Cisco UCS Director vs Cloudify comparison

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Cisco UCS Director

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Cloudify and Cisco UCS Director are competitors in infrastructure automation and management. Cloudify is favored for competitive pricing and responsive support, while Cisco UCS Director is preferred for its comprehensive feature set, appealing to those needing robust functionality.

Features: Cloudify supports multi-cloud orchestration, allowing seamless workflows across various environments. It excels in extensibility through custom plugins and offers infrastructure-as-code capabilities with operational actions. Cisco UCS Director integrates with a wide range of hardware and software, provides centralized management, and supports multi-cloud management, handling workloads across AWS, Azure, and on-premises platforms.

Room for Improvement: Cloudify could enhance its documentation and offer more streamlined user interfaces. Additional native integrations with larger cloud providers could fortify its standing. Similarly, expanding its community support may benefit users seeking rapid resolutions. Cisco UCS Director might improve by simplifying its deployment process, augmenting its GUI for greater user-friendliness, and reducing initial deployment complexity to encourage broader adoption. Enhanced user training resources could also serve as a beneficial addition.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cloudify is recognized for straightforward deployment and efficient customer service, enabling quick setup and query resolutions. Cisco UCS Director's deeper infrastructure integration renders deployment more complex, but its extensive documentation and professional support can mitigate deployment challenges, thanks to detailed support services.

Pricing and ROI: Cloudify is a cost-effective solution, offering quicker ROI due to lower setup costs and efficient deployment. Cisco UCS Director incurs higher initial expenses, justified by its extensive functionalities and long-term ROI for extensive data center management. The decision is often between immediate cost savings with Cloudify versus long-term operational gains with Cisco.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco UCS Director vs. Cloudify Report (Updated: July 2025).

Cisco UCS Director vs. Cloudify

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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

Cisco UCS Director

Ranking in Cloud Management

22nd

Average Rating

7.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Cloudify

Ranking in Cloud Management

29th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS Director is 1.3%, down from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cloudify is 1.9%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

Sunny Nair

Solution Architect and Senior Consultant at Keysight Technologies

Good multi-cloud management capability, but third-party and legacy integration needs improvement

Normally, UCS Director is used primarily for orchestration, but when we look at a non-Cisco data infrastructure components, the UCS Director needs a bit more improvement in terms of integration with third-party systems and with existing older systems. I feel that more development or a more integrated road map should be set up so that it becomes a common platform for any infrastructure. In the next release of this solution, I would like to see changes in the navigation controls of UCS Director. That would be helpful. Modifying the icons that are available for use, as well as virtualization aspects.

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Mark Wittling

Cloud Architect at Cox communications

Works very well for advanced service chaining requirements and has extremely advanced engineers for support

We had a manager who thought that Cloudify could be used as a replacement for Horizon in OpenStack, but we found that Cloudify lacked the user interface or GUI for doing multitenancy and basic platform management tasks. Cloudify was really good at launching, for example, firewalls and configuring them and doing service chaining and rather advanced things like that, but it didn't meet the requirements for a basic platform management solution. It is something that seems to work better as a bolt-on or an augmented solution. It is a bit mis-marketed as a Cloud Management solution. It is not that. It is more of a service orchestration and automation tool. It is very good at doing that, but it fails to meet basic platform management requirements. Once you have it running, you can't really do anything with it without writing code and scripts. It requires a full-time DevOps person to use it. We deployed a Palo Alto firewall with it. That's basically what the project was for us, and it worked flawlessly once we got it finished, but it took another 12 weeks to get all of the automation and everything else coded, tested, and working. There is certainly a place for this technology, but when we got rid of OpenStack and moved to VMware, we either had to go with the vRealize Automation Suite to do this kind of automation, or we had to find an alternative solution to manage the private cloud. So, we put Cloudify in, but we really couldn't find it useful for basic platform administration tasks.

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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

"The main feature of this solution is the integration with all the Cisco solutions and other vendors."

"Cisco UCS Director is straightforward to use, which we greatly appreciate."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the fabric sharing."

"The product is flexible and compact. It has a lot of features."

"This is a user-friendly solution that is very good and easy to use."

"The solution is helpful for centralized management."

"The reason we went with Cisco is that it comes at a very negligible cost as part of the BOQ. Compared to the competition's products, which are incredibly expensive, UCS Director is low-cost."

"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."

More Cisco UCS Director pros

"You can use only what you need. You can remove certain Cloudify functions from the framework to create a "minified" version of what you need. This might only consist of the messaging delivery system, and the orchestration functions."

"Cloudify provides the infrastructure-as-code, as well as operational action capabilities (orchestrated startups or upgrades, and more)."

"Valuable features are auto-scaling and load balancing."

"Product has given us the ability to catch early scaling issues that many companies hit on with private clouds."

"The solution includes the option to run background scripts and processes from a connected API."

"Extensible internal functions and plugins. Can implement custom plugins to fit your scenario. Python based plugins."

"Cloudify works in cases where you have very advanced service chaining requirements. It really works well there, and it fits the best. They have a standardized markup that's based on TOSCA, which is a standard. I like the fact that they're standards-based. Their solution works extremely well if you have the talent and the manpower to write TOSCA descriptors to deploy and interchange services or to automate the configuration and turn up of services."

"Has great extendability which means you can build your own custom logic."

More Cloudify pros

Cons

"The product could allow more programmatic opportunities through better development of the API."

"There aren’t any areas of improvement that immediately come to mind."

"There could be an improvement with the integration with the newest solutions from other vendors' technologies."

"I would like to see more integration with other solutions."

