CloudStack vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

Apache and Broadcom are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. Apache is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.2, while Broadcom is ranked #3 with an average rating of 7.9. Apache holds a 2.5% mindshare in CM, compared to Broadcom’s 5.8% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of Apache users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

CloudStack

Read 34 CloudStack reviews

2,189 Views
2,036 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Automation

Read 172 VMware Aria Automation reviews

9,092 Views
5,001 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

CloudStack

VMware Aria Automation

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

CloudStack and VMware Aria Automation compete in the cloud management and automation domain, appealing to enterprises enhancing cloud operations. VMware Aria Automation exhibits a feature advantage with its extensive offerings.

Features: CloudStack supports API-driven operations, enables scalability across multiple hypervisors, and offers simplified management. VMware Aria Automation includes advanced provisioning automation, governance, and lifecycle management, optimized for complex cloud environments.

Room for Improvement: CloudStack could benefit from an enhanced user interface, better documentation, and more frequent updates to improve stability. VMware Aria Automation might improve by streamlining complex customizations, increasing integration capabilities, and simplifying initial setup processes.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: CloudStack offers quick deployment with community-based support. In contrast, VMware Aria Automation involves complex deployment processes but provides extensive customer service and professional support for intricate setups.

Pricing and ROI: CloudStack offers a cost-effective entry point with solid ROI for those embracing open-source solutions. VMware Aria Automation, though pricier at the onset, promises substantial ROI through its comprehensive feature set and robust automation capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed CloudStack vs. VMware Aria Automation Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

CloudStack vs. VMware Aria Automation

March 2026

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Helped 884,933 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

CloudStack

Ranking in Cloud Management

7th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VMware Aria Automation

Ranking in Cloud Management

3rd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

172

Ranking in other categories

Configuration Management (8th), Network Automation (6th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (19th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (5th)

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of CloudStack is 2.5%, down from 6.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 5.8%, down from 11.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
VMware Aria Automation	5.8%
CloudStack	2.5%
Other	91.7%

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

Tharun Kumar Reddy Thamatam

Senior Infrastructure Consultant at Infosys

Achieving seamless infrastructure management with optimized network and user access controls

I believe enhancements could be made in CloudStack, particularly in the management servers. I had the opportunity to collaborate with one of the Apache CloudStack developers, leading to the installation of additional agents for better information retrieval from hypervisors. We implemented configurations, ensuring consistency across hosts and VMs. We also utilized Ansible or YAML files to automate password upgrades during patching activities and database management, showcasing our customization efforts for improvement. For future releases, it would be beneficial if Apache enhanced CloudStack by integrating alerting systems directly. We've had instances where hypervisors experienced overloads without prior alerts, so proactive alerts within the tool would better prepare us for addressing issues swiftly, preventing disruption in business operations. A portal summarizing system metrics alongside alert capabilities would greatly enhance our operational efficiency.

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VasilisGiannitsiotis

Senior IT at ITSolutions

Automation has streamlined complex financial workflows but still needs more intuitive orchestration

Something to improve in VMware Aria Automation would be related to VCF 9, as I do not know what it is trying to bring because they exposed it as the solution of everything. So VCF 9 will bring VCF Automation and VCF Operations, the new product line of VMware. I have not seen what this brings or what else it includes. Maybe in the area of vRealize Orchestrator, this would be beneficial because VRO can do everything. Perhaps a more user-friendly way to use that tool would be helpful because the possibilities there are endless. I am looking for more user-friendly navigation in VMware Aria Automation.

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

"When compared to OpenStack, CloudStack is also an open-source platform that is continuously improving its features and capabilities with each new version release. Having worked with CloudStack 4.7, 4.14, and most recently, 4.17, I have noticed significant enhancements in the platform's features and customer experience, such as the introduction of a new user interface in the latest release. Notably, the latest versions have made major improvements to VM live migrations, making them more efficient and effective."

"CloudStack provides an environment that is very simple to use, with built-in APIs and a web interface that supports almost all features of AWS and Azure."

