Cisco UCS Director vs Densify comparison

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Cisco UCS Director

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Densify and Cisco UCS Director compete in cloud optimization and infrastructure management. Cisco UCS Director has an advantage due to its robust features that justify its cost.

Features: Densify focuses on intelligent cloud optimization with advanced analytics, resource management, and the ability to aggregate multiple cloud accounts for comprehensive visibility. Cisco UCS Director offers extensive infrastructure management capabilities, including automation across physical and virtual environments, multi-cloud management, and strong integration with other Cisco solutions.

Room for Improvement: Densify could enhance its functionality by expanding its integration with more third-party applications, improving its user interface for non-technical users, and offering more detailed reporting features. Cisco UCS Director might benefit from simplifying its deployment process, expanding support for non-Cisco infrastructures, and enhancing its documentation for easier user navigation.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cisco UCS Director has a complex deployment model but offers substantial support for users, ensuring assistance throughout the deployment process. Densify provides a streamlined deployment experience with efficient customer service, making it easier for teams to get started quickly.

Pricing and ROI: Densify presents a cost-effective option with quicker ROI due to its targeted functionalities, facilitating resource management efficiencies. Cisco UCS Director, with its higher upfront investment, offers significant long-term value, promising extended ROI through its integrated management capabilities and automation features.

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

Cisco UCS Director vs. Densify

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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

Densify

Ranking in Cloud Management

35th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Migration (16th), Virtualization Management Tools (11th), Cloud Analytics (4th), Cloud Cost Management (13th)

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 Densify is 1.0%, down from 1.1% 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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Amit Kantia

Infrastructure capacity & demand manager at Kyndryl

Its most valuable feature is the ability to capture attributes in the console, but it is not a stable solution

I recommend others to use Densify. They can not only use it for reporting but for automation as well. They can implement the policies on the console easily during the build-out procedure. Stability is the primary concern to us as it is causing lots of problems. We can only make significant decisions if Densify allows us, and it takes lots of time. Thus, I rate the tool as a six out of ten.

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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 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."

"The solution is helpful for centralized management."

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

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

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

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

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

"Cisco's knowledge base is extensive."

More Cisco UCS Director pros

"I would say that the initial thing is that it provides us with a technological basis to expand capacity management beyond Excel."

"The Control Console is an incredible way to give a quick view of current capacity utilization allowing technical people to drill down quickly and allowing business/management people to get a quick overview of the environment."

"The Densify Control Console, and Environment Status."

"The solution's tech support is excellent."

"The Control Console provides a very easy to read dashboard of "too little/just right/too much" resources both for current data and on a historical or predictive basis."

"One would be the automatic rebalancing of the environment. That was one feature which helped. With that, we could improve our efficiency of our VMware infrastructure."

"Densify's ability to aggregate multiple on-premise vCenters and multiple cloud accounts, gives it a level of visibility not found in many places."

"The ability to increase server density inside of my environment, which has helped me drive reduction in costs."

More Densify pros

Cons

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

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

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

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

"The product's pricing needs to improve."

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

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

"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 solution's stability is the primary concern for me."

"In terms of integration, the tool has great data. However, it's not always meaningful because the true business attributes of how most Fortune 500 companies operate are not maintaining in one tool, they're in a school of many tools."

"It seems that the mechanism for integration is, it goes so far but I think there could be some standard integration to normal remedy service now etc. I think that should be out of the box."

"Normalization of CPU utilization is required. At present, the data is available based on entitlement level."

"Initially we talked about some custom reporting, wherein our customer expected certain reports on a few areas, like how the storage is allocated, how the network performance is doing, and how the network utilization is happening for a virtual machine."

"Unfortunately the tools and mechanisms which really came to maturity in the cloud, and were not mainstream on-premise, are still not implemented."

"Some parts of the interface are rather complex and require a bit of time to navigate, but this has never stopped us as a Densify advisor is readily available to help with our "how to" queries."

"A closer integration to the service management processes."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Setup cost is negligible, as it scales fairly well."

"Densify has licensing setup so you can collect data without licensing. It gives you the ability to collect on everything, then choose later what you would like to license."

"Cost is always involved, but then I feel that this solution is better than other products that we have."

"There was some sticker shock, as this is not just another software product to spit out graphs."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

26%

Financial Services Firm

20%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Manufacturing Company

24%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

14%

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.

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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

Cloudability vs Densify

Compared 38% of the time

IBM Turbonomic vs Densify

Compared 29% of the time

Intel Granulate vs Densify

Compared 18% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs Densify

Compared 15% of the time

More Densify Competitors

Product Reports

Cisco UCS Director

Download Cisco UCS Director product report

Download Densify 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

Densify is a hybrid cloud and container resource management platform that makes workloads self-aware of their precise resource requirements and automates the resource management and selection process. This solution helps you control your cloud spend and also helps your apps perform and scale better. Densify enables you to match your cloud requirements with the optimal cloud supply. Additionally, Densify is the only technology that leverages patented, predictive machine learning-powered analytics to perform advanced modeling of workload patterns, and provide precise optimization directives. It is ideal for cloud engineers, container platform owners, and IT finance.

Densify works by:

Establishing application demand patterns that are based on business cycles, seasonality, peaks, valleys, and other variables.
Building normalized models of cloud supply and ingesting the entire cloud catalog and latest technologies.
Considering numerous factors, such as performance benchmarks, cost, technical rules, tags, and policies. The solution uses business and functional tags, operational realities, and granular policy control.

Densify Features

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

Integration with management and provisioning systems
Machine learning-based analytics
Automated resource optimization
App owner collaboration
Tailored efficiency reports
Observability
Controllability
Capacity optimization
Policy driven, automated governance
VM placement
Predictive analytics

Densify Benefits

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

Automated resource management: Densify provides your organization with automated resource management at scale, with elasticity at an affordable low cost.

Full stack visibility: The Densify solution offers full stack visibility with improved efficiency by determining container size and node resources.

Financial visibility: In addition to full stack visibility, one of Densify’s other advantages is that it offers full financial visibility and cost intelligence for both reporting as well as chargebacks.

Resizing and rebalancing: Densify analyzes your private cloud infrastructure, providing resizing and rebalancing recommendations.

Helps you choose the right host environment: Densify automatically routes workloads to the best hosting environment based on detailed workload requirements. For workloads not requiring immediate placement, it reserves capacity to ensure it is available when required.

A true SaaS implementation: Because Densify is a true SaaS implementation, there is no software to maintain or to learn.

Better for IT finance: The solution is good for IT finance because it collects and analyzes your detailed billing data, giving you visibility into your spending, what services you’re buying, and how to better manage your costs. In addition, it can also generate reports that cover your spending and your utilization of reservations and reserved instances and savings plans.

Reduce risk and costs: Machine learning-based analytics help your organization optimize consumption to eliminate waste and overprovisioning while ensuring performance.

Cost-efficient: The Densify solution is cost-efficient, helping you drastically reduce per-processor software license costs by placing workloads intelligently.

Sample Customers

Entel, Data#3, Cegal, NESIC, LightEdge

AIG, Bank of America, Cigna, Citi

Cisco UCS Director vs. Densify