CloudStack vs OpenNebula comparison

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CloudStack

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

CloudStack and OpenNebula are competing in the cloud infrastructure domain. OpenNebula has the upper hand due to its adaptability and ease of deployment across varied infrastructures.

Features: CloudStack offers comprehensive support for hybrid and multi-cloud environments, advanced networking, and security features, and a centralized management system for scalability. OpenNebula has a lightweight footprint, provides a user-friendly interface, and supports flexibility across both private and public cloud platforms.

Room for Improvement: CloudStack can improve by streamlining its resource-intensive deployment process, simplifying the customization process, and enhancing its support for newer virtualization technologies. OpenNebula could benefit from expanding advanced networking capabilities, increasing support for multi-cloud environments, and improving its integration with additional enterprise applications.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: OpenNebula is known for its straightforward deployment and strong customer support, making it easy to manage various cloud infrastructures. CloudStack's deployment may require more resources, but it provides extensive documentation and community support for users.

Pricing and ROI: CloudStack is an open-source solution, potentially involving higher initial expenses due to substantial customization and resource needs. OpenNebula, also open-source, presents lower setup costs and an attractive return on investment for small to medium-sized enterprises.

To learn more, read our detailed CloudStack vs. OpenNebula Report (Updated: July 2025).

CloudStack vs. OpenNebula

July 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

CloudStack

Ranking in Cloud Management

10th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

OpenNebula

Ranking in Cloud Management

6th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of CloudStack is 4.8%, down from 6.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenNebula is 6.8%, up from 6.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

Wido Den Hollander

Community Ambassador at 42on

A solution that strikes a balance between user-friendliness, scalability, and stability

The market keeps changing, and so does technology. I think that container technology in CloudStack is an area that needs to be improved. Regarding container technology, Kubernetes is something many people want to use and something which, as of now, many are using currently. However, there is still room for improvement in Kubernetes, particularly with networking functionality and network virtualization. When it comes to what needs to be improved in CloudStack, I would say that it should stay the way it is currently. It should continue being a stable product that people can rely on since many may be inclined to follow the latest trends and hype, which is not always good for a solution's stability. It is crucial to prioritize stability, which is a key factor that companies seek. In my view, the platform could benefit from adding more metrics. More metrics would offer more insights and data on the platform's performance, utilization, and usage. Overall, I believe that having more metrics available would be highly desirable.

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FOURES Jean-Philippe

Products Manager at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Reliable, simple to manage, and offers great technical support

The support of VXLAN fits with our network management. Thanks to this we can propose mixed solutions using virtual resources on OpenNebula and bare metal servers hosted in our facilities linked to each other on the sale network. This use case is very useful when some applications need bare metal power (Kubernetes workers, huge databases, AI models computations, et cetera). The cluster management is very useful for splitting our different clusters (mutual vs dedicated). We can manage deployments and capacity planning without pain. The API is also really simple and it helped us to develop the Terraform provider to manage OpenNebula like any other cloud infrastructure.

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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

"We had a relevant reduction of bureaucracy tasks."

"Over the years, we have valued CloudStack for its stability."

"It is very easy to install and manage. It has the all modules in one node, unlike other software (OpenStack). The product allows a customized look and feel, and the ability to add custom workflows."

"It has become easy to deploy new devices with no or minimal hardware changes. Now, a user can be ready to use a firewall within a few minutes, as compared to the traditional physical model which involved purchase, shipping, hardware configuration, cabling, power, etc."

"It works, and pretty much always has. Reliability and support for enterprise features, with a multi-tenant interface, makes CloudStack a very compelling solution."

"My company could implement a lot of customizations and integration with load balancers and DNS. When we started using CloudStack, we didn't have that integration, so we developed that. We could fix anything missing in the solution."

"Killer features for me were: support for many hypervisors, ability to match business logic, "everything in one box," available APIs."

"CloudStack supports every operating system that supports hypervisors, which makes the product more attractive, compared to vCloud Director or Azure."

More CloudStack pros

"With a single click, we could set things up and initiate them."

"OpenNebula is lightweight, stable, and easy to customize."

"What's best about OpenNebula that people like is that it's easy to deploy. It's also easy to manage. It's interesting because people choose OpenNebula over other solutions because of the ease of management."

"It is quite easy to deploy."

"The solution provides templates for configurations that can easily be exchanged to VMs."

"For the entire data center, as a private cloud, I believe that user management, expert management, and the virtual data center is completely magic for the users."

"It makes maintenance very easy and stress-free for our teams."

"The service feature appeals most to us, thus it is the most valuable."

More OpenNebula pros

Cons

"The main reason why we started looking for another solution: backups, replication, HA, and dependency on secondary storage. CS is quite sensitive for infrastructure, and any kind of network disruption between CS and secondary storage leads to VM hanging."

"Accounts, domains, and user accounts are set up with public cloud in mind, not private."

