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CloudBolt vs VMware Cloud Director 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.2
Organizations saw 60% savings and 50% faster deliveries with CloudBolt, benefiting from automation and reduced support costs.
Sentiment score
6.1
VMware Cloud Director offers varied ROI, balancing fast efficiency gains with high costs and mixed customer support experiences.
We have seen over 60 to 70 percent return on investment with CloudBolt.
Cybersecurity Consultant at Nnamdi Azikiwe University
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.4
CloudBolt offers responsive, efficient customer service with excellent support, fast issue resolution, and highly praised technical assistance.
Sentiment score
6.8
VMware Cloud Director's service is praised for helpfulness and documentation, though technical support experiences mixed reviews regarding efficiency.
In case of VMware Cloud Director or any other VMware product, 70-80% of problems we can easily troubleshoot by leveraging public documentation and the available KB articles.
Technical Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.2
CloudBolt is scalable for varied infrastructures but needs blueprint improvements; ratings range from seven to nine out of ten.
Sentiment score
7.3
VMware Cloud Director offers robust scalability for diverse cloud needs, praised for rapid provisioning and high user capacity.
CloudBolt is very scalable for me.
Cybersecurity Consultant at Nnamdi Azikiwe University
VMware Cloud Director is quite scalable; I would rate it nine out of ten.
Senior System Engineer & Project Manager at TechnoPeak
I would rate scalability for VMware Cloud Director as 8, especially from the on-premises environment.
Technical Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
CloudBolt is stable and reliable, with effective support, though some face issues due to memory constraints and updates.
Sentiment score
7.7
VMware Cloud Director is reliable and resilient, though some integration issues exist; users generally report high stability and performance.
There are occasional problems when trying to increase the parameters of a virtual machine.
Senior System Engineer & Project Manager at TechnoPeak
 

Room For Improvement

CloudBolt needs improvements in cost optimization, UI design, container support, SaaS management, billing, integrations, and feature workflows.
VMware Cloud Director needs better third-party integration, enhanced features, improved GUI, stable components, and clearer documentation.
To improve CloudBolt, I believe the user experience needs enhancement as some users find it somewhat dated compared to newer cloud management platforms.
Sr PreSales Cloud Architect at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees
The UI and UX design should be more user-friendly, as new users cannot easily navigate the workflow without prior knowledge.
Cybersecurity Consultant at Nnamdi Azikiwe University
Cross-cloud migration refers to if a customer has something on Azure, wanting to bring it up on VMware or maybe from VMware to AWS, vice versa.
Technical Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The console methods make management difficult until VMware tools are installed.
Senior System Engineer & Project Manager at TechnoPeak
At Layer 7, the load balancing does not have many features compared to other technologies such as NetScaler from Citrix or F5.
Ingeniero De Preventa De Cloud Y Servicios Profesionales at licenciasonline
 

Setup Cost

CloudBolt offers scalable pricing per server, with discounts for upfront purchases, appealing to automation-focused teams despite varying costs.
VMware Cloud Director is costly but offers unique features and flexibility, with potential discounts mitigating expenses for some users.
CloudBolt's pricing is very affordable.
Cybersecurity Consultant at Nnamdi Azikiwe University
The pricing for VMware Cloud Director is more or less reasonable, especially when compared to Cisco, which is significantly more expensive.
Senior System Engineer & Project Manager at TechnoPeak
From a pricing perspective, I would rate VMware Cloud Director as 7 because being the available feature set, Broadcom always offered more price compared to another product.
Technical Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Valuable Features

CloudBolt excels in governance, deployment, provisioning, multi-cloud management, integration, cost management, efficiency, and supports major cloud providers.
VMware Cloud Director provides secure, scalable cloud management with multi-tenancy, automation, and seamless integration for diverse enterprise needs.
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.
Sr PreSales Cloud Architect at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees
The best features of CloudBolt are the governance enforcement and cloud deployment, which provide better deployed infrastructure to our engineers and have reduced dependencies.
Cybersecurity Consultant at Nnamdi Azikiwe University
The most valuable feature of VMware Cloud Director is segregating the underlying infrastructure for the end user.
Technical Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
A notable feature is the Independent Disk, which allows detaching a virtual drive from one virtual machine and attaching it to another, enabling more flexibility in operations.
Senior System Engineer & Project Manager at TechnoPeak
I believe the best feature of VMware Cloud Director is the multitenant capability because I use only one deployment and can configure many clients.
Ingeniero De Preventa De Cloud Y Servicios Profesionales at licenciasonline
 

Categories and Ranking

CloudBolt
Ranking in Cloud Management
20th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Cost Management (33rd)
VMware Cloud Director
Ranking in Cloud Management
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
70
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of CloudBolt is 2.0%, down from 2.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 2.7%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Cloud Director2.7%
CloudBolt2.0%
Other95.3%
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.
KuldeepSingh4 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Experienced users benefit from resource isolation and valuable self-service portal while seeing potential in enhanced infrastructure visibility
VMware is not going further with VMware Cloud Director. They are integrating the VMware Cloud Director feature with Aria Automation only for the upcoming versions, primarily with the VCF 9, and slowly they are integrating some of the parts they have already integrated, and they might not continue with VMware Cloud Director in the future. They can make it more granular to ensure hardware-level segregation, the underlying infrastructure level of segregation for the end user, and a separate security boundary where users can access the end-to-end layer. End-to-end layer means my software layer along with the hardware layer. If they want to do a certain level of troubleshooting primarily on the ESXi part, that is what I feel is lacking for now because for an end user accessing the SSP, the underlying infrastructure is a kind of black box for them. For VMware Cloud Director, it can be more comprehensive if we enable public cloud integration as well. In today's date, customers are adopting a multi-cloud environment where VMware Cloud Director is much feasible to leverage the underlying VMware backend architecture. If VMware Cloud Director could be made to have more integration with the public cloud and do the day one, day two jobs for public cloud interface as well, that would be beneficial. Additionally, I recommend leveraging the VMware Cloud Director layer if a customer has a multi-cloud environment and is planning some cross-cloud migration capability. Cross-cloud migration refers to if a customer has something on Azure, wanting to bring it up on VMware or maybe from VMware to AWS, vice versa. In that case, VMware Cloud Director should provide some cross-cloud migration capability as well.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
9%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise36
 

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 to newer cloud management platforms. From a telemetry and analytics perspective, ...
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 to manage hybrid and multi-cloud provisioning across AWS, Azure, GCP, VMware, a...
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 automation, and planning integrations in advance, such as IAM, CMDB, or security a...
Would you change anything about VMware vCloud Director if you could?
VMware vCloud Director works very well and there are not many things that I would like to see changed. However, a single thing comes to mind when I think of improvements and that is integration. In...
What is the biggest improvement you saw at your company after you started using VMware vCloud Director?
For my company, VMware vCloud Director noticeably increased operational efficiency. When I started working here a few years ago, my organization was using another cloud management tool. We switched...
Is vCloud Director convenient for building applications?
When it comes to building applications, vCloud Director offers you various methods to create cloud-ready ones. For example: Your DevOps team is supported through Infrastructure as Code services w...
 

Also Known As

No data available
vCloud Director
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

WM, CyWest, Panic, Camden, University of Maryland, Xerox, Neustar, Medidata, Continu, Aruba Networks, Neuberger Berman, Peak6, EverBank, Ascensus, Hosting Edge
MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.
Find out what your peers are saying about CloudBolt vs. VMware Cloud Director and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.