CloudStack vs VMware Cloud Director comparison

Apache and VMware are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. Apache is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.7, while VMware is ranked #5 with an average rating of 7.9. Apache holds a 5.1% mindshare in CM, compared to VMware’s 6.5% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Apache users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of VMware users who would recommend it.

CloudStack

Read 31 CloudStack reviews

1,938 Views
1,445 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

VMware Cloud Director

Read 68 VMware Cloud Director reviews

2,393 Views
1,600 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

CloudStack

VMware Cloud Director

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

VMware Cloud Director and CloudStack compete in the cloud services platform category. VMware Cloud Director seems to have the upper hand due to its comprehensive suite of features and strong integration within the VMware ecosystem.

Features: VMware Cloud Director offers scalability and a robust platform for cloud services. It integrates well with VMware's ecosystem, providing advanced automation with vRealize Automation and detailed monitoring with vRealize Operations. CloudStack supports multiple hypervisors, provides strong networking and virtualization features, and is known for its flexibility as an IaaS tool.

Room for Improvement: VMware Cloud Director could improve its integration with third-party services, enhance ease of deployment, and address pricing concerns. Users also mention the need for better hyperscaler integration and enhanced billing features. CloudStack requires improvements in stability for virtual routers, enhanced documentation, and better promotion to increase market presence. Simplifying rolling updates and maintenance operations is also needed.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Cloud Director supports diverse deployment environments like hybrid and private clouds. It features commendable customer service, although technical support can be inconsistent. CloudStack requires more user involvement during deployment and troubleshooting, with less extensive support networks. This makes VMware more appealing to businesses seeking comprehensive support.

Pricing and ROI: VMware Cloud Director is expensive, with high licensing costs that can impact smaller companies. Despite the cost, some users find the investment justified by its features. High total costs of ownership can affect its ROI in budget-sensitive projects. CloudStack, being open-source, is cost-effective, with no licensing fees and lower operational costs, offering potentially higher ROI if support needs are minimal.

To learn more, read our detailed CloudStack vs. VMware Cloud Director Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

CloudStack vs. VMware Cloud Director

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

VMware Cloud Director

Ranking in Cloud Management

5th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

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 VMware Cloud Director is 6.5%, down from 7.0% 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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NiteshKumar1

Principle consultant at Infosys

Provides crystal clear dashboarding and allows you to manage and monitor your infrastructure

The overall dashboarding is very crystal clear. The ability to switch from one infrastructure to another infrastructure and get into detailed information, whether it is compute, storage network, or whatever. That helps you get a holistic view of the overall infrastructure running in your landscape. This also helps the leadership and management be aware of the right potential investment strategy by looking at the potential utilization. vCloud Director also provides ways and means through which you can make a prediction or a forecast of the infrastructure that would be needed in the future, depending on what you are currently running. That does not take away the fact that we have to be completely aware of our pipeline projects in our schedule so that you can plan your infrastructure requirements accordingly. vCloud Director provides multifold features that have been beneficial to the end users.

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

"We like the virtualization capabilities."

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

"The most valuable feature from my point of view is access to environment via console through separate browser window."

"The platform is very simple to scale-out."

"The structuring of the components and isolated environments helped us when using parts of the framework at different levels of product development."

"Multiple types of hypervisor support, multi-zone support, and VPC are great valuable features."

"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."

More CloudStack pros

"The most valuable feature of vCloud Director is its ability to host customers on their own cloud."

"We use it to replicate VMs for our customers from one data center to another data center."

"The compatibility with vSAN and NSX is the greatest feature of vCloud. It also has integration with vROps, which is quite nice."

"vCloud is a good platform for visualization. It is very handy for monitoring. VMware can integrate with all monitoring systems like vRealize, and the management monitoring is good. I'm very happy with VMware. VMware is good in management and monitoring systems."

"VMware Cloud Director is quite scalable; I would rate it nine out of ten."

"I like the functionality that's available with Orchestrator. The platform stability stuff that I would be involved in worries me from the automation side because you have a lot less hands-on control of things. Price point, it kind of puts us off."

