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CloudBolt vs OpenNebula vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of CloudBolt is 1.9%, down from 2.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenNebula is 1.7%, down from 7.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 5.5%, down from 11.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Aria Automation5.5%
OpenNebula1.7%
CloudBolt1.9%
Other90.9%
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.
FOURES Jean-Philippe - PeerSpot reviewer
Products Manager at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
Reliable, simple to manage, and offers great technical support
The support of VXLAN fits with our network management. Thanks to this we can propose mixed solutions using virtual resources on OpenNebula and bare metal servers hosted in our facilities linked to each other on the sale network. This use case is very useful when some applications need bare metal power (Kubernetes workers, huge databases, AI models computations, et cetera). The cluster management is very useful for splitting our different clusters (mutual vs dedicated). We can manage deployments and capacity planning without pain. The API is also really simple and it helped us to develop the Terraform provider to manage OpenNebula like any other cloud infrastructure.
VasilisGiannitsiotis - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT at ITSolutions
Automation has streamlined complex financial workflows but still needs more intuitive orchestration
Something to improve in VMware Aria Automation would be related to VCF 9, as I do not know what it is trying to bring because they exposed it as the solution of everything. So VCF 9 will bring VCF Automation and VCF Operations, the new product line of VMware. I have not seen what this brings or what else it includes. Maybe in the area of vRealize Orchestrator, this would be beneficial because VRO can do everything. Perhaps a more user-friendly way to use that tool would be helpful because the possibilities there are endless. I am looking for more user-friendly navigation in VMware Aria Automation.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Hybrid cloud platform for VM and app deployment and management, with very good stability. It's customizable, easy to set up, and can be deployed within half an hour."
"I find the self-service features valuable."
"The product takes care of a hybrid cloud environment and it helps me maintain control and insight across various cloud platforms."
"The solution's biggest advantage is flexibility"
"CloudBolt's ease of use, coupled with our initial focus on fully automating infrastructure deployment, has won accolades from our internal stakeholders."
"Role-based access control and application blueprinting."
"Customer Service: World class."
"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."
"OpenNebula has very good integration with SAP Storage, is easy to use, has a good UI, and is very scalable."
"The ability to use it almost like a public cloud for an organization is a big asset, as it will create a value proposition and can control costs in a great way."
"The service feature appeals most to us, thus it is the most valuable."
"For the entire data center, as a private cloud, I believe that user management, expert management, and the virtual data center is completely magic for the users."
"I'll definitely recommend OpenNebula because it's an open-source solution that's effortless to set up, and the total cost of ownership is low."
"OpenNebula has given us tremendous knowledge about cloud computing and about Cloud Management platforms, commonly known as CMP."
"OpenNebula is lightweight, stable, and easy to customize."
"What's best about OpenNebula that people like is that it's easy to deploy. It's also easy to manage. It's interesting because people choose OpenNebula over other solutions because of the ease of management."
"The most valuable feature is vRA’s ability to integrate whether with additional VMware vRealize suites or other vendors' cloud products."
"The automation part is valuable, especially where vRA integrates with vRO, because it reduces the amount of effort we have to make."
"It is very stable, works well, is easy to use once it's deployed, and is also easy to deploy."
"Through these capabilities, we have achieved more control, more monitoring capabilities, and more efficiency in terms of delivering solutions with much more confidence and fewer failures."
"It provides visibility into the VM space."
"We have scaled from two servers to about 140 servers in a very short period of time, which would have been a nightmare had it not been for the SaltStack configurations."
"It benefits the speed of our development, and the speed of anything we test and send through to production."
"The infrastructure has helped us to greatly increase our agility."
 

