Cisco UCS Director vs CloudStack comparison

Cisco and Apache are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. Cisco is ranked #22 with an average rating of 8.0, while Apache is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.7. Cisco holds a 1.3% mindshare in CM, compared to Apache’s 5.1% mindshare. Additionally, 71% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Apache users who would recommend it.

Cisco UCS Director

Read 14 Cisco UCS Director reviews

575 Views
314 Comparison Views

71% willing to recommend

CloudStack

Read 31 CloudStack reviews

1,938 Views
1,445 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Cisco UCS Director

CloudStack

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

CloudStack and Cisco UCS Director are competing in IT infrastructure management. Cisco UCS Director generally has the upper hand with a wider feature set appealing to large-scale, intricate environments, while CloudStack captures attention with cost advantages and adept customer support.

Features: CloudStack provides powerful APIs, extensive support for various hypervisors, and compatibility with multiple availability zones. It offers orchestration of large virtual environments, making it a flexible cloud deployment option. Cisco UCS Director stands out by unifying infrastructure management across compute, storage, and networking, with integration capabilities enhancing its comprehensive IT management solution.

Room for Improvement: CloudStack could enhance its integration with newer technologies to maintain competitiveness. Strengthening its interface for non-technical users would also be beneficial. Improving its documentation and community resources would help new users. Cisco UCS Director could lower its initial complexity for setup. Expanding compatibility beyond primarily Cisco environments would widen appeal. Improving user interface intuitiveness could attract a larger user base.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: CloudStack is known for its easy deployment, particularly in environments with open-source tools. Its customer service is responsive and knowledgeable, which enhances overall user experience. Cisco UCS Director requires a more detailed setup due to its complexity but is supported by Cisco’s robust service network that ensures comprehensive problem resolution.

Pricing and ROI: CloudStack offers lower initial costs, appealing to organizations under budget constraints, and presents quick ROI by utilizing open-source foundations. Cisco UCS Director, while having a higher upfront cost, offers substantial ROI through better operational efficiencies and infrastructure management, aligning well with larger enterprises seeking comprehensive capabilities.

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

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director vs. CloudStack

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

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

CloudStack

Ranking in Cloud Management

11th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of June 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 CloudStack is 5.1%, down from 5.9% 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.

Read full review

Wido Den Hollander

Community Ambassador at 42on

A solution that strikes a balance between user-friendliness, scalability, and stability

The market keeps changing, and so does technology. I think that container technology in CloudStack is an area that needs to be improved. Regarding container technology, Kubernetes is something many people want to use and something which, as of now, many are using currently. However, there is still room for improvement in Kubernetes, particularly with networking functionality and network virtualization. When it comes to what needs to be improved in CloudStack, I would say that it should stay the way it is currently. It should continue being a stable product that people can rely on since many may be inclined to follow the latest trends and hype, which is not always good for a solution's stability. It is crucial to prioritize stability, which is a key factor that companies seek. In my view, the platform could benefit from adding more metrics. More metrics would offer more insights and data on the platform's performance, utilization, and usage. Overall, I believe that having more metrics available would be highly desirable.

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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 solution is helpful for centralized management."

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

"UCS director enables us to be more productive and more agile, and also more self-sufficient because we don't have to depend on anybody else."

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

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

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

"Feature-wise, the solution helps one to add multiple environments in one place...It is a scalable product."

"Cisco's knowledge base is extensive."

More Cisco UCS Director pros

"I liked the separation of the isolated network versus the shared network."

"It works, and pretty much always has. Reliability and support for enterprise features, with a multi-tenant interface, makes CloudStack a very compelling solution."

"CloudStack, by default, gives us a zone-based setup which makes it easier to manage datacenters located in different geographical areas."

"CloudStack supports every operating system that supports hypervisors, which makes the product more attractive, compared to vCloud Director or Azure."

"When compared to OpenStack, CloudStack is also an open-source platform that is continuously improving its features and capabilities with each new version release. Having worked with CloudStack 4.7, 4.14, and most recently, 4.17, I have noticed significant enhancements in the platform's features and customer experience, such as the introduction of a new user interface in the latest release. Notably, the latest versions have made major improvements to VM live migrations, making them more efficient and effective."