"We consider it intuitive and user-friendly. It offers a variety of functions for the customer to control the networking, virtual workloads, disk snapshots, and all of vSphere's core features."

"It has helped us develop a better way of selling services to customers, evolve from the typical housing, and make revenues for the Telefonica company."

More VMware Cloud Director pros

Cons

"I encountered some stability issues. When I tried to remove high-capacity virtual machines it took a long time to update, and sometimes the VM status failed to update properly in the cloud database. This occurred multiple times, even though I had sufficient resources."

"CS has very descriptive logging, and every time I faced issues and asked for help, I didn’t get any reply from the community. Reason? Its quite obvious. CS runs on specific environments, unique to each case. So, unless it is a functional issue of CS, nobody can help you. All issues were resolved by myself going through logs. This is another reason why you need smart enough people to manage it. Engineers must have knowledge of hypervisors and understand how CS interacts with them."

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

"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."

"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."

"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 numerous, multi-layered drill-down menus make it difficult to find one simple knob to turn."

More CloudStack cons

"There are some shortcomings. There are bugs with opening support."

"vCloud Director's pricing is high. Its integration with open-source technologies is limited."

"We have had very minor problems with it when we've been upgrading."

"The initial setup of the vCloud Director was not complex and not easy, it was in the middle range of difficulty. It could be made easier."

"There are occasional problems when trying to increase the parameters of a virtual machine, which sometimes results in pending tasks that fail due to errors, requiring support intervention."

"Improvements could be made in the building feature since there isn't a real building feature associated with the product. We require a building feature to integrate with other solutions."

"vRealize Orchestrator is an expensive tool."

"vCloud Director should improve by having support with other cloud providers, such as Microsoft Azure and Google cloud."

More VMware Cloud Director 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."

"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."

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

"The solution is open-source and free."

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

"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."

"CloudStack is an open-source product."

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

"It is better than other solutions out there when it comes to cost."

"The license could be less expensive and we are on a perpetual license."

"I believe the pricing is reasonable."

"We are paying around $ 15,000 per month for vCloud Director, and it would be nice if it could be made cheaper."

"My company has no problems with the pricing of the product as we got good discounts from VMware."

"If one means a very bad price, and ten means a very good price, I rate the price as a five on a scale of one to ten."

"I recommend using the Enterprise or Enterprise Plus licenses because they unlock all of the solution's capabilities."

"It enables us to provision new clients more quickly."

More VMware Cloud Director pricing and cost advice

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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%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

10%

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.

See all answers

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?

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...

See all answers

Would you change anything about VMware vCloud Director if you could?

VMware vCloud Director works very well and there are not many things that I would like to see changed. However, a single thing comes to mind when I think of improvements and that is integration. In...

See all answers

What is the biggest improvement you saw at your company after you started using VMware vCloud Director?

For my company, VMware vCloud Director noticeably increased operational efficiency. When I started working here a few years ago, my organization was using another cloud management tool. We switched...

See all answers

Is vCloud Director convenient for building applications?

When it comes to building applications, vCloud Director offers you various methods to create cloud-ready ones. For example: Your DevOps team is supported through Infrastructure as Code services w...

See all answers

Comparisons

OpenNebula vs CloudStack

Compared 71% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs CloudStack

Compared 9% of the time

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs CloudStack

Compared 5% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs CloudStack

Compared 4% of the time

Fortinet FortiPortal vs CloudStack

Compared 3% of the time

More CloudStack Competitors

VMware Aria Automation vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 23% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 20% of the time

OpenNebula vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 9% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 9% of the time

vCenter Orchestrator vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 3% of the time

More VMware Cloud Director Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

CloudStack

June 2025

Download CloudStack product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Cloud Director

March 2025

Download VMware Cloud Director product report

Also Known As

Vmops, Cloud.com

vCloud Director

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 Cloud Director, also known as vCloud Director, is a cloud management tool that offers secure, flexible, and efficient cloud resources to thousands of enterprises and IT teams across the world. The solution serves as one of the leading cloud service-delivery platforms for businesses that want to manage and operate their services effectively. By deploying this solution, companies can benefit from virtualized networking, computing, security, and storage. These benefits can be received in a timely manner, as the infrastructure of the product is operationally ready within minutes and clients do not need to install and configure physical infrastructure.

