CloudStack vs VMware Aria Operations 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 #2 with an average rating of 8.6. Apache holds a 2.5% mindshare in CM, compared to Broadcom’s 4.3% 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 Operations

Read 376 VMware Aria Operations reviews

9,256 Views
5,461 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

CloudStack

VMware Aria Operations

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

VMware Aria Operations and CloudStack both compete in the cloud management and virtualization domain. VMware Aria Operations seems to have the upper hand with its intensive monitoring and predictive analytics, which provides a proactive approach to IT management.

Features: VMware Aria Operations offers robust monitoring and management tools that allow users to collect data and use real-time analytics to adjust policies for optimized performance. Its dynamic thresholding and predictive analytics help anticipate and mitigate potential issues. CloudStack provides strong multi-hypervisor support and scalability, catering to diverse cloud environments. Its API integration facilitates diverse operations and supports different hypervisors efficiently.

Room for Improvement: VMware Aria Operations could enhance its usability by simplifying the interface and improving third-party tool integration. Users suggest the need for more intuitive reporting and automation features, along with expanded documentation for customizations. CloudStack users recommend interface improvements and enhanced documentation to better address integration capabilities and user feedback during deployment.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Aria Operations supports both on-premises and hybrid cloud environments, presenting users with flexible deployment choices. It generally receives positive feedback for customer service, though technical support experiences may vary. CloudStack also benefits from a strong community support structure and offers several deployment models, including public cloud capabilities, although professional support could be expanded for complex setups.

Pricing and ROI: VMware Aria Operations can be expensive, particularly for large deployments, but it promises a strong return on investment by optimizing operational efficiency and minimizing downtime. Licensing options are varied and should be closely aligned with business needs. As an open-source platform, CloudStack eliminates licensing fees, presenting a cost advantage, though there might be expenses related to dedicated support and additional features. This flexibility and cost-effectiveness make it appealing for organizations aiming to manage expenses.

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

Buyer's Guide

CloudStack vs. VMware Aria Operations

March 2026

Download the complete report

Helped 884,797 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 Operations

Ranking in Cloud Management

2nd

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

376

Ranking in other categories

Virtualization Management Tools (1st)

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 Operations is 4.3%, down from 8.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
VMware Aria Operations	4.3%
CloudStack	2.5%
Other	93.2%

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.

Read full review

AldoDomini

Senior System Network Analyst at Net spa

Have faced limitations due to high costs but have maintained reliability over time

The primary issue is the pricing, which is very expensive for my company's budget. We cannot afford to pay such a large fee. We are not Microsoft or BMW; we are a small company. As a small company, I have no power to negotiate directly with VMware. Perhaps larger companies have more opportunity to contract directly with VMware, but I do not have that leverage. The only path I can follow is to change solutions. Net.spA is a company working in the field of waste management. We are not a technological company, so we do not have a large margin to justify purchasing and maintaining the VMware infrastructure at current costs.

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

"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."

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

"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."

"Valuable features include that it is a user-friendly portal, VPN P2S and S2S possibilities, and it's easy to manage accounts and limits."

"The API with CloudStack made integration into various external facing web applications simple enough."

"The initial implementation process was quite good."

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

"We had a relevant reduction of bureaucracy tasks."

More CloudStack pros

"Valuable features include the PowerCLI module and the ability to do scripting, to pull information out, to simplify reporting and troubleshooting. Being able to gather metrics, or to gather information to alert on it, or to be able to present it in a report, is crucial because, even if the interface is fast, we want to be able to do everything faster through automation. The fact that that's being developed more and more is very important."

"Capacity planning and workload optimization are good areas in the tool."

"The reports: Print any kind of reports or generate them, and send them to somebody if they say my VM is going very slow."

"My experience with VMware has been good from a functionality point of view; the interface is intuitive for me, though at the beginning when I started working with it around ten years ago, it was somewhat difficult."

"When we have problems with applications, we are fast with troubleshooting because we use vROps."

"It has helped improve the quality of service to users. It's made sure that we don't have servers that are over-subscribed with storage that starts to end up being at the minimalist points."

"The most valuable feature would be reporting because if frame or something is not syncing or we have an issue it will report us and give us a warning."