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."
"The solution is not easy to use. It's not intuitive enough to click anywhere in the solution and make it work."
"The area of integrating on-prem and cloud needs improvement."
"The management of SaaS must be improved."
"We did find it was a bit challenging to scale horizontally behind a load balancer in an active/active configuration."
"The scheduling feature of CloudBolt needs improvement because sometimes, it doesn't work."
"Support for containers is basic and needs improvement."
"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."
"Template management also needs improvement in OpenNebula because it's inferior right now."
"It should have a simple REST API like most other tools. It's the industry standard format. An XML-RPC API gives you an XML document that you have to convert and then do something with that. REST API endpoint provides outputs in a JSON document. I would also like to see support for user data or heat templates, which OpenStack offers, but OpenNebula doesn't have this yet."
"They should add more features like object storage."
"The protocol for clusterization is rough and doesn't work well."
"There are small things that are hard. For example, making sure that it is going to be installable on public clouds."
"Most of the competitors are offering some sort of billing software to transform their installation to work as a small-sized public cloud, but those offerings from OpenNebula are still missing."
"The UI, monitoring, and alerting could benefit from further improvements."
"The front-facing API can be improved to support lots of requests when the platform is huge with lots of virtual resources."
"They should make it a little bit more dynamic, a little bit easier to deal with large-scale AD deployments. They need to make it a little more enterprise-ready. That is the one thing that kills us."
"I would say maybe a better interface. It looks very plain."
"We still struggle a little bit with the configuration as far as making sure that we have all the endpoints where they need to be, because that's not as agile as we'd like in the back-end. We're working towards that with our DevOps teams to make sure that we're touching the right endpoints and getting the right data."
"With distributed, installation is a pain. I have always gotten into errors when employing a distributed environment, which provides High Availability."
"Multitenancy management is a little bit difficult to do, so it is an area that can be improved."
"The initial setup was complex from beginning to delivery. The current version is a bit more complex than version 7 to deploy."
"Our primary challenge is upgrading the product to the latest version. This process requires careful communication with the vendor to mitigate risks."
"vCenter and vRA, I believe they share two different databases so sometimes you have to somehow sync them up. I wish there was only one database between the two or, somehow, one database would rule over the other one, so if you have both products, the vCenter might use the vRA database. Otherwise, when you do stuff in vCenter, you have to write a command on vRA to update the databases."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate the pricing an eight out of ten because the solution is expensive."
"The solution is reasonably priced."
"The system is cheaper if a customer has fewer servers since you pay by the node."
"The solution is open source so is free."
"OpenNebuoa has recently come up with a new subscription model that is economical and a lot of new customers are choosing this as it is an easy subscription model."
"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."
"We use the Community Edition, rather than the Enterprise Edition."
"The licensing for OpenNebula used to be free, but now it's no longer free. A customer contacted me asking to move to another provider because of the changes in the licensing terms for OpenNebula. I have no information on how much the OpenNebula license is because the customer pays for it, and I only do the integration."
"OpenNebula gives good value for money."
"Better pricing is always handy, but I feel it's at the right price point."
"The tool is expensive since it is an enterprise product."
"From a budget point of view, the pricing is a bit on the higher side."
"I would rate the pricing a ten out of ten, with ten being very expensive."
"As far as value is concerned, it has been essential to our environment. We have been able to deploy VMs quickly and the developers have their own sandbox, so they can spin up and destroy VMs at their own will."
"We have seen significant ROI. We used to have physical servers, it took 90 days to get a server, order it, buy it, and get it in. We have it down to 10 minutes, building a server with virtualization, and now that's too slow. So, we let the customer do it at their speed. Therefore, it is pretty much up in a couple of minutes and they have a server."
"From the customer perspective, the value was worth it."
"It is pricey for what you get."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
University
7%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
7%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise9
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise131
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with CloudBolt?
To improve CloudBolt, I believe the user experience needs enhancement as some users find it somewhat dated compared t...
What is your primary use case for CloudBolt?
My main use case for CloudBolt includes having a centralized self-service provisioning and orchestration, allowing me...
What advice do you have for others considering CloudBolt?
For others looking into using CloudBolt, I advise defining governance policies early, focusing on building modular au...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What's the difference between VMware vRA (automation) and vROps (operations)?
vROP is a virtualization management solution from VMWare. It is efficient and easy to manage. You can find anything y...
Is there any way to try VMware Aria Automation for free?
When it comes to VMware Aria Automation, you have three choices for free runs: Hands-on Lab (HOL) Advanced lab A fre...
Which sectors can benefit the most from VMware Aria Automation?
I was looking at VMware Aria Automation case studies recently and I got the impression that three main kinds of compa...
 

Also Known As

No data available
No data available
VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

WM, CyWest, Panic, Camden, University of Maryland, Xerox, Neustar, Medidata, Continu, Aruba Networks, Neuberger Berman, Peak6, EverBank, Ascensus, Hosting Edge
Akamai, BBC, Fermilab, Terradue, Surf Sara, Produban, Netways, ESA, China Mobile, BlackBerry, Deloitte, Fuze, Telefonica, Trivago, Nokia, Encore Tech, Beeks.
Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
Find out what your peers are saying about Broadcom, Nutanix, IBM and others in Cloud Management. Updated: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.