"You can manage infrastructure with a few people, since product is monolithic."

"I have also explored setting up with OpenStack and I found it harder to use than CloudStack."

"CloudStack helped us showcase our features through process visualization and functional solutions."

"CloudStack manages infrastructure with 2-4 thousands of hosts easily."

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

"You can build your own cloud and make it customizable with APIs."

More CloudStack pros

"We can connect between multiple VMs in a matter of seconds."

"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."

"It allows us to be more agile and provide services to our company more rapidly."

"Today, if I want to provision one VM, it takes me five minutes. Earlier, it would take a minimum of 30 minutes to go and choose everything. Now, I can just do one click and it can provision my whole VM. We also integrated with our Alexa, so even through voice functionality, I can create a VM. One of the guys at VMware, along with our partner, deployed that in our environment. If I say, "Hey, Alexa, I need a VM with four gigs of RAM," it will go and start creating it."

"We've just shifted to an Agile development so there has absolutely been an improvement in speed to market. We now have consistent release plans because we have these environments as ready as they are."

"From day 1 that it went into production, we started seeing its benefits."

"We provided the ability to request virtual machines to our end users. Before, this was a very manual process, which took engineers to do. Now, it's an automated process."

"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."

More VMware Aria Automation pros

Cons

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

"Multi-deployments."

"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."

"The web UI can be improved. It is too complex, and not trivial for the average user."

"The absence of the feature, deploy an instance from a snapshot, is the weak point of the platform. It is a feature that everyone needs nowadays."

"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."

"My teammates have complained about the upgrade. The source code had massive files that had to be merged with our own development to upgrade to the latest version of CloudStack. It was quite painful for them. CloudStack could add some cost management tools to give me some control over the costs associated with the number of users of my services."

More CloudStack cons

"vRealize Automation on the back-end is still a little complicated. It has a lot of moving pieces, simplifying that from a pure infrastructure point of view would be a good thing."

"Having an overview and managing all this is a bit difficult in the beginning."

"When you start to do a deployment where you need higher availability and more resiliency, then the complexity goes up drastically."

"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 was complex because we have a high availability cluster. Especially when it comes to upgrades, we have a lot of downtimes and problems. The upgrade experience has been painful."

"7.5 is not user-friendly, in fact, it's a nightmare. They changed everything on the graphic user interface, the mode where the user interacts with the product."

"I would not recommend this product. I think that there are better products to meet your needs that are competitors on the market."

"The costing and pricing models of their product."

More VMware Aria Automation 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."

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

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

"CloudStack is an open-source product."

"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."

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

"The solution is open-source and free."

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"The pricing is very high."

"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."

More VMware Aria Automation pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Educational Organization

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	13
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	12

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	33
Midsize Enterprise	24
Large Enterprise	130

Questions from the Community

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.

See all answers

What needs improvement with CloudStack?

Enhancements for CloudStack can focus on integrating more hypervisors, as mentioned regarding current features. We're working on a new feature that will allow for certain limited functions, but ove...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for CloudStack?

My usual use cases for CloudStack involve an AWS style private cloud or public cloud. I can deploy an AWS style cloud using the open source tool that is CloudStack. The use case depends on the cust...

See all answers

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

OpenNebula vs CloudStack

Compared 25% of the time

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs CloudStack

Compared 6% of the time

Turbo360 (Formerly Serverless360) vs CloudStack

Compared 5% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs CloudStack

Compared 4% of the time

Flexera Cloud Management Platform (CMP) vs CloudStack

Compared 4% of the time

More CloudStack Competitors

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 10% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 6% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 6% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 3% of the time

OpenNebula vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 1% of the time

More VMware Aria Automation Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

CloudStack

March 2026

Download CloudStack product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Automation

February 2026

Download VMware Aria Automation product report

Also Known As

Vmops, Cloud.com

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

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

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

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

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

Buyer's Guide

CloudStack vs. VMware Aria Automation

March 2026

Free Report: CloudStack vs. VMware Aria Automation

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