetry have been critical features. If a mass change fails on one device, the system cleanly reverses everything, ensuring I never end up with a half-configured device. This is an important capability in networking.
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

"Cisco Crosswork Network Automation positively impacts my organization by simplifying deployment complexity, providing stable scalability, and managing thousands of network devices without performance bottlenecks."
"Cisco Crosswork Network Automation has structurally lowered my organization's OPEX by basically eliminating manual traffic re-routing tasks, and has reduced maintenance windows roughly by half."
"Scalability is an exceptional strength of Cisco Crosswork Network Automation, as it is built for service provider scale, easily handles tens of thousands of devices, and uses a layered services architecture with microservices clusters and distributed data gateways to push thousands of concurrent changes without bottlenecks, which is incredibly impressive."
"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."
"It has reduced provisioning time from roughly three to six weeks to about an hour on a private cloud, and about 25 minutes on public cloud."
"The most valuable features for us are capacity planning as well as environment life management; putting in specific templates and workflows that we know are secure. That solidifies the environments that we're in or that are being provisioned. We also know that every environment being provisioned has a lifespan. It affects capacity, so it's great for budgeting, from my perspective, and good for my team."
"We have seen significant ROI, as we used to have physical servers that took 90 days to get a server ordered, bought, and installed, and now with virtualization we have it down to a couple of minutes for customers to have a server."
"It's extremely convenient to be able to spin something up and be able to work on other things, because it's already done it, making my workload lighter."
"The product’s most valuable feature is its ability to provide environmental security."
"We have scaled from two servers to about 140 servers in a very short period of time, which would have been a nightmare had it not been for the SaltStack configurations."
"We monitor the configurations against CIS standards. We run CIS benchmarks and maintain configurations with higher CIS values for each server."
 

Cons

"I think the biggest improvement needed for Cisco Crosswork Network Automation is its multi-vendor support, which needs to be more robust."
"However, there are some areas that could benefit from improvement."
"Cisco Crosswork Network Automation needs improved API documentation, an expense integration guide, and code samples to simplify custom script development for DevOps and NetOps teams."
"There is a lot of information to go over and it’s hard to keep it all straight."
"We found some intermittent issues with the Windows minion connection."
"I rate the solution at seven out of ten because I don't believe it's a perfect solution."
"We do not utilize the orchestration capabilities."
"The high price of the tool is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"VMware needs to make it to where it is not as custom. Right now, you spend a lot of time making the services work. In order to get it up and running initially, that takes time."
"We have seen couple of bugs."
"It is not intuitive or user-friendly. It's complicated as heck."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"There is confusion between licensing levels. There are three different licensed versions of vRealize Automation, and there are different things which can happen in each of them."
"They should provide one license for all the sub-products."
"This is an expensive product and the high price is starting to become an issue for us."
"The cost of the solution is reasonable for us. Although it is relatively high, we prioritize stability and integration over cost."
"A simplified version for small businesses would be good."
"The solution has helped to increase infrastructure, agility, speed, and provisioning in the time to market."
"It is an open-source product."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Outsourcing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
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

No data available
VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat, Cisco, Broadcom and others in Network Automation. Updated: September 2026.
915,341 professionals have used our research since 2012.