One of the biggest advantages of vCloud Director is that it allows users to build cloud-ready applications. In several ways, it facilitates the process for developers, including:

Open to DevOps: The product addresses the needs of DevOps teams by providing Infrastructure as Code services with vCD Terraform Provider. This allows developers to deliver infrastructure directly from code. Additionally, it provides capabilities from Python and vCD API as well as Object Storage API and App Launchpad APIs.
Customization: This solution is very customizable and extensible for cloud providers to deliver their own branding, themes, and services to their clients.
Dev-ready cloud: vCloud Director offers support for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid for vSphere and multicloud with a plugin for container service extension. Through these, native K8s Clusters or Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Clusters can be delivered and managed through a user interface (UI) and application programming interface (API).

vCloud Director Features

This VMware product has various features through which users can virtualize their data and benefit from quality management solutions. Among the popular capabilities of vCloud Director are:

Elastic secure virtual data centers: This vCloud Director feature provides tenants with securely isolated virtual resources, fine-grained control of their public cloud services, and independent role-based authentication.
Multi-site management: This feature allows companies to stretch data centers across sites and geographies as well as connect to existing dedicated vCenters for access and management or on-broad into VMware vCloud Director.
ISV ecosystem: This feature integrates leading cloud service vendors into the product using an open extensibility framework. Some of the partners of vCloud Director include Dell Data Protection, Veeam, Cloudian, AWS S3, and Dell ECS.
DRaaS workload protection: This feature allows users to deliver self-service tiered disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) on-premises to cloud and cloud to cloud.
Cloud migration: Part of this feature is the plugin VMware Cloud Director Availability, which enables simple migration to cloud, offering self-service cold or warm migration to users' vCloud Director clouds.
Operational visibility and insights: The product includes an accessible dashboard and a single pane of glass to provide centralized multi-tenant cloud management views.
Cloud-native applications and development: This feature makes the platform suitable for developers to sandbox or deploy apps as it natively supports Tanzu Basic, native K8s, and PKS.
Automation: Through various tools and deep integration, the solution allows users to automate complex infrastructure-as-code and tile UI-driven workflows. This allows them to deploy X-as-a-Service and maintain full access control and visibility at the same time.
Application Platform as a Service: This feature enables users to deliver their own catalog-based applications or VMware Cloud Marketplace-certified third-party cloud applications through the plugin App Launchpad VMware Cloud Director.
GPU as a Service: Utilizing Nvidia AI Enterprise, this feature provides support for GPU as a Service and delivers multi-tenant GPU services for customers who require high-performance compute for GPU-specific applications.
Secure cloud: The solution supports multiple security-centric features to deliver an enterprise-class cloud service, including NSX-T distributed firewalling, workload encryption, and integrated disaster recovery replication.

vCloud Director Benefits

VMware vCloud Director offers various benefits to its users. Some of these include:

The solution provides a highly efficient self-service model which consists of a virtual data center compute, network, storage, and security.
VMware vCloud Director offers its users multi-tenancy infrastructure with deep automation which facilitates their daily tasks.
The product is cost-efficient, as it is service-ready on its very first day and offers a high revenue from services.
Businesses can deliver services to their clients in a timely manner through this product, benefitting from its natively integrated solutions.
VMware vCloud Director provides users with high flexibility, as it allows businesses to stretch networks across virtual data centers globally.
The solution provides load-balancing capabilities, which facilitate the creation of new hybrid applications and digital transformation initiatives.

Reviews from Real Users

Ajit Y., a cloud architect at a computer software company, likes VMware vCloud Director because it is a stable, truly multitenant software and the go-to tool for infrastructure as a service.

Kashif F., a divisional engineer at National Telecom Corporatio, rates vCloud Director highly because the product can be used for infrastructure provisioning without using a platform service.

VMware

Sample Customers

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

MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.

Buyer's Guide

CloudStack vs. VMware Cloud Director

June 2025

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