"Normally, UCS Director is used primarily for orchestration, but when we look at a non-Cisco data infrastructure components, the UCS Director needs a bit more improvement in terms of integration with third-party systems and with existing older systems."

"The areas where this product can be improved are the integrations and the UI. These features are not as friendly compared to VMware products."

"The tool should be a lot more intuitive and make it easy for us to understand and migrate."

"The product's pricing needs to improve."

More Cisco UCS Director cons

"Error handling could be improved; GUI is lacking with respect to user privileges and connectivity."

"Install of the product itself could be improved and I would like to see better event monitoring."

"Certainly the UI could use some intensive work, but nevertheless, overall, it’s a complete product with its 3.4 version and much better features are available with 4.0."

"Unlike the Docker environment, Cloudify takes time for configuration and its learning curve."

"The solution is a bit of a headache because mistakes happen in the blueprint every time we deploy and they require modifications."

"It lacked the user interface for multitenancy and basic platform management tasks. It is a leader in the niche area that they like to perform in, but it only does about 30% of top-tier advanced functions of platform management. It doesn't meet about 70% of what you need to manage a private cloud platform."

"The upgrading process could be simplified."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate Cisco UCS Director's price a three out of ten. Cisco UCS Director is not an affordable product. With Cisco UCS Director, there is a need to pay an overall price, which consists of the product, software, and support."

"The budget doesn’t work for the state and local governments."

"Cisco UCS Director is expensive...I rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten."

"I would rate the product's pricing an eight out of ten."

"The cost of this solution is significant."

"On a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price and ten is a high price, I rate the pricing around five to six out of ten."

"I wasn't involved in the pricing of it because we were just doing prototype work with it, but I was told by the upper management team that it was quite expensive. That was another reason we switched to Morpheus."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

26%

Financial Services Firm

20%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Retailer

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cisco UCS Director?

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco UCS Director?

While the pricing might be seen as expensive, it provides value for money due to reliable service and excellent technical support.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cisco UCS Director?

There aren’t any areas of improvement that immediately come to mind.

See all answers

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Comparisons

Cisco Intersight vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 54% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 29% of the time

OpenNebula vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 16% of the time

More Cisco UCS Director Competitors

Morpheus vs Cloudify

Compared 45% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs Cloudify

Compared 26% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Cloudify

Compared 16% of the time

IBM Turbonomic vs Cloudify

Compared 14% of the time

More Cloudify Competitors

Product Reports

Cisco UCS Director

Download Cisco UCS Director product report

Download Cloudify product report

Overview

Cisco UCS Director enables automated delivery of physical and virtual data center resources, empowering data centers to move at the speed of business.

Cisco

Cloudify is an open-source orchestration-first cloud management platform. The solution allows applications to efficiently run across multiple cloud or data center platforms for premium multi-cloud infrastructure automation and orchestration. It provides infrastructure automation using environment as a service (EaaS) technology to deploy and continuously manage any cloud, private data center, or Kubernetes service from one central point while leveraging existing toolchains.

Cloudify Product Highlights

Fully customizable (white label, add, and modify widgets)
Create a custom view per business units, groups, user role
Easy integration with any 3rd-party/homegrown portal
Identify and eliminate task execution failures via a visual interface
Easy service composition that allows you to create new or update existing services
Switch between code and topology views
Import existing automation templates and scripts into Cloudify and automatically convert them into certified environments.
Intelligent and declarative engine that automates the entire lifecycle management
Intuitive UX and dashboards allowing complete visibility and control over usage, behavior, faults, and events of application/network services.

Cloudify Features

Cloudify has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Elastic caching
Post-deployment automation
Deployment monitoring
Service catalog
Real-time code validation
Plugins (Kubernetes, Ansible, AWS Cloud Formation, Azure ARM, Terraform)
Advanced Kubernetes management UI
Multi cluster action
Governance and compliance
Self-serve experience

Cloudify Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing Cloudify. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Operation agility: Cloudify gives your organization and DevOps teams the ability to react to resource needs, evolve, and adapt quickly over time.

Self-service: Cloudify provides a self-service catalog and portal framework for cloud automation and cloud orchestration to provide a helpful and intuitive experience for environments, apps, and services setup and management.

Real-time visibility: Cloudify enables you to visually track all task executions. By implementing Cloudify, you can monitor progress and status of each execution step on Cloudify’s cloud orchestration platform, identify and eliminate task execution failures via a visual interface, and you can also apply management actions, such as stop, correct, and resume, quickly.

Reduce design and configuration time: The Cloudify solution has a visual editor, allowing greater visibility into blueprint structure and dependencies, and drag-n-drop service composition that helps you leverage shared resources and components for ultimate open-source infrastructure and cloud orchestration.

Fast deployment: Another benefit of Cloudify is that it helps speed up deployments of your test/dev/production environments from your CI/CD.

Enables continuous updates: With Cloudify, you have continuous updates for your production environments. Cloudify enables your organization to monitor health, heal failures, update patches, and scale resources without any environment downtime.

Governance: By using the Cloudify solution, you can accommodate governance changes and can scale and update operations according to your certified architecture.

Easier to manage Kubernetes: Cloudify makes it simple for you to manage multi Kubernetes clusters via service orchestration, enabling you to manage the application service itself rather than just its infrastructure.

Cost optimization: With Cloudify, you can control costs by employing end-to-end modeling of the entire infrastructure. The solution offers cost-saving policies, which include the decommissioning of formerly complex services and resources.

Sample Customers

Entel, Data#3, Cegal, NESIC, LightEdge

Proximus Partner Communications (Israel) VMware NTT Data Metaswitch Spirent Communications Lumina Networks Atos Fortinet

Cisco UCS Director vs. Cloudify