Cisco UCS Director vs Spacelift comparison

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Cisco UCS Director

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Cisco UCS Director and Spacelift are competing in the automation solutions category. Cisco UCS Director has an advantage in feature complexity, whereas Spacelift is prominent for its adaptability and cloud infrastructure support.

Features: Cisco UCS Director offers robust orchestration capabilities, comprehensive data center management, and emphasizes centralized management. Spacelift excels in automation features, offers strong integration with modern DevOps tools, and focuses on continuous delivery workflows supporting cloud-native integrations.

Room for Improvement: Cisco UCS Director could enhance its cloud-first strategy, improve integration with non-Cisco tools, and streamline its extensive setup process. Spacelift can enhance traditional data center support, expand its documentation base, and improve its offering for enterprises with hybrid environments.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cisco UCS Director provides extensive documentation and traditional on-premise deployment, suitable for enterprises with existing data center investments. Its customer service benefits from a well-established support network. Spacelift adopts a cloud-first approach, simplifying deployment and offering quicker setup for cloud environments, coupled with a modernized service model for customer support.

Pricing and ROI: Cisco UCS Director demands a higher initial setup cost aligned with its comprehensive features and traditional licensing model, serving larger organizations seeking comprehensive data center control. In contrast, Spacelift features a more agile pricing structure, facilitating faster ROI, especially in environments leveraging extensive automation and cloud resources, making it more suitable for cloud-native operations.

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

Cisco UCS Director vs. Spacelift

September 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

20th

Average Rating

7.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Spacelift

Ranking in Cloud Management

19th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS Director is 1.4%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spacelift is 1.0%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Spacelift	1.0%
Cisco UCS Director	1.4%
Other	97.6%

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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Moloko Mokubedi

Junior DevOps Engineer at Kartoza (Pty) Ltd

The GitOps feature automatically picks up changes from my GitHub projects

There are a few areas for improvement. For instance, getting notification webhooks is not easy. In the free version, there's no straightforward way to be notified once a deployment is finished. Spacelift requires creating a notification policy, which involves using the open policies framework. However, this feature is not available on the free plan. Additionally, for each new project, I need to create a new IAM role, which is not optimal. It would be better if I could use a single role for all interactions with my AWS account.

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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

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

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

"The solution is helpful for centralized management."

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

More Cisco UCS Director pros

"Spacelift is like an extension of Terraform, where everything can be visibly managed."

"I appreciate that I just have to connect to my AWS account with my credentials, and Spacelift handles the rest."

"One key feature is the Spacelift policies, which we can attach to deployments to ensure compliance with our standards."

"A valuable feature of Spacelift is that you can attach labels, and it is a modernized tool for infrastructure deployments. It is pull request-based, and you can see all the Terraform plan and apply logs on the pull request itself, which is not available across any other CI/CD tools."

"Knowing the HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) makes it easier to use without issues."

Cons

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

"The product's pricing needs to improve."

More Cisco UCS Director cons

"If you are a small enterprise organization, below 500 people, I would not recommend it."

"Spacelift currently lacks features that can help with complex type deployments and coordination for major deployments."

"Synchronization can be difficult when using older and newer versions with Kubernetes and HashiCorp."

"The self-hosted version does not have a lot of features compared to the SaaS version, such as cloud integrations for Azure and GCP."

"In the free version, there's no straightforward way to be notified once a deployment is finished."

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."

"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."

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

"The cost of this solution is significant."

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

"It is a bit expensive product."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

11%

Educational Organization

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cisco UCS Director?

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

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.

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 ...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Spacelift?

I've never checked the pricing because I enjoy using it for free. Besides the notification feature, I haven't needed any paid features.

What needs improvement with Spacelift?

What is your primary use case for Spacelift?

I use Spacelift to deploy my applications, particularly AWS applications and infrastructure to my personal AWS account.

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Product Reports

Download Cisco UCS Director product report

Cisco UCS Director

October 2025

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September 2025

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

Spacelift provides a sophisticated infrastructure management platform with key features such as Drift Detection and Terraform integration, simplifying complex deployments and enhancing user workflows through an intuitive interface.

Spacelift excels in modernizing infrastructure management by integrating smoothly with Terraform, using a pull request-based approach for visibility into logs. It automates change detection using GitOps from GitHub and supports AWS connectivity with credential management. Despite its strengths, some users find room for improvement in supporting smaller enterprises and offering more seamless cloud integrations with self-hosted versions. Handling of HashiCorp Vault secrets and cumbersome notification webhooks may require additional setup effort.

What are the most valuable features?

Drift Detection: Ensures user edits are managed effectively, reducing configuration discrepancies.
Terraform Integration: Seamless compatibility with Terraform for robust infrastructure management.
GitOps: Automates change detection from GitHub, ensuring efficient workflows.
Compliance Policies: Helps maintain infrastructure within regulatory guidelines.
Stack Execution: Enables runs with label attachments for organized operations.

What benefits or ROI can users expect?

Improved Deployment Control: Default plan prompts support structured and controlled deployments.
Streamlined Terraform Management: Enhanced visibility into logs aids in transparent and efficient operations.
Efficient AWS Interactions: Credential management simplifies connections, making operations more fluid.
Dynamic Infrastructure Handling: Supports significant projects by replacing tools like Terraform Enterprise.

In specific industries, Spacelift is primarily utilized for infrastructure management and deployment across platforms like AWS, Azure, and GCP. In banking architecture, it replaces Terraform Enterprise, ensuring secure and efficient operations. Projects like Google Fiber benefit from its capability to import and manage data effectively, engaging users with HashiCorp Language and GitHub for CI/CD integration.

Sample Customers

Entel, Data#3, Cegal, NESIC, LightEdge

Information Not Available