Cloudify vs OpenNebula comparison

Cloudify and OpenNebula are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. Cloudify is ranked #29, while OpenNebula is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.5. Cloudify holds a 1.9% mindshare in CM, compared to OpenNebula’s 6.8% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Cloudify users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of OpenNebula users who would recommend it.

Cloudify

Read 12 Cloudify reviews

886 Views
824 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

OpenNebula

Read 15 OpenNebula reviews

3,255 Views
3,157 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Cloudify

OpenNebula

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Cloudify and OpenNebula are competing platforms in cloud orchestration and management, with Cloudify holding an advantage due to its flexible features and advanced integration capabilities.

Features: Cloudify supports multi-cloud integration, application orchestration, and automation, making it ideal for complex environments. Extensive TOSCA support, infrastructure-as-code, and service chaining enhance its flexibility. OpenNebula is renowned for easy setup and management of virtualized data centers, scalable architecture, and robust API support for custom automation.

Room for Improvement: Cloudify could improve by simplifying the deployment process to better accommodate smaller organizations. Additionally, enhanced out-of-the-box integrations and streamlined resource consumption might attract more users. OpenNebula could benefit from expanded customer support, more refined enterprise features, and increased documentation for complex cloud setups.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cloudify offers customizable deployments suitable for complex enterprise needs, backed by dedicated support. OpenNebula's straightforward deployment model allows for rapid implementation, but its customer support may not match Cloudify's depth.

Pricing and ROI: Cloudify typically incurs higher setup costs but offers significant ROI for adaptable and scalable environments. OpenNebula provides a cost-effective solution with lower upfront investment, appealing to budget-conscious organizations or those with less complexity.

To learn more, read our detailed Cloudify vs. OpenNebula Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cloudify vs. OpenNebula

July 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

Cloudify

Ranking in Cloud Management

29th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

OpenNebula

Ranking in Cloud Management

6th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Cloudify is 1.9%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenNebula is 6.8%, up from 6.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

Mark Wittling

Cloud Architect at Cox communications

Works very well for advanced service chaining requirements and has extremely advanced engineers for support

We had a manager who thought that Cloudify could be used as a replacement for Horizon in OpenStack, but we found that Cloudify lacked the user interface or GUI for doing multitenancy and basic platform management tasks. Cloudify was really good at launching, for example, firewalls and configuring them and doing service chaining and rather advanced things like that, but it didn't meet the requirements for a basic platform management solution. It is something that seems to work better as a bolt-on or an augmented solution. It is a bit mis-marketed as a Cloud Management solution. It is not that. It is more of a service orchestration and automation tool. It is very good at doing that, but it fails to meet basic platform management requirements. Once you have it running, you can't really do anything with it without writing code and scripts. It requires a full-time DevOps person to use it. We deployed a Palo Alto firewall with it. That's basically what the project was for us, and it worked flawlessly once we got it finished, but it took another 12 weeks to get all of the automation and everything else coded, tested, and working. There is certainly a place for this technology, but when we got rid of OpenStack and moved to VMware, we either had to go with the vRealize Automation Suite to do this kind of automation, or we had to find an alternative solution to manage the private cloud. So, we put Cloudify in, but we really couldn't find it useful for basic platform administration tasks.

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FOURES Jean-Philippe

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.

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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

"TOSCA model allows modeling the application rather than the automation. It is a machine-readable representation of the application and its infrastructure, which can be used for other things too, not just for the orchestration (e.g. enterprise architecture big picture, who connects to whom)."

"It enables a single platform to communicate with the entire infrastructure."

"Cloudify works in cases where you have very advanced service chaining requirements. It really works well there, and it fits the best. They have a standardized markup that's based on TOSCA, which is a standard. I like the fact that they're standards-based. Their solution works extremely well if you have the talent and the manpower to write TOSCA descriptors to deploy and interchange services or to automate the configuration and turn up of services."

"Has great extendability which means you can build your own custom logic."

"You can use only what you need. You can remove certain Cloudify functions from the framework to create a "minified" version of what you need. This might only consist of the messaging delivery system, and the orchestration functions."

"Valuable features are auto-scaling and load balancing."

"Cloudify provides the infrastructure-as-code, as well as operational action capabilities (orchestrated startups or upgrades, and more)."

"The solution includes the option to run background scripts and processes from a connected API."

More Cloudify pros

"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 solution provides templates for configurations that can easily be exchanged to VMs."

"OpenNebula has very good integration with SAP Storage."

"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."

"It's easy to integrate OpenNebula with our IT systems."

"The service feature appeals most to us, thus it is the most valuable."

"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."

"It is quite easy to deploy."

More OpenNebula pros

Cons

"Unlike the Docker environment, Cloudify takes time for configuration and its learning curve."

"It lacked the user interface for multitenancy and basic platform management tasks. It is a leader in the niche area that they like to perform in, but it only does about 30% of top-tier advanced functions of platform management. It doesn't meet about 70% of what you need to manage a private cloud platform."

"The solution is a bit of a headache because mistakes happen in the blueprint every time we deploy and they require modifications."

"Certainly the UI could use some intensive work, but nevertheless, overall, it’s a complete product with its 3.4 version and much better features are available with 4.0."

"Install of the product itself could be improved and I would like to see better event monitoring."

"The upgrading process could be simplified."

"Error handling could be improved; GUI is lacking with respect to user privileges and connectivity."

"An area for improvement in OpenNebula is the number of features it has. The solution doesn't have that many cloud features compared to other solutions. You'd say, "Okay, simplicity over a rich feature list?" Some say, "No, I need a big machine or a cloud interface for my customers to manage resources. I don't have to go and do it for them." Some people do it that way, and it works, but I'd like to improve the limited features in OpenNebula."

