Cloudify vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

Cloudify and Broadcom are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. Cloudify is ranked #26, while Broadcom is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.1. Cloudify holds a 1.8% mindshare in CM, compared to Broadcom’s 9.4% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Cloudify users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

Cloudify

Read 12 Cloudify reviews

830 Views
772 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Automation

Read 171 VMware Aria Automation reviews

7,662 Views
4,137 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Cloudify

VMware Aria Automation

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Cloudify and VMware Aria Automation are products competing in the cloud management space. Cloudify seems to have a cost advantage, whereas VMware Aria Automation offers a richer feature set, potentially providing a more comprehensive solution worth the investment.

Features: Cloudify provides adaptive automation and orchestration for multi-cloud and edge environments, dynamic blueprinting, and the flexibility of an open-source model. VMware Aria Automation offers deep integration with VMware’s ecosystem, advanced automation features, and strong security measures suitable for enterprise-grade environments.

Room for Improvement: Cloudify could enhance its structured customer service and add more direct support channels. To compete better at the enterprise level, its automation features could be expanded. There is room for further development in its orchestration standards. VMware Aria Automation might improve its initial setup complexity to ease new user adoption. It could also broaden its interoperability with third-party tools. Pricing transparency could be improved to offer clearer ROI justifications for prospective customers.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cloudify features a straightforward deployment process, leveraging community forums for user support, which may affect response times. VMware Aria Automation offers integrated deployment paths within VMware's ecosystem, supported by comprehensive professional services ensuring faster issue resolution.

Pricing and ROI: Cloudify generally offers lower upfront costs and appeals with significant ROI for businesses seeking adaptability and long-term operational savings, particularly appealing to startups. VMware Aria Automation demands a more significant initial investment but is reported to deliver impressive ROI through its extensive features and integrations, making it suitable for larger enterprises.

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

Buyer's Guide

Cloudify vs. VMware Aria Automation

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

26th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VMware Aria Automation

Ranking in Cloud Management

2nd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

171

Ranking in other categories

Configuration Management (6th), Network Automation (3rd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (16th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (5th)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Cloudify is 1.8%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 9.4%, down from 10.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
VMware Aria Automation	9.4%
Cloudify	1.8%
Other	88.8%

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

Mohammed Abuaisha

Senior Backend Engineer at HelloFresh

Very powerful with great extendibility; great for huge and complex infrastructures

This is a somewhat complex solution for very complex use cases where there are multiple cloud vendors, multiple infrastructures, and multiple configurations. It solves a lot of issues for complex operations. It's good for the telecom industry. If you have multiple locations with a lot of tools that you want to integrate, and complex teams using different solutions, and you want to unify all these under one umbrella, I think Cloudify is a good product. If you're looking to provision infrastructure on a specific cloud and manage RDS, for example, I think the use case would be less suitable because you'd need to purchase a license for something you're not going to use. I rate this solution nine out of 10 primarily because of its extendibility which is great.

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Le Quang Long

Cloud Engineer at BIDV - Ngân hàng TMCP Đầu tư & Phát triển Việt Nam

Significantly streamlined operations with good automation that helps with simplifying workflows

It helps me build a big catalog and provide it to my end users. It helps us automate the workflow of creating many VMs and the TensorFlow key method. I do not meet many people to operate it live beforehand. It operates for both of my products, but as a product, it is complicated to integrate and automate with other products.

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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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

More Cloudify pros

"VMware Aria Automation is a very scalable solution because it integrates well with a couple of leading products in the industry. For products that are not already integrated, there are plugins or adapters that can be used with customization."

"The solution has helped us to increase infrastructure agility, mostly because, in addition to it being able to do its thing on its own, it has tie-ins to other parts of our CICD pipeline. We use Jenkins for our build process which, of course, vRA has plugins for, to be able to integrate with it. We use Chef and there is the Chef build as part of our image that we standardized to deploy, and that can tie in with our section of the pipeline that it does for applications."

