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: June 2025).

CloudStack vs. OpenNebula

June 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

11th

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 June 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of CloudStack is 5.1%, down from 5.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenNebula is 7.1%, up from 6.7% 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

"CloudStack’s private gateway networking feature is what enables us to offer utmost security and confidentially to our customers and partners, by enabling them to connect to their virtual data centers via dedicated, encrypted, private fiber lines that never touch the public internet space. Ease of setup and management are certainly important additional benefits for us on the engineering team."

"Everything in CloudStack works effectively."

"You can manage infrastructure with a few people, since product is monolithic. We had three engineers (storage, virtual, Linux admins) only. Also, CS supports different flavours of hypervisors."

"We had a relevant reduction of bureaucracy tasks."

"CloudStack is simple to stand up and get off the ground in a hurry. Its centralized design allows for easier troubleshooting when compared to OpenStack. Out of the box, it’s very well suited for white labeling and IaaS."

"I have been impressed by CloudStack's most recent updates around Kubernetes. In particular, they have worked with Kubernetes to support the Cluster API, and you can now easily integrate Kubernetes into CloudStack and get access to a lot of good features."

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

"I liked the separation of the isolated network versus the shared network."

More CloudStack pros

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

"The most valuable feature of OpenNebula is that it scales very well."

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

"It's easy to integrate OpenNebula with our IT systems."

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

"OpenNebula has very good integration with SAP Storage."

"OpenNebula is easy to deploy and manage compared to other solutions like OpenStack."

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

More OpenNebula pros

Cons

"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."

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

"There are some minor things that can be improved even more such as, perhaps, a bit more polishing on the GUI side to catch up with the API possibilities (which are really extensive) but otherwise nothing critical."

"I would like to see support for native VLAN, and fault-tolerance."

"Lack of support for third-party software vendors such as Veeam and Zerto creates limitations on comprehensive offerings which would include backup and disaster recovery."

"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."

"A technology upgrade is one item which could be improved upon a lot."

"Companies need to be knowledgeable about cloud technology. It's not for novice users."

More CloudStack cons

"It should have a simple REST API like most other tools. It's the industry standard format. An XML-RPC API gives you an XML document that you have to convert and then do something with that. REST API endpoint provides outputs in a JSON document. I would also like to see support for user data or heat templates, which OpenStack offers, but OpenNebula doesn't have this yet."

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

"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."

"As with all enterprise software licensing, the pricing is not intuitive and must be negotiated; grandfathered contracts are better than anything offered today."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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."

"The solution is open-source and free."

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

"OpenNebula gives good value for money."

"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."

"The solution is open source so is free."

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

"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."

"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

21%

Educational Organization

10%

University

Financial Services Firm

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

June 2025

Download OpenNebula product report

May 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.