"They have been saying for the past two and a half years that they would develop a feature to hot-add RAM and CPU, but it does not work."

"They should add more features like object storage."

"The protocol for clusterization is rough and doesn't work well."

"As with all enterprise software licensing, the pricing is not intuitive and must be negotiated; grandfathered contracts are better than anything offered today."

"Backup features are only available in the enterprise edition. The community version lacks a good solution for making backups."

"The web interface could be better. It's not very difficult to use, but there's room for enhancement."

"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."

More OpenNebula cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I wasn't involved in the pricing of it because we were just doing prototype work with it, but I was told by the upper management team that it was quite expensive. That was another reason we switched to Morpheus."

"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."

"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."

"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."

"We use the Community Edition, rather than the Enterprise Edition."

"OpenNebula gives good value for money."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Retailer

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

20%

University

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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What do you like most about OpenNebula?

The live migration feature has been great and is something we use very often.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for OpenNebula?

OpenNebula gives good value for money.

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What needs improvement with OpenNebula?

The web interface could be better. It's not very difficult to use, but there's room for enhancement. Another area for improvement is the integration with hardware to manage the lower layer of the n...

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Comparisons

Morpheus vs Cloudify

Compared 45% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs Cloudify

Compared 26% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Cloudify

Compared 16% of the time

IBM Turbonomic vs Cloudify

Compared 14% of the time

More Cloudify Competitors

CloudStack vs OpenNebula

Compared 49% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs OpenNebula

Compared 13% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs OpenNebula

Compared 12% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs OpenNebula

Compared 9% of the time

Morpheus vs OpenNebula

Compared 4% of the time

More OpenNebula Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudify

July 2025

Download Cloudify product report

Buyer's Guide

OpenNebula

June 2025

Download OpenNebula product report

Overview

Cloudify is an open-source orchestration-first cloud management platform. The solution allows applications to efficiently run across multiple cloud or data center platforms for premium multi-cloud infrastructure automation and orchestration. It provides infrastructure automation using environment as a service (EaaS) technology to deploy and continuously manage any cloud, private data center, or Kubernetes service from one central point while leveraging existing toolchains.

Cloudify Product Highlights

Fully customizable (white label, add, and modify widgets)
Create a custom view per business units, groups, user role
Easy integration with any 3rd-party/homegrown portal
Identify and eliminate task execution failures via a visual interface
Easy service composition that allows you to create new or update existing services
Switch between code and topology views
Import existing automation templates and scripts into Cloudify and automatically convert them into certified environments.
Intelligent and declarative engine that automates the entire lifecycle management
Intuitive UX and dashboards allowing complete visibility and control over usage, behavior, faults, and events of application/network services.

Cloudify Features

Cloudify has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Elastic caching
Post-deployment automation
Deployment monitoring
Service catalog
Real-time code validation
Plugins (Kubernetes, Ansible, AWS Cloud Formation, Azure ARM, Terraform)
Advanced Kubernetes management UI
Multi cluster action
Governance and compliance
Self-serve experience

Cloudify Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing Cloudify. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Operation agility: Cloudify gives your organization and DevOps teams the ability to react to resource needs, evolve, and adapt quickly over time.

Self-service: Cloudify provides a self-service catalog and portal framework for cloud automation and cloud orchestration to provide a helpful and intuitive experience for environments, apps, and services setup and management.

Real-time visibility: Cloudify enables you to visually track all task executions. By implementing Cloudify, you can monitor progress and status of each execution step on Cloudify’s cloud orchestration platform, identify and eliminate task execution failures via a visual interface, and you can also apply management actions, such as stop, correct, and resume, quickly.

Reduce design and configuration time: The Cloudify solution has a visual editor, allowing greater visibility into blueprint structure and dependencies, and drag-n-drop service composition that helps you leverage shared resources and components for ultimate open-source infrastructure and cloud orchestration.

Fast deployment: Another benefit of Cloudify is that it helps speed up deployments of your test/dev/production environments from your CI/CD.

Enables continuous updates: With Cloudify, you have continuous updates for your production environments. Cloudify enables your organization to monitor health, heal failures, update patches, and scale resources without any environment downtime.

Governance: By using the Cloudify solution, you can accommodate governance changes and can scale and update operations according to your certified architecture.

Easier to manage Kubernetes: Cloudify makes it simple for you to manage multi Kubernetes clusters via service orchestration, enabling you to manage the application service itself rather than just its infrastructure.

Cost optimization: With Cloudify, you can control costs by employing end-to-end modeling of the entire infrastructure. The solution offers cost-saving policies, which include the decommissioning of formerly complex services and resources.

Cloudify

OpenNebula provides the most simple but feature-rich and flexible solution for the comprehensive management of virtualized data centers to enable private, public and hybrid IaaS clouds. OpenNebula interoperability makes cloud an evolution by leveraging existing IT assets, protecting your investments, and avoiding vendor lock-in.

OpenNebula is a turnkey enterprise-ready solution that includes all the features needed to provide an on-premises (private) cloud offering, and to offer public cloud services.

OpenNebula

Sample Customers

Proximus Partner Communications (Israel) VMware NTT Data Metaswitch Spirent Communications Lumina Networks Atos Fortinet

Akamai, BBC, Fermilab, Terradue, Surf Sara, Produban, Netways, ESA, China Mobile, BlackBerry, Deloitte, Fuze, Telefonica, Trivago, Nokia, Encore Tech, Beeks.

Buyer's Guide

Cloudify vs. OpenNebula

July 2025

Free Report: Cloudify vs. OpenNebula

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