Cloudify vs VMware Cloud Director comparison

Cloudify and Broadcom are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. Cloudify is ranked #27, while Broadcom is ranked #4 with an average rating of 7.8. Cloudify holds a 1.9% mindshare in CM, compared to Broadcom’s 5.6% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Cloudify users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

Cloudify

Read 12 Cloudify reviews

851 Views
791 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

VMware Cloud Director

Read 69 VMware Cloud Director reviews

2,738 Views
2,273 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Cloudify

VMware Cloud Director

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

VMware Cloud Director and Cloudify are competing in the cloud management platform domain. VMware Cloud Director often has the upper hand with its advanced networking and security features, while Cloudify stands out for complex automation tasks due to its strong orchestration capabilities.

Features: VMware Cloud Director is noted for comprehensive virtualization management, advanced networking, and detailed security protocols. Cloudify excels with cloud-agnostic orchestration, seamless automation across multiple clouds, and strong deployment flexibility.

Room for Improvement: VMware Cloud Director could improve by simplifying its initial infrastructure setup, enhancing multi-cloud support, and reducing costs for small to medium businesses. Cloudify could benefit from enhancing its native security features, providing more detailed documentation, and increasing its scalability for very large enterprises.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Cloud Director requires a robust setup but offers comprehensive support documentation and reliable customer service. Cloudify offers simplified deployment with its flexible architecture and is known for responsive support, providing faster time-to-value.

Pricing and ROI: VMware Cloud Director has higher initial setup costs, which can result in greater long-term ROI for complex environments. Cloudify offers a more accessible entry cost with competitive ROI through efficient automation and scalability benefits.

To learn more, read our detailed Cloudify vs. VMware Cloud Director Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cloudify vs. VMware Cloud Director

September 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

27th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VMware Cloud Director

Ranking in Cloud Management

4th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Cloudify is 1.9%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 5.6%, down from 7.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
VMware Cloud Director	5.6%
Cloudify	1.9%
Other	92.5%

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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KuldeepSingh4

Technical Solution Architect at HCLSoftware

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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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Extensible internal functions and plugins. Can implement custom plugins to fit your scenario. Python based plugins."

"Product has given us the ability to catch early scaling issues that many companies hit on with private clouds."

"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."

"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."

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

More Cloudify pros

"The product's initial setup phase was easy."

"vCloud Director is a scalable solution, and we have 10 customers who use it."

"So far, we have had no problems at all, as it has been very stable. It is working well."

"The orchestration and automation are very valuable."

"It has helped us with user segmentation and QA."

"They can do any provisioning for the virtual machines. For instance, they will only see those resources if we allocate 10 Ghz database storage. The limitation is due to our setup: we need to ensure customer isolation, as vCloud Director supports multi-tenancy."

"We use it to replicate VMs for our customers from one data center to another data center."

"It helps ensure security across our cloud environments."

More VMware Cloud Director pros

Cons

"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."

"The upgrading process could be simplified."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"This solution could improve by adding root cause analysis."

"The initial setup is not straightforward; it can be complicated. The deployment can take one to two weeks."

"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."

"vCloud Director's pricing is high. Its integration with open-source technologies is limited."

"There are some shortcomings. There are bugs with opening support."

"The product could use a billing feature so we can automate billing for clients."

"We use vCloud Director along with Terraform, and it's difficult to make them work together. It takes a long time to deploy virtual machines with Terraform in vCloud Director. For example, it can take about one or two hours to create 10 machines. It takes up a lot of our DevOps' and engineers' time in comparison to that with other solutions. This is an area that they should work on and improve."

"I had issues with the support, but I also learned from the support. There is room for improvement in the response time."

More VMware Cloud Director 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."

"vCloud Director is an expensive solution."

"It enables us to provision new clients more quickly."

"The license could be less expensive and we are on a perpetual license."

"We pay monthly for all of the licenses."

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing eight and a half to nine out of ten."

"We are able to provision new clients faster. Every month, we take on more customers."

"If ten is very expensive, I rate the tool's price as a four out of ten."

"vCloud Director is a very expensive solution."

More VMware Cloud Director pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Retailer

Educational Organization

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

19%

Government

10%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	24
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	36

Questions from the Community

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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...

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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...

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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...