"It gives us a lot of details about the environment that we normally wouldn't be able to see without using other tools. We get visibility into our infrastructure, a single interface to see storage performance, VM performance, and to find issues in the environment that we wouldn't normally see."

More VMware Aria Operations pros

Cons

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

"From time to time there is a bug in calculating limits of resources for customer domain/account. Maybe it’s a problem with 4.9.2."

"The Windows hosts do not get their hostnames from cloud-init."

"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."

"It is not widely used so Google does not help very much when you are troubleshooting, and the CloudStack forum is not very active."

"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."

"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."

More CloudStack cons

"If this tool can integrate with other products, for example, those that monitor the network devices or any other storage devices, it will be very beneficial."

"The integration points can use improvement. We currently use a lot of third-party management packs to get insights for SQL, HP or Dell EMC. If we could have more integration built in as a standard feature that would make it slightly better."

"I rated this solution an eight and not a ten because we work to give a multi-tenant product to our customers and vROps doesn't meet our needs."

"Monitoring is useful but if the solution can't automate or function without my input, it's a waste of my time. That's where I found out there are some issues with this product, there are elements that are not as intuitive as they could or should be."

"In terms of what could be improved or added to VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), from my experience, it needs more work in the ITSM space because my company never used it as an IT service management tool."

"It would be good to have more detailed reports and more details on the dashboard."

"There's a lot of stuff we want to do that we can't. I would advise someone considering this solution to take classes and get a lot of information because this solution may look simple but it's a lot harder than it seems."

"Moving forward, I would like to see some tighter integration with the vSphere Web Client, just so that I don't have to open multiple windows and jump back and forth. We've currently running vSphere 6.7 and there is a lot tighter integration between vROps and vSphere, but it can always be better."

More VMware Aria Operations cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 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."

"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 solution is open-source and free."

"CloudStack is an open-source product."

"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."

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

"In terms of the pricing for VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), I can't remember exactly how much it costs, but it was included in the VMware vSphere enterprise plus licensing package my company paid for."

"I would give the solution a three out of five, with one being cheap and five being expensive. There are some elements of the pricing that are good, and some areas where I feel like I'm being charged for something the product can't provide yet."

"The optimization is a huge return on investment alone."

"The solution has a huge cost. If we could just have one license covering everything that vROps can do, that would be great. I would prefer it this way."

"The billing is complicated because every country has a different option. Here in Chile, we don't pay for this kind of service with the Chilean pesos. We use another currency. In the future, I think vROps needs to work with governments for a native solution."

"There's a smaller category that stands out due to its affordability, especially for recent versions, which I rate as four or five in terms of value. However, if you're looking for a vCenter with older, more advanced features, it comes at a significantly higher cost, and I would rate it around ten. They provide us with a choice between a recent version and one integrated, and I lean towards the former."

"We have definitely seen ROI by removing unnecessary servers and VMs. By having vROps as an assistant when it comes to monitoring and managing resources, it has helped us a lot with cost savings and managing expenses."

"It has reduced time to troubleshoot issues. With our customized dashboards, we can target issues and attribute them to the correct team."

More VMware Aria Operations 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

884,797 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Educational Organization

10%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Marketing Services Firm

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	65
Midsize Enterprise	62
Large Enterprise	278

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 VMware Aria Operations a user friendly solution?

In terms of user-friendliness, VMware Aria Operations is one of the best solutions out there. It is not overly complex to set up and you can rely on the technical support to provide you with assis...

See all answers

What is the most useful new feature of VMware Aria Operations?

For me, the alerts features are the most unique part of this product, no matter the current name it uses. When they introduced the new version of VMware Aria Operations, they also introduced more a...

See all answers

Comparisons

OpenNebula vs CloudStack

Compared 25% of the time

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs CloudStack

Compared 6% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs CloudStack

Compared 6% of the time

Turbo360 (Formerly Serverless360) vs CloudStack

Compared 5% of the time

Greenqloud qstack vs CloudStack

Compared 4% of the time

More CloudStack Competitors

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 11% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 9% of the time

IBM Turbonomic vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 7% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 5% of the time

Nutanix Prism vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 5% of the time

More VMware Aria Operations Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

CloudStack

March 2026

Download CloudStack product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Operations

February 2026

Download VMware Aria Operations product report

Also Known As

Vmops, Cloud.com

VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), vCenter Operations Manager (VCOPS)

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 Operations is a high-ranking virtualization management and cloud management tool that automates and simplifies IT management to the applications it supports. It achieves this through full-stack visibility from physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure. The product allows users to enable self-driving IT operations management across private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. This is conducted with the unified operations platform that delivers continuous performance, capacity and cost optimization, and integrated compliance through artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and predictive analytics.

