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CloudPassage vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

CloudPassage
Ranking in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
48th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (41st)
VMware Aria Automation
Ranking in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
17th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
170
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (3rd), Configuration Management (7th), Network Automation (3rd), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) category, the mindshare of CloudPassage is 0.1%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 0.3%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
 

Featured Reviews

it_user854058 - PeerSpot reviewer
It helped us be more aware of what our security posture is, but not all of the features work in my environment
I would say CloudPassage is very useful for certain things. If you just want a few modules then focus on what you need and negotiate the price based on the individual module, rather than looking at the whole thing, because I didn't find all the modules very useful. Also, use Splunk in combination with it if you want reporting. I would give CloudPassage at least a seven out of 10. I rate it on the high-end because of the customer support - I've never seen any support that is comparable to that, it's very good, excellent. The support staff actually care, they actually follow up; it's very nice. And CloudPassage really listens to its customers. The product itself is very nice if you're only looking to check off your compliance requirements, but if you're looking for more of dashboarding and things like that, CloudPassage is improving but it's not quite there.
Le Quang Long - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Policies are very easy to manage on a day-to-day basis."
"Key features are the Software Vulnerability Assessment and the CSM, which is the configuration check."
"It provides velocity both from management and customer perspectives, from ingesting new catalog items, developing new workflows for additional features, and/or allowing customer access to multiple guest OS instances at scale in a shorter time frame."
"Scalability is perfect. We haven't had any issues."
"The most valuable feature that we have is that it's able to deploy several different operating systems, it's able to deploy whatever we want. We can take a template, spin it up, revise it, save it back off, and be able to have that for other departments. We can have one for our Dev team and one for our research team which has some specific requirements. We can keep track of them and deploy things automatically."
"A lot of its DevOps for infrastructure capabilities improve reliability. Much effort was put in by some customers, like a large automobile manufacturer, a large telecom, and two large banks, to achieve a certain level of capabilities in this space. These DevOps for infrastructure capabilities have saved time for developers. In one use case for a large marketplace, a typical release cycle took about 80 hours and was brought down to three hours by automating deployment for developers. The quicker that deployments happen, the faster that they can do their product release cycles."
"Even with the virtualization, it would take us at least three or four days to create a VM. With vRA we have brought that down to seven minutes. The solution has helped increase infrastructure, agility, speed of provisioning, time to market, application agility. Everything got super fast."
"We haven't hit any limits yet, scalability is good."
"For repeated installations and provisioning of VMs, we now have a clear definition of what has been installed, and we can monitor all that stuff."
"It's also absolutely easy and intuitive. It uses the same basic layout as the rest of the product suite so it's really easy to navigate, find your way around between the tabs and the areas."
 

Cons

"Anything outside of the software vulnerability management and the CSM, things like the GhostPort, need some improvement. The dashboard is in beta. It looks really good, I wish it would come out of beta."
"In the CSM module the policies are really hard to work with it. It is not very flexible at all. I would suggest that they change that. Right now, the scan is based on the group that the server is in. What happens if the server is in multiple groups?"
"Of all the advertised functions, I only find two things that really work in my environment, even though I wanted to use all of them. They're not flexible enough to be used."
"The reports and graphs are unintuitive."
"It's not a smooth upgrade process. For a DTA environment, which is very simple, it is a smooth process, but for our production environment, which is quite enhanced and has a lot of dependencies, it's not easy at all, and it results in a lot of errors... It takes a lot of retries to upgrade which ends up being costly."
"It is difficult to set up."
"They can improve on the dashboard representations and the options for non-technical people. I would like to see the ability to customize that and maybe provide them with helpful guides to what subscriptions they have. Sometimes, I find that I have to do more explanation to people who do approvals. I would really like to customize the display to the terms they use in their particular business unit. So a little bit more of a nod to the customization of the UI for non-technical users would be helpful."
"For the administrator, it can be a little challenging. For the administrator, there are a lot of moving parts. It is fine once you figure out where the knobs are you need to twiddle, but it can be a challenge to get it up and running."
"I would like to see a simpler way of provisioning it. As is, we can automate the provisioning of a VM, however, when it comes to the external IPs, that is outside of VMware. But that has to be automated as well. If there was a way for us to have the virtual machines connect to switches that are external to VMware, that would be great. That way, it would handle the entire workflow from creation and provisioning of a VM to the connectivity to the external IP addresses which allow our customers to have access to the VM. Currently, that IP configuration has to be done manually."
"The setup needs coding. It's not easy. It's not straightforward."
"As a product, it is complicated to integrate and automate with other products."
"I don't find it to be entirely user-friendly. There are a lot of complicated menus within menus within menus. Things move around from version to version."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"CloudPassage is a little bit on the expensive side. So my suggestion is that the company lower its price point a wee bit or sell modules, separate them in modules, because I only find two things that are useful to me, yet I pay for four or five modules. It didn't seem like it was a fair deal."
"We also evaluated VMware NSX, but the pricing and features available in a CloudPassage implementation were decisive in deciding to go with CP."
"We do plan to see ROI with any new implementation of new technologies being implemented within our environment."
"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."
"I'm very interested in the integration with Puppet. However, my organization doesn't have the funding for something like Puppet right now. If VMware would integrate that feature set (Puppet) into vRA. That would be very awesome."
"It made the provisioning of the virtual machines easier and faster. We can react more quickly to customers' demands."
"I would rate the pricing a ten out of ten, with ten being very expensive."
"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."
"The solution has helped to increase infrastructure, agility, speed, and provisioning in the time to market."
"From the customer perspective, the value was worth it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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...
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 ...
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 ...
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Citrix
Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
Find out what your peers are saying about CloudPassage vs. VMware Aria Automation and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.