"The structuring of the components and isolated environments helped us when using parts of the framework at different levels of product development."

"The API with CloudStack made integration into various external facing web applications simple enough."

"CloudStack’s private gateway networking feature is what enables us to offer utmost security and confidentially to our customers and partners, by enabling them to connect to their virtual data centers via dedicated, encrypted, private fiber lines that never touch the public internet space. Ease of setup and management are certainly important additional benefits for us on the engineering team."

More CloudStack pros

Cons

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

"We cannot depend on this solution to manage all of the data center's infrastructure."

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

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

"The product's pricing needs to improve."

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

"Currently, Cisco UCS Director is unable to integrate with another product or with a server from another brand."

"There are a lot of bugs in the solution. This is an area in the solution that can be improved."

More Cisco UCS Director cons

"The absence of the feature, deploy an instance from a snapshot, is the weak point of the platform. It is a feature that everyone needs nowadays."

"It's really hard to delete zones, clusters, datacenters. You need to follow strict rules, which were not properly documented at the time."

"It would be great to have a couple of “external” networks for VPC and have the possibility, for each domain, to choose they type of “external” network."

"It would be a good to have more specific error messages within administration processes (e.g. problem with creating new instance)."

"CloudStack lacks a billing solution which would complete it as a full 360-degree product."

"The numerous, multi-layered drill-down menus make it difficult to find one simple knob to turn."

"The user can't upload SSH keys from the UI. We have to use the API for this, and it is not always convenient."

"The area of improvement could be the regionalization aspect. For example, managing multiple regions or HubStack deployments together was not thought out thoroughly in the versions I used. We faced issues around managing the global infrastructure and had to develop around it."

More CloudStack cons

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 cost of this solution is significant."

"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."

"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."

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

"There is no license, so the product is free unless you are buying professional technical support services."

"As far as I know, CS is still free of charge. If you want to pay some money, Citrix Cloud Platform is based on CS, I think. As for hypervisors – everything as usual, you need to pay for VMware and vCenter. As for XenServer, recently they changed the free feature list, so you may need to pay some money to get useful features like XenMotion."

"CloudStack is an open source solution, so you don't need to pay anything for it. When our company develops something specially for CloudStack, it is donated to the Apache Software Foundation and provided to anyone that wants to use it."

"CloudStack is an open-source product."

"The solution is open-source and free."

"It is a 100% open-source solution needing just an Apache license. Also, there are no hidden fees to be paid."

"The Apache CloudStack is open source, so you do not have licenses to purchase."

"Give an effort to planning. If possible, contract a specialized consultant company for the initial setup and knowledge transfer."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

31%

Financial Services Firm

19%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

21%

Educational Organization

10%

University

Financial Services Firm

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

What do you like most about CloudStack?

The initial implementation process was quite good.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CloudStack?

CloudStack is open-source, so there is no cost apart from learning. Billing solutions, if outsourced, come at a moderate cost.

See all answers

What needs improvement with CloudStack?

CloudStack lacks a billing solution which would complete it as a full 360-degree product. Additionally, more themes and drag-and-drop interfaces could enhance the user experience. Improved document...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 53% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 31% of the time

OpenNebula vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 16% of the time

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OpenNebula vs CloudStack

Compared 72% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs CloudStack

Compared 9% of the time

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs CloudStack

Compared 5% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs CloudStack

Compared 5% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs CloudStack

Compared 4% of the time

More CloudStack Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director

June 2025

Download Cisco UCS Director product report

Buyer's Guide

CloudStack

June 2025

Download CloudStack product report

Also Known As

No data available

Vmops, Cloud.com

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

Apache CloudStack is open source software designed to deploy and manage large networks of virtual machines, as a highly available, highly scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform.

Apache

Sample Customers

Entel, Data#3, Cegal, NESIC, LightEdge

GreenQloud, Exoscale, TomTom, ASG, PC Extreme, ISWest, Grid'5000

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director vs. CloudStack

June 2025

Free Report: Cisco UCS Director vs. CloudStack

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