VMware Aria Operations Use Cases

VMware Aria Operations has several use cases, some of which include:

Continuous performance optimization: VMware Aria Operations allows users to assure application performance at a minimal cost, facilitated by real-time predictive analytics and artificial intelligence. The product can be used to automatically balance workloads, improve consolidation rations, optimize and rightsize workloads, and avoid contention.
Capacity and cost management: VMware Aria Operations can be utilized to reduce cost and improve efficiency with real-time ML-based capacity and cost analytics. The solution uses these tools to visualize cost savings opportunities and accelerate decision-making.
Intelligent remediation: This product can also be used to predict, prevent, and troubleshoot issues with actionable insights. Through other VMware integrations, users can streamline and centralize IT operations.
Integrated compliance: The solution can be utilized to reduce risk and enforce IT regulatory standards for VMware Cloud through integrated compliance and automated drift remediation.

VMware Aria Operations Features

The product has various features which users can utilize. Several of the features that the 2022 version of VMware Aria Operations introduced include:

Management pack builder: This feature is a no-code solution that allows users to expand their operations visibility to anywhere they wish. The builder allows users to connect to a data source using an HTTP or Amazon AWS data source, as well as to make API calls, create objects, and build out relationships with other objects in the product.
Public cloud basic actions: This is a set of features that allows VMware Aria Operations users to initiate actions automatically via the product's UI for AWS, Microsoft Azure, or GCP CE instances.
Rule-based application discovery: Through this new feature of the product, users can easily discover multiple applications running in all or specific areas of infrastructure and view associated resources. This can be achieved through simple user-defined rules, including discovering applications based on tags, object names, and properties.
Aria Operations capacity management: This feature allows organizations to view the results of what-if analysis based on their allocation model and specify business hours for capacity calculations.
Alerts: This is a set of features that include components called Conditions and Symptoms, which are used to alert different types of issues on the platform.
User access management: Through this feature, users can benefit from improved ways to configure in VMware Aria Operations with the introduction of scopes.
Support for raw device mapping storage: This feature allows users to get configuration details about their raw device mapping (RDM), such as disk sharing, compatibility mode, and SCSI Bus Sharing.

VMware Aria Operations Benefits

VMware Aria Operations brings various benefits to the organizations using it. Among them are the following:

The product helps organizations reduce unplanned downtime and maximize return on investment (ROI) in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
VMware Aria Operations simplifies management for hybrid clouds from migration assessments.
Users can benefit from an accelerated journey to VMware Cloud on AWS through this solution.
The product can be delivered on premises or as a service, providing flexibility for its users.
VMware Aria Operations can increase operational efficiency through monitoring and management features.
The solution accelerates decision-making through detailed cost analytics, which is visualized for users' convenience.
VMware Aria Operations allows users to both utilize standard compliance templates and create their own custom ones.

Reviews from Real Users

Mohamed N., a tech lead VMware support engineer at a tech services company, appreciates VMware Aria Operations because it is easy to use, stable, and support is always available.

Mojtaba K., a senior system administrator at a comms service provider, values VMware Aria Operations due to the fact that its dashboards give you a glimpse of what is really going on in your virtualized environment.

Broadcom

Sample Customers

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

Science Applications International Corporation, Tribune Media, Heartland Payment Systems, Telkom Indonesia, Columbia Sportswear, iGATE, CSS Corp, Angel Broking, Adira Finance, Hipskind, Beiersdorf Shared Services, Innovate Mas Indonesia, Adobe, Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi , Join Experience S.A, Borusan Holdings, Department of Transport - Abu Dhabi

Buyer's Guide

CloudStack vs. VMware Aria Operations

March 2026

Free Report: CloudStack vs. VMware Aria Operations

Find out what your peers are saying about CloudStack vs. VMware Aria Operations and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.

DOWNLOAD NOW

884,797 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our CloudStack vs. VMware Aria Operations 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.