"For time consuming operations like storage migrations, volume Snapshot restore and the like, we faced issues like MySQL operations timing out and status update failures. Those areas needs improvement."

"The product could improve by embracing newer technologies like GPU virtualization."

"It would be great to have a couple of “external” networks for VPC and have the possibility, for each domain, to choose they type of “external” network."

"The area of Apache CloudStack that could stand the most improvement is the functionality/features around the virtual routers. They can be somewhat cumbersome to deal with at times and are the least stable piece of the product."

"This product needs a lot improvement on the development side. Every new version introduces new bugs. It lacks many features needed for NFV like DPDK, SR-IOV support, etc."

"The user can't upload SSH keys from the UI. We have to use the API for this, and it is not always convenient."

More CloudStack cons

"They should add more features like object storage."

"They have been saying for the past two and a half years that they would develop a feature to hot-add RAM and CPU, but it does not work."

"The storage feature that they have is a bit confusing."

"There are no payment gateways in OpenNebula."

"The front-facing API can be improved to support lots of requests when the platform is huge with lots of virtual resources."

"Most of the competitors are offering some sort of billing software to transform their installation to work as a small-sized public cloud, but those offerings from OpenNebula are still missing."

"Backup features are only available in the enterprise edition. The community version lacks a good solution for making backups."

"An area for improvement in OpenNebula is the number of features it has. The solution doesn't have that many cloud features compared to other solutions. You'd say, "Okay, simplicity over a rich feature list?" Some say, "No, I need a big machine or a cloud interface for my customers to manage resources. I don't have to go and do it for them." Some people do it that way, and it works, but I'd like to improve the limited features in OpenNebula."

More OpenNebula cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"CloudStack is an open source solution, so you don't need to pay anything for it. When our company develops something specially for CloudStack, it is donated to the Apache Software Foundation and provided to anyone that wants to use it."

"It is a 100% open-source solution needing just an Apache license. Also, there are no hidden fees to be paid."

"As far as I know, CS is still free of charge. If you want to pay some money, Citrix Cloud Platform is based on CS, I think. As for hypervisors – everything as usual, you need to pay for VMware and vCenter. As for XenServer, recently they changed the free feature list, so you may need to pay some money to get useful features like XenMotion."

"The Apache CloudStack is open source, so you do not have licenses to purchase."

"CloudStack is an open-source product."

"Give an effort to planning. If possible, contract a specialized consultant company for the initial setup and knowledge transfer."

"There is no license, so the product is free unless you are buying professional technical support services."

"The solution is open-source and free."

"The solution is open source so is free."

"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."

"The licensing for OpenNebula used to be free, but now it's no longer free. A customer contacted me asking to move to another provider because of the changes in the licensing terms for OpenNebula. I have no information on how much the OpenNebula license is because the customer pays for it, and I only do the integration."

"OpenNebuoa has recently come up with a new subscription model that is economical and a lot of new customers are choosing this as it is an easy subscription model."

"We use the Community Edition, rather than the Enterprise Edition."

"OpenNebula gives good value for money."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

21%

Educational Organization

11%

Financial Services Firm

University

Computer Software Company

21%

University

10%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about CloudStack?

The initial implementation process was quite good.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CloudStack?

CloudStack is open-source, so there is no cost apart from learning. Billing solutions, if outsourced, come at a moderate cost.

What needs improvement with CloudStack?

CloudStack lacks a billing solution which would complete it as a full 360-degree product. Additionally, more themes and drag-and-drop interfaces could enhance the user experience. Improved document...

What do you like most about OpenNebula?

The live migration feature has been great and is something we use very often.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for OpenNebula?

OpenNebula gives good value for money.

What needs improvement with OpenNebula?

The web interface could be better. It's not very difficult to use, but there's room for enhancement. Another area for improvement is the integration with hardware to manage the lower layer of the n...

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Product Reports

Download CloudStack product report

CloudStack

July 2025

Download OpenNebula product report

June 2025

Also Known As

Vmops, Cloud.com

No data available

Overview

Apache CloudStack is open source software designed to deploy and manage large networks of virtual machines, as a highly available, highly scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform.

Apache

OpenNebula provides the most simple but feature-rich and flexible solution for the comprehensive management of virtualized data centers to enable private, public and hybrid IaaS clouds. OpenNebula interoperability makes cloud an evolution by leveraging existing IT assets, protecting your investments, and avoiding vendor lock-in.

OpenNebula is a turnkey enterprise-ready solution that includes all the features needed to provide an on-premises (private) cloud offering, and to offer public cloud services.

Sample Customers

GreenQloud, Exoscale, TomTom, ASG, PC Extreme, ISWest, Grid'5000

Akamai, BBC, Fermilab, Terradue, Surf Sara, Produban, Netways, ESA, China Mobile, BlackBerry, Deloitte, Fuze, Telefonica, Trivago, Nokia, Encore Tech, Beeks.