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Cloudify 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudify
Ranking in Cloud Management
29th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Cloud Director
Ranking in Cloud Management
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
68
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 VMware Cloud Director is 6.3%, down from 7.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Mark Wittling - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
NiteshKumar1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides crystal clear dashboarding and allows you to manage and monitor your infrastructure
The overall dashboarding is very crystal clear. The ability to switch from one infrastructure to another infrastructure and get into detailed information, whether it is compute, storage network, or whatever. That helps you get a holistic view of the overall infrastructure running in your landscape. This also helps the leadership and management be aware of the right potential investment strategy by looking at the potential utilization. vCloud Director also provides ways and means through which you can make a prediction or a forecast of the infrastructure that would be needed in the future, depending on what you are currently running. That does not take away the fact that we have to be completely aware of our pipeline projects in our schedule so that you can plan your infrastructure requirements accordingly. vCloud Director provides multifold features that have been beneficial to the end users.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"It enables a single platform to communicate with the entire infrastructure."
"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)."
"The solution includes the option to run background scripts and processes from a connected API."
"Extensible internal functions and plugins. Can implement custom plugins to fit your scenario. Python based plugins."
"Valuable features are auto-scaling and load balancing."
"Product has given us the ability to catch early scaling issues that many companies hit on with private clouds."
"Has great extendability which means you can build your own custom logic."
"The stability of the product is better than just 'good.'"
"vCloud is a good platform for visualization. It is very handy for monitoring. VMware can integrate with all monitoring systems like vRealize, and the management monitoring is good. I'm very happy with VMware. VMware is good in management and monitoring systems."
"The initial installation and setup are very quick."
"We use it to replicate VMs for our customers from one data center to another data center."
"The solution is reliable and performs well."
"We use the infrastructure as a service cloud, that is, we use the features as infrastructure for this. We are not using any platform services."
"It helps ensure security across our cloud environments."
"vCloud Director works and makes my life easier. Its self-service capabilities allow us to give resources to our customers. They can spin up as many or as few machines as they like, and it works."
 

Cons

"Error handling could be improved; GUI is lacking with respect to user privileges and connectivity."
"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."
"Unlike the Docker environment, Cloudify takes time for configuration and its learning curve."
"The upgrading process could be simplified."
"Install of the product itself could be improved and I would like to see better event monitoring."
"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."
"vRealize Orchestrator is an expensive tool."
"The integration between components could be improved."
"The solution requires a lot of hardware and resources for cloud deployment than other competitors. Additionally, the performance could improve."
"Improvements could be made in the building feature since there isn't a real building feature associated with the product. We require a building feature to integrate with other solutions."
"The product could use a billing feature so we can automate billing for clients."
"In version 6.7, compatibility to migrate VMs from a vCenter to vCloud Director had a problem. However, this has been solved in the newest version."
"vCloud Director could use the vCenter database to store information. This way, we don't end up in a situation where we have things going out of sync."
"We are having a bit of a problem with vCloud Availability. We know that vRA has a new product, HCX. We would like to know about it, then migrate to the product."
 

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."
"If one means a very bad price, and ten means a very good price, I rate the price as a five on a scale of one to ten."
"vCloud Director is an expensive solution."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"We are able to provision new clients faster. Every month, we take on more customers."
"In certain cases, the price of Cloud Director is quite high, especially with the load balancing and other features they've introduced. That seems quite costly. Overall, for VSPP programming, I think it's okay. However, features like enterprise load balancing and all these other things are very costly."
"I believe the pricing is reasonable."
"My company has no problems with the pricing of the product as we got good discounts from VMware."
"If ten is very expensive, I rate the tool's price as a four out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Retailer
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
10%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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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

Proximus Partner Communications (Israel) VMware NTT Data Metaswitch Spirent Communications Lumina Networks Atos Fortinet
MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudify vs. VMware Cloud Director and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
861,390 professionals have used our research since 2012.