Cloudify vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

Cloudify and Broadcom are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. Cloudify is ranked #27, while Broadcom is ranked #2 with an average rating of 7.9. Cloudify holds a 1.9% mindshare in CM, compared to Broadcom’s 9.8% 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

851 Views
791 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Automation

Read 171 VMware Aria Automation reviews

8,035 Views
4,339 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Cloudify

VMware Aria Automation

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

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

Download the complete report

Helped 867,676 peers since 2012

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 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 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 Aria Automation is 9.8%, down from 11.7% 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	9.8%
Cloudify	1.9%
Other	88.3%

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.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."

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

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

"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)."

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

"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."

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

More Cloudify pros

"The self-service capabilities are by far the best that we've seen in terms of features. If the user is being able to log in and make requests himself, from the onboarding process all the way to the end, that's very helpful."

"vRA is user-friendly. It has the same layout and walk-through GUI, similar to other VMware products."

"The blueprint functionality of the product is intuitive and user-friendly. The concept of the blueprints is visual and easy to use."

"The product saves a lot of time and cost for us. It has valuable features for creating a playbook."

"The most valuable feature is the way that it plugs into our monitoring systems, and Infoblox and Puppet."

"Currently, the primary feature we're using in VMware Aria Automation is its ability to execute tasks quickly. However, we haven't explored other features like workload management or the full stack yet. So it's hard to make comparisons or fully utilize its potential until we expand our usage."

"VMware Aria Automation has made a lot of things easier. It has really helped the operations team to spin up the virtual machines."

"compare-to-competition; Citrix was on our short list. But over the last ten years, we have been a big VMware shop. We wanted to continue with VMware because we are confident that VMware can address any kind of problem situation, any challenges. But with Citrix, we didn't find that kind of credibility when we did solution testing, a PoC."

More VMware Aria Automation pros

Cons

"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."

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

"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."

"In terms of additional features, I would like it to be able to poll my vCenter infrastructure more rapidly and adapt to changes quickly. It should alert me and let me know when there are broken components, as a result of underlying infrastructure changes. It needs to be more stringent."

"Deploying and configuring the solution takes a lot of time."

"It is too broad scale and complicated. It takes too many clicks to do things."

"I would like to see better integration capabilities. Maybe if they could develop libraries within Aria Automation for simpler integration with other third-party solutions, instead of just basic integration."

"With the workflow aspect, which has manual intervention, a policy needs to be approved by somebody. There could be better management of that piece with better templates. It is like a workflow engine, but does not have enough example templates to do certain things. A lot of people waste a lot of time trying to figure out the same thing, and everybody is trying to figure out the same thing, e.g., how to make a MySQL cluster in a Windows environment?"

"The basic support is not there for Google Cloud and Azure. They are unable to provision nor do cost controls. Google is still left out. It is great that they have done AWS, but we are a retailer which means nothing to us because it is a competitor. Azure is good, but Google is where a lot of our development environments are."

"As a product, it is complicated to integrate and automate with other products."

"VMware needs to make it to where it is not as custom. Right now, you spend a lot of time making the services work. In order to get it up and running initially, that takes time."

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 solution is pretty expensive but provides good workload management."

"The pricing for this solution is roughly 20% lower than the competitive products in the market."

"I would rate the pricing a ten out of ten, with ten being very expensive."

"As far as value is concerned, it has been essential to our environment. We have been able to deploy VMs quickly and the developers have their own sandbox, so they can spin up and destroy VMs at their own will."

"It is an expensive product. After VMware's acquisition by Broadcom, there was a rise in the price of VMware Aria Automation."

"The cost of the solution is reasonable for us. Although it is relatively high, we prioritize stability and integration over cost."

"From the customer perspective, the value was worth it."

"So much can be done with the Open Source side, and especially for smaller shops. I personally think the pricing for Enterprise is hard to justify."

More VMware Aria Automation pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Management solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

867,676 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Retailer

Educational Organization

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

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

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

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...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

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

Tieto OneCloud vs Cloudify

Compared 12% of the time

More Cloudify Competitors

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 17% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 14% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 11% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 8% 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

September 2025

Download Cloudify product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Automation

August 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

Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudify vs. VMware Aria Automation and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

867,676 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Cloudify vs. VMware Aria Automation report.

See our list of best Cloud Management vendors.

We monitor all Cloud Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.