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CloudBolt vs CloudStack comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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

CloudBolt
Ranking in Cloud Management
26th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Cost Management (36th)
CloudStack
Ranking in Cloud Management
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
34
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of CloudBolt is 1.8%, down from 2.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CloudStack is 2.1%, down from 4.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
CloudStack2.1%
CloudBolt1.8%
Other96.1%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

AbhishekGupta2 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr PreSales Cloud Architect at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees
Centralized self-service has unified hybrid clouds and has improved governance and cost control
The best features CloudBolt offers include governance and policy control, allowing security teams to set up their specific guardrails with governance at scale. Multi or hybrid cloud abstraction provides a single pane of glass for different types of environments, and self-service catalogs enable technical or business users to request services without multiple tickets. CloudBolt also offers strong integration capabilities that work well with existing tools without disrupting the current environment. From an integration standpoint, CloudBolt works well with various public and private cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, GCP, VMware, and Nutanix, as well as different virtualization software, infrastructure as code templates such as Ansible and Terraform, ITSM tools such as ServiceNow, and CMDB platforms. CloudBolt has positively impacted my organization by managing multiple cloud environments for thousands of users with a complex enterprise workflow that has helped reduce man-hours required for provisioning resources. We have achieved faster delivery through standardized operating procedures and reduced reworks due to automation. The chargeback and showback mechanisms allow us to charge different business units according to their consumption, providing better governance, lower risk, and lower cost, resulting in a good return on investment. Since using CloudBolt, I have seen a 25 to 30 percent reduction in service delivery time and an improvement in efficiency of almost 20 to 25 percent within a timeframe of approximately 8 to 10 months.
Tharun Kumar Reddy Thamatam - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I find the self-service features valuable."
"Since using CloudBolt, I have seen a 25 to 30 percent reduction in service delivery time and an improvement in efficiency of almost 20 to 25 percent within a timeframe of approximately 8 to 10 months."
"Making the lifecycle management automated has made life easier."
"CloudBolt's ease of use, coupled with our initial focus on fully automating infrastructure deployment, has won accolades from our internal stakeholders."
"The best features CloudBolt offers are its speed, which is very fast in terms of provisioning compared to traditional ISO-based methods, and this speed has helped my team and organization; we completed a new site setup in under a few days, which would take about a few weeks using traditional methods."
"We were able to save enough from reduced support cost associated with maintaining and operating our previous cloud management platform within months to pay for CloudBolt."
"Customer Service: World class."
"The initial deployment was super easy."
"The APIs for automation in CloudStack are excellent; everything is API-driven, and while the API is very rich and hard to learn, you can do everything you would want to do, including everything in the user interface and more."
"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."
"Multiple types of hypervisor support, multi-zone support, and VPC are great valuable features."
"The product gives us the ability to orchestrate large virtual environments and is flexible enough to allow us to configure it for what we need. We value the flexibility of the networking feature set as well as the ability to build virtual private clouds."
"The platform is very simple to scale-out.​"
"CloudStack supports every operating system that supports hypervisors, which makes the product more attractive, compared to vCloud Director or Azure."
"I have also explored setting up with OpenStack and I found it harder to use than CloudStack."
"Killer features for me were: support for many hypervisors, ability to match business logic, "everything in one box," available APIs."
 

Cons

"I had an issue with the scheduling feature of CloudBolt, but I'm not sure if that's been fixed in the new version."
"For improvements, I would say that they could maybe increase the number of integrations and add more out-of-the-box work flows and possibly a new or improved user interface."
"To improve CloudBolt, I believe the user experience needs enhancement as some users find it somewhat dated compared to newer cloud management platforms."
"We did find it was a bit challenging to scale horizontally behind a load balancer in an active/active configuration."
"CloudBolt can be improved. It needs way more customizations when it comes to provisioning itself."
"The area of integrating on-prem and cloud needs improvement."
"The scheduling feature of CloudBolt needs improvement because sometimes, it doesn't work."
"The solution is not easy to use. It's not intuitive enough to click anywhere in the solution and make it work."
"After Citrix divested CloudPlatform to Accelerite, commercial support was absolutely atrocious."
"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."
"I would like to see support for native VLAN, and fault-tolerance."
"For time consuming operations like storage migrations, volume Snapshot restore and the like, we faced issues like MySQL operations timing out and status update failures. Those areas needs improvement."
"The area of Apache CloudStack that could stand the most improvement is the functionality/features around the virtual routers. They can be somewhat cumbersome to deal with at times and are the least stable piece of the product."
"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."
"It would be a good to have more specific error messages within administration processes (e.g. problem with creating new instance)."
"I think that container technology in CloudStack is an area that needs to be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate the pricing an eight out of ten because the solution is expensive."
"The system is cheaper if a customer has fewer servers since you pay by the node."
"The solution is reasonably priced."
"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."
"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."
"There is no license, so the product is free unless you are buying professional technical support services."
"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.​​"
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
7%
Construction Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise12
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with CloudBolt?
We are doing a lot of customization. For example, if I want to do a custom scheme or if I want to do a static IP, these kinds of flows I still need to do very manually or through a script, so it wo...
What is your primary use case for CloudBolt?
My main use case for CloudBolt is provisioning servers. We have a VM environment, so we would use a CloudBolt template and then map it to CloudBolt environment and provision the server for our prod...
What advice do you have for others considering CloudBolt?
My advice for others looking into using CloudBolt is that if you are a server admin, it is very useful. I would advise you that CloudBolt will be very useful for your needs.
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.
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...
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...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Vmops, Cloud.com
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

WM, CyWest, Panic, Camden, University of Maryland, Xerox, Neustar, Medidata, Continu, Aruba Networks, Neuberger Berman, Peak6, EverBank, Ascensus, Hosting Edge
GreenQloud, Exoscale, TomTom, ASG, PC Extreme, ISWest, Grid'5000
Find out what your peers are saying about CloudBolt vs. CloudStack and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.