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Comparisons

Morpheus vs Cloudify

Compared 36% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs Cloudify

Compared 24% of the time

IBM Turbonomic vs Cloudify

Compared 14% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Cloudify

Compared 14% of the time

Tieto OneCloud vs Cloudify

Compared 12% of the time

More Cloudify Competitors

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 21% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 19% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 9% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 9% of the time

OpenNebula vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 8% of the time

More VMware Cloud Director Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudify

September 2025

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Buyer's Guide

VMware Cloud Director

August 2025

Download VMware Cloud Director product report

Also Known As

No data available

vCloud Director

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

VMware Cloud Director, also known as vCloud Director, is a cloud management tool that offers secure, flexible, and efficient cloud resources to thousands of enterprises and IT teams across the world. The solution serves as one of the leading cloud service-delivery platforms for businesses that want to manage and operate their services effectively. By deploying this solution, companies can benefit from virtualized networking, computing, security, and storage. These benefits can be received in a timely manner, as the infrastructure of the product is operationally ready within minutes and clients do not need to install and configure physical infrastructure.

One of the biggest advantages of vCloud Director is that it allows users to build cloud-ready applications. In several ways, it facilitates the process for developers, including:

Open to DevOps: The product addresses the needs of DevOps teams by providing Infrastructure as Code services with vCD Terraform Provider. This allows developers to deliver infrastructure directly from code. Additionally, it provides capabilities from Python and vCD API as well as Object Storage API and App Launchpad APIs.
Customization: This solution is very customizable and extensible for cloud providers to deliver their own branding, themes, and services to their clients.
Dev-ready cloud: vCloud Director offers support for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid for vSphere and multicloud with a plugin for container service extension. Through these, native K8s Clusters or Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Clusters can be delivered and managed through a user interface (UI) and application programming interface (API).

vCloud Director Features

This VMware product has various features through which users can virtualize their data and benefit from quality management solutions. Among the popular capabilities of vCloud Director are:

Elastic secure virtual data centers: This vCloud Director feature provides tenants with securely isolated virtual resources, fine-grained control of their public cloud services, and independent role-based authentication.
Multi-site management: This feature allows companies to stretch data centers across sites and geographies as well as connect to existing dedicated vCenters for access and management or on-broad into VMware vCloud Director.
ISV ecosystem: This feature integrates leading cloud service vendors into the product using an open extensibility framework. Some of the partners of vCloud Director include Dell Data Protection, Veeam, Cloudian, AWS S3, and Dell ECS.
DRaaS workload protection: This feature allows users to deliver self-service tiered disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) on-premises to cloud and cloud to cloud.
Cloud migration: Part of this feature is the plugin VMware Cloud Director Availability, which enables simple migration to cloud, offering self-service cold or warm migration to users' vCloud Director clouds.
Operational visibility and insights: The product includes an accessible dashboard and a single pane of glass to provide centralized multi-tenant cloud management views.
Cloud-native applications and development: This feature makes the platform suitable for developers to sandbox or deploy apps as it natively supports Tanzu Basic, native K8s, and PKS.
Automation: Through various tools and deep integration, the solution allows users to automate complex infrastructure-as-code and tile UI-driven workflows. This allows them to deploy X-as-a-Service and maintain full access control and visibility at the same time.
Application Platform as a Service: This feature enables users to deliver their own catalog-based applications or VMware Cloud Marketplace-certified third-party cloud applications through the plugin App Launchpad VMware Cloud Director.
GPU as a Service: Utilizing Nvidia AI Enterprise, this feature provides support for GPU as a Service and delivers multi-tenant GPU services for customers who require high-performance compute for GPU-specific applications.
Secure cloud: The solution supports multiple security-centric features to deliver an enterprise-class cloud service, including NSX-T distributed firewalling, workload encryption, and integrated disaster recovery replication.

vCloud Director Benefits

VMware vCloud Director offers various benefits to its users. Some of these include:

The solution provides a highly efficient self-service model which consists of a virtual data center compute, network, storage, and security.
VMware vCloud Director offers its users multi-tenancy infrastructure with deep automation which facilitates their daily tasks.
The product is cost-efficient, as it is service-ready on its very first day and offers a high revenue from services.
Businesses can deliver services to their clients in a timely manner through this product, benefitting from its natively integrated solutions.
VMware vCloud Director provides users with high flexibility, as it allows businesses to stretch networks across virtual data centers globally.
The solution provides load-balancing capabilities, which facilitate the creation of new hybrid applications and digital transformation initiatives.

Reviews from Real Users

Ajit Y., a cloud architect at a computer software company, likes VMware vCloud Director because it is a stable, truly multitenant software and the go-to tool for infrastructure as a service.

Kashif F., a divisional engineer at National Telecom Corporatio, rates vCloud Director highly because the product can be used for infrastructure provisioning without using a platform service.

Broadcom

Sample Customers

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

MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.

Buyer's Guide

Cloudify vs. VMware Cloud Director

September 2025

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