"vRA helps automate deployment for developers. We do a lot of orchestration or customization within our environment so it will suit each of our customers. So, we have different business units who have their own templates."

"It benefits the speed of our development, and the speed of anything we test and send through to production."

"I used the technical support during upgrades. They came onsite and are very technical. They are very good"

"The operations manager does a fantastic job on the front end because it includes on-premises and cloud use cases."

"The product is stable."

"usability; Ease of use, the GUI, is probably the best feature, so that really anybody can use it. You don't have to be technical to be able to deploy a VM. I find it to be intuitive and user-friendly. Regarding some of the files that you feed it, you don't have to do a ton of development. You can feed it pretty standard configuration files. You don't have to be a developer, you don't have to know C# or Java or the like to get it going."

More VMware Aria Automation pros

Cons

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

"Multitenancy management is a little bit difficult to do, so it is an area that can be improved."

"Stability has gotten a lot better. However, the vRO aspect, when you have a multi vRA head, is a little bit finicky still. vRO still needs to stay on one appliance and be one application, because, when you have two, you can't see runs on the other one that are happening when you're not logged into that one."

"The upgrade experience is horrible. It's not straightforward, there are a lot of failures, a lot of support interactions. It's not something that we are able to pull off ourselves. I've been with vRA since it was termed vCSA. We've gone through multiple rounds, and it has never been easy."

"Most of the time the upgrade experience has been good but sometimes things break after upgrading. For example, some API codes stopped working."

"We are migrating from vRA version 7 to 8, but the migration is really hectic and time-consuming. There are no straightforward paths to migrate. We are doing an entirely new deployment to go to vRA version 8.0, then somehow get all of the VMs to vRA 8.0. Therefore, it would have been great if VMware had some solutions to upgrade from vRA 7 to 8 seamlessly. This includes the management of all the objects or VMs from the older version. Unfortunately, it is not there."

"I know you can spin up virtual desktops in vRA, but they're not thin-provisioned. I don't know if that's because the other product, Horizon View, is there, but it would be nice to see more integration."

"Normally, on the first call to technical support, you don't get the right person. The log analysis takes a long time. This is something which should be improved."

"The initial setup is complex. There are too many components to integrate, especially when we integrated with different storage types and backup vendors. All the integration made it more complex."

More VMware Aria Automation 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 pricing for this solution is roughly 20% lower than the competitive products in the market."

"I would rate it high because, compared to other solutions, VMware’s pricing is quite expensive. VMware products have become significantly more costly in recent years, leading to higher costs."

"We have seen significant ROI. We used to have physical servers, it took 90 days to get a server, order it, buy it, and get it in. We have it down to 10 minutes, building a server with virtualization, and now that's too slow. So, we let the customer do it at their speed. Therefore, it is pretty much up in a couple of minutes and they have a server."

"From a budget point of view, the pricing is a bit on the higher side."

"We do plan to see ROI with any new implementation of new technologies being implemented within our environment."

"Better pricing is always handy, but I feel it's at the right price point."

"This is an expensive product and the high price is starting to become an issue for us."

"The tool is expensive since it is an enterprise product."

More VMware Aria Automation pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Retailer

Educational Organization

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

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	32
Midsize Enterprise	24
Large Enterprise	130

Questions from the Community

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What's the difference between VMware vRA (automation) and vROps (operations)?

vROP is a virtualization management solution from VMWare. It is efficient and easy to manage. You can find anything you need from the software interface. It provides complete visibility over applic...

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Is there any way to try VMware Aria Automation for free?

When it comes to VMware Aria Automation, you have three choices for free runs: Hands-on Lab (HOL) Advanced lab A free trial I cannot describe in detail the second and third options as my company ...

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Which sectors can benefit the most from VMware Aria Automation?

I was looking at VMware Aria Automation case studies recently and I got the impression that three main kinds of companies were using it most often: Social organizations Financial institutions and ...

