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 #7 with an average rating of 8.2. Cisco holds a 2.0% mindshare in CM, compared to Apache’s 2.5% mindshare. Additionally, 73% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Apache users who would recommend it.

Cisco UCS Director

Read 15 Cisco UCS Director reviews

1,101 Views
1,079 Comparison Views

73% willing to recommend

CloudStack

Read 34 CloudStack reviews

2,189 Views
2,036 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Cisco UCS Director

CloudStack

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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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: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director vs. CloudStack

March 2026

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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

7.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

CloudStack

Ranking in Cloud Management

7th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS Director is 2.0%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CloudStack is 2.5%, down from 6.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
CloudStack	2.5%
Cisco UCS Director	2.0%
Other	95.5%

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

ErnieRumfield

Senior Telecommunications Engineer at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

Managing extensive VoIP services becomes efficient and seamless

We use Cisco UCS Director primarily for managing our VoIP service to maintain seamless service delivery. We operate in an enterprise government environment Cisco UCS Director is straightforward to use, which we greatly appreciate. It helps save time by making it quicker to roll out new call…

Read full review

Tharun Kumar Reddy Thamatam

Senior Infrastructure Consultant at Infosys

Achieving seamless infrastructure management with optimized network and user access controls

I believe enhancements could be made in CloudStack, particularly in the management servers. I had the opportunity to collaborate with one of the Apache CloudStack developers, leading to the installation of additional agents for better information retrieval from hypervisors. We implemented configurations, ensuring consistency across hosts and VMs. We also utilized Ansible or YAML files to automate password upgrades during patching activities and database management, showcasing our customization efforts for improvement. For future releases, it would be beneficial if Apache enhanced CloudStack by integrating alerting systems directly. We've had instances where hypervisors experienced overloads without prior alerts, so proactive alerts within the tool would better prepare us for addressing issues swiftly, preventing disruption in business operations. A portal summarizing system metrics alongside alert capabilities would greatly enhance our operational efficiency.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I would recommend this solution to others because it simplifies a lot of tasks via orchestration."

"An easy and strong configuration, along with its low cost, are some of the features of the solution."

"Without UCS Director it wouldn't be possible for us to go from receiving shipments at a data center to having systems live in production in a matter of days, or sometimes hours, instead of waiting weeks."

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

"Overall, I think that this is a very good product, although nothing is perfect."

"I can manage multiple workloads whether it's on AWS, Azure, or on-premises. They can be managed by using the UCS Director."

"The improvement for our organization has really been ease of use; we'd be a mess without the solution."

"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."

More Cisco UCS Director pros

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

"You can manage infrastructure with a few people, since product is monolithic."

"You can manage infrastructure with a few people, since product is monolithic. We had three engineers (storage, virtual, Linux admins) only. Also, CS supports different flavours of hypervisors."

"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."

"CloudStack is a very feature-rich product; it gives you a lot of control over your VM networks and has extensive integration with storage plugins where you can use many open source tools to bring storage into your CloudStack environment for backups or even to run VMs."

"I have been impressed by CloudStack's most recent updates around Kubernetes. In particular, they have worked with Kubernetes to support the Cluster API, and you can now easily integrate Kubernetes into CloudStack and get access to a lot of good features."

"CloudStack manages infrastructure with 2-4 thousands of hosts easily."

"Being able to completely virtualize a customer’s physical data center and migrate any workload into the cloud, and cover the most complex use cases - while offering high performance and true volume QoS, backed by SSD-based managed storage - is what differentiates it from other IaaS solutions."

More CloudStack pros

Cons

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

"Simplifying the user interface would go a long way to making it more usable."

"It is not easy to add or expand the product."

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

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

"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."

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

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

More Cisco UCS Director cons

"With all that simplicity come limitations that need to be understood and planned for: Accounts, domains, and user accounts are set up with public cloud in mind, not private."

"We did encounter issues with stability, and the main issue was secondary storage. When it is not available, XenServers and hypervisors are affected. And CS doesn’t do anything to reboot, or fix. Come to think of it, maybe it shouldn’t, considering their approach – CS just orchestrates everything else on the hypervisor and storage level."

"The main reason why we started looking for another solution: backups, replication, HA, and dependency on secondary storage. CS is quite sensitive for infrastructure, and any kind of network disruption between CS and secondary storage leads to VM hanging."

"CS has very descriptive logging, and every time I faced issues and asked for help, I didn’t get any reply from the community. Reason? Its quite obvious. CS runs on specific environments, unique to each case. So, unless it is a functional issue of CS, nobody can help you. All issues were resolved by myself going through logs. This is another reason why you need smart enough people to manage it. Engineers must have knowledge of hypervisors and understand how CS interacts with them."

"The product has evolved a lot since the first versions in which it was very complicated to do version updates, and had various problems."

"For future releases, it would be beneficial if Apache enhanced CloudStack by integrating alerting systems directly. We've had instances where hypervisors experienced overloads without prior alerts, so proactive alerts within the tool would better prepare us for addressing issues swiftly, preventing disruption in business operations."

"It is not widely used so Google does not help very much when you are troubleshooting, and the CloudStack forum is not very active."

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

More CloudStack cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"The cost of this solution is significant."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"The solution is open-source and free."

"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 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."

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

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

18%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Marketing Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

12%

Educational Organization

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	11

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	13
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	12

Questions from the Community

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?

It should be more of a cloud-based architecture for Cisco UCS Director, and it should be affordable to small customers as well because the pricing is a major challenge when we talk about Cisco UCS ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Cisco UCS Director?

Mainly in my region and country, large data center customers are using Cisco UCS Director, not the SMB or mid-market customers. More of the on-premise customers are utilizing Cisco UCS Director. Th...

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?

Enhancements for CloudStack can focus on integrating more hypervisors, as mentioned regarding current features. We're working on a new feature that will allow for certain limited functions, but ove...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for CloudStack?

My usual use cases for CloudStack involve an AWS style private cloud or public cloud. I can deploy an AWS style cloud using the open source tool that is CloudStack. The use case depends on the cust...

See all answers

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Compared 6% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 5% of the time

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Compared 23% of the time

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Compared 6% of the time

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs CloudStack

Compared 6% of the time

Turbo360 (Formerly Serverless360) vs CloudStack

Compared 5% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs CloudStack

Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Director

March 2026

Download Cisco UCS Director product report

Buyer's Guide

CloudStack

March 2026

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

March 2026

Free Report: Cisco UCS Director vs. CloudStack

Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco UCS Director vs. CloudStack and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.

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