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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
7.9
CloudBolt's efficiency and automation reduced costs by 60% and improved delivery speed by over 50% in three years.
Sentiment score
6.9
VMware Cloud Director improves client provisioning, resource control, and efficiency, but opinions vary on its long-term cost-effectiveness.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
8.5
CloudBolt's customer service excels with quick responses, proactive follow-ups, and knowledgeable support, ensuring efficient issue resolution.
Sentiment score
6.9
VMware Cloud Director's support is praised for effectiveness but criticized for delays, improving complex case handling, and communication.
Most of the time, we have to raise the case with the vendors such as HPE or other providers, but 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.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.7
CloudBolt scales effectively across environments but may struggle with horizontal scaling; VMware infrastructure adapts by resource adjustments.
Sentiment score
7.4
VMware Cloud Director excels in scalability, enabling efficient workload management and integration, highly rated for large-scale deployments.
VMware Cloud Director is quite scalable; I would rate it nine out of ten.
I would rate scalability for VMware Cloud Director as 8, especially from the on-premises environment.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
CloudBolt is widely regarded as stable, with some issues resolved swiftly and benefiting from strong support and collaboration.
Sentiment score
7.7
VMware Cloud Director is highly rated for stability and reliability, despite occasional issues and interoperability challenges during deployment.
There are occasional problems when trying to increase the parameters of a virtual machine.
 

Room For Improvement

CloudBolt needs improvements in container support, user interface, integration, billing, scheduling, SaaS management, and on-prem/cloud integration.
VMware Cloud Director needs improved integration, GUI, search, interoperability, cost options, automation, and features found in competitors.
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.
The console methods make management difficult until VMware tools are installed.
 

Setup Cost

CloudBolt offers flexible pricing with discounts, allowing cost-effective management based on deployment size, though fees vary by location.
VMware Cloud Director is pricey but offers extensive features, with flexibility options for cost-conscious buyers against major cloud competitors.
The pricing for VMware Cloud Director is more or less reasonable, especially when compared to Cisco, which is significantly more expensive.
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.
 

Valuable Features

CloudBolt excels in ease of use, flexibility, and expandability, offering extensive automation, customization, and cloud management features.
VMware Cloud Director offers scalable, user-friendly cloud management with strong integration, automation, and multi-tenancy for private and hybrid environments.
The most valuable feature of VMware Cloud Director is segregating the underlying infrastructure for the end user.
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.
 

Categories and Ranking

CloudBolt
Ranking in Cloud Management
19th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Cost Management (18th)
VMware Cloud Director
Ranking in Cloud Management
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
69
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of CloudBolt is 2.7%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 6.0%, down from 7.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

AdeolaEkunola - PeerSpot reviewer
The solution offers reliable resource control but needs to improve its UI
Cloudbox is just an abstraction software. There is no need for scalability. It's quite a simple solution. You might only need to increase the resources you apply to the CloudBold deployment. If, for example, the number of users increases, you might have to check the recommendations from CloudBolt and act accordingly. We have over 100 internal users. Regarding the infrastructure it sits on, the solution sits on the private of the on-prem, a VMware infrastructure that stands across two sites, the DR and the main production. We have over 60 ESXi of Asterisk and about 500 or 1,000 virtual machines.
KuldeepSingh4 - PeerSpot reviewer
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
Computer Software Company
16%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Energy/Utilities Company
6%
Computer Software Company
20%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about CloudBolt?
I find the self-service features valuable.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CloudBolt?
I rate the pricing an eight out of ten because the solution is expensive. The license is expensive to acquire.
What needs improvement with CloudBolt?
The area of integrating on-prem and cloud needs improvement. Another area that the solution needs to improve on is the UI. The UI can be much better.
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: July 2025.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.