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Comparisons

Morpheus vs Cloudify

Compared 29% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs Cloudify

Compared 28% of the time

IBM Turbonomic vs Cloudify

Compared 14% of the time

Tieto OneCloud vs Cloudify

Compared 13% of the time

More Cloudify Competitors

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 15% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 12% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 10% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 7% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 6% of the time

More VMware Aria Automation Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudify

October 2025

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Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Automation

October 2025

Download VMware Aria Automation product report

Also Known As

No data available

VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack

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 Aria Automation is a cloud management tool that allows companies to simplify their cloud experience through a modern automation platform. The solution is designed to deliver self-service clouds, multi-cloud automation with governance, and DevOps-based security and infrastructure management. It helps organizations improve IT agility, efficiency, and productivity through its various features.

VMware Aria Automation has multiple use cases that include the following:

Self-service multi-cloud: VMware Aria Automation can be used to deliver consistent self-service consumption. Another use case in this area is for delivering infrastructure across VMware Clouds as well as public clouds.
Multi-cloud governance: The solution can be used to manage cost, performance, networking, configuration, and security at scale for multi-cloud environments. VMware Aria Automation offers all this with an everything-as-code approach.
DevOps for infrastructure: Through VMware Aria Automation, companies can enable a powerful infrastructure as code platform with support for iterative development and infrastructure pipelining.
Kubernetes automation: Users can utilize VMware Aria Automation to automate the management of Kubernetes clusters and namespaces with support for vSphere with Tanzu.
Security operations: VMware Aria Automation facilitates event-driven automation to deliver full-service IT system compliance enforcement and vulnerability remediation.

VMware Aria Automation Features

VMware Aria Automation has various features that allow users to easily perform operations. Some of the solution's capacities include:

VMware Cloud agnostic template: This feature allows organizations to use a single cloud template to deploy with Infrastructure as a Code. Deployment options include VMware Cloud as well as major public cloud platforms such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and more.
Extensibility and customization: This VMware Aria Automation feature allows users to get full extensibility and customization. This can be achieved through Aria Automation Orchestrator, Action-Based Extensibility (ABX), and built-in integrations with common third-party tools.
Self-service multi-cloud: This feature enables users to request and provision infrastructure resources. It can be done across clouds using a unified and consistent Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) consumption layer, idempotent REST API, and self-service catalog.
Centralized policies and governance: VMware Aria Automation offers a feature for users to manage multiple clouds with templatized cloud and policy definition, automated remediation, and cloud environment visibility.
Configuration management: Through this feature of the product, day 1 and 2 control can be achieved for virtualized and cloud environments. This can be done with intuitive configuration automation, compliance enforcement, and vulnerability remediation.
Infrastructure pipelining: Through this feature, organizations can access user-friendly release automation pipelines. They can be specifically tailored for CI/CD in infrastructure use cases.

VMware Aria Automation Benefits

VMware Aria Automation offers its users various benefits. Some of the biggest advantages that the solution brings to companies that utilize it include:

VMware Aria Automation provides faster time to market for companies through offloading manual tasks with advanced workflows and agile templating.
The solution offers high levels of security and control.
This product is suitable for beginners, as it offers a self-service consumption experience for users.
VMware Aria Automation accelerates innovation through Infrastructure as Code and DevOps principles.
The product provides users with flexibility, as it is compatible with the most popular public cloud solutions.
The solution offers fast deployment because of all natively integrated functions.

Reviews from Real Users

Awais J., CTO/CEO at a tech services company, likes VMware Aria Automation because it saves a lot of time, provides more visibility, and has extensive automation capabilities.

An IT consultant at a government rates VMware Aria Automation highly because the product gives you flexibility to analyze and consume resources.

Broadcom

Sample Customers

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

Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual

Buyer's Guide

Cloudify vs. VMware Aria Automation

September 2025

Free Report: Cloudify vs. VMware Aria Automation

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