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Densify vs IBM Turbonomic vs VMware Aria Operations comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Virtualization Management Tools category, the mindshare of Densify is 5.7%, up from 2.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 13.5%, up from 12.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations is 25.2%, down from 33.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Virtualization Management Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Aria Operations25.2%
IBM Turbonomic13.5%
Densify5.7%
Other55.599999999999994%
Virtualization Management Tools
 

Featured Reviews

AbhishekGupta2 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr PreSales Cloud Architect at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees
Optimized cloud costs and automated right‑sizing have reduced spend while reporting needs improvement
The best features Densify offers are actionable optimization recommendations, which tell you how to reduce costs while maintaining performance; the ML-powered predictive analytics feature, which considers historical patterns to provide recommendations; multi-cloud coverage for optimization across AWS, Azure, and GCP; and a solid balance between performance and cost. Out of those features, I find myself relying on actionable optimization recommendations and predictive analytics features the most because Densify goes one step beyond by providing recommendations considering historical patterns, especially for workloads that only spike during certain times of the month. Densify has positively impacted my organization by providing significant cost savings through right-sizing and eliminating inefficient resources, allowing faster decisions based on data, and reducing manual intervention for cloud operations, thus providing automation of basic cloud routines. I usually see a twenty-five to thirty percent cost saving in my customer's environment, and from a time-saving perspective, it has almost halved the time of the operations team.
reviewer1446966 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
The solution reduced our operational expenditures and is able to identify points before we even noticed them
The management interface seems to be designed for high-resolution screens. Somebody with a smaller-resolution screen might not like the web interface. I run a 4K monitor on it, so everything fits on the screen. With a lower resolution like 1080, you need to scroll a lot. Everything is in smaller windows. It doesn't seem to be designed for smaller screens. When I change the resolution to 1080, I only see half of what I would on my big 4K monitor. It would be annoying to have to scroll to see the flow chart. They have a flow chart that goes top to bottom like a tree. On a lower resolution, it might be nice if that scrolls horizontally because it's long, narrow, and tall. It's only three icons wide, but it's 15 icons tall. I think it would be helpful to have the ability to change that for a smaller screen and customize the widget.
AldoDomini - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The ability to increase server density inside of my environment, which has helped me drive reduction in costs."
"I would say that the initial thing is that it provides us with a technological basis to expand capacity management beyond Excel."
"Our team members are now spending more productive time on other priorities and are handling much more effective tasks."
"The solution's tech support is excellent."
"From my perspective, this product is really good, and we are not even using each and every feature."
"The Control Console is an incredible way to give a quick view of current capacity utilization allowing technical people to drill down quickly and allowing business/management people to get a quick overview of the environment."
"The Control Console provides a very easy to read dashboard of "too little/just right/too much" resources both for current data and on a historical or predictive basis."
"The tool will come back and tell us that we can operate with 1,000 minutes as an example, save 90% on the contractual rate and not run into any issues."
"Great product and we use it extensively, from setting up VMturbo to load balance our VM's across a cluster, implementing right sizing recommendations, policy rules, memory/storage and CPU trends and plans for future projections in order to determine how we can reduce our hardware and licensing footprints."
"Turbonomic is the best for two main reasons: Simplicity and accuracy."
"Overall, from our organization's standpoint, the solution has helped to build our entire migration effort."
"We have saved more from cost avoidance on a recent expansion than the product will cost over three years."
"Performance is something that should constantly be monitored and constantly be worked on, and Turbonomic is doing that in the background, without me having to manually do it, which is a great help."
"Turbonomic is an excellent product as far as we are concerned for managing the pod sizes and determining the best sizing for those pods."
"Customer Service: Excellent Technical Support: The support team at VMTurbo is so quick in responding."
"Customer Service: Perfect, with attention to details on every open ticket, and Technical Support: Top notch effort put into each support request."
"The product's initial setup phase is straightforward."
"I would advise others to start using this because they will not regret it."
"It's valuable because it helps us look at our performance statistics for our environment."
"The most valuable feature is the reporting, being able to give accurate reports to our management on what's going on in our VMware environment, for example, if they want to know what capacity is remaining on certain systems."
"Now, with vRealize Operations, we're actually proving to the company that we're utilizing the virtual infrastructure to its fullest capability, but actually scaling back instead of adding more resources."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the effectiveness of hardware availability and flexibility."
"The reports: Print any kind of reports or generate them, and send them to somebody if they say my VM is going very slow."
"We went from using industry standard KPIs to going to a complete on-demand model based on the algorithms from vRealize Operations. It has enabled us to drive more utilization out of our existing compute infrastructure to the point where, for a period of six months, we didn't purchase a single server or any additional compute. We were able to continue to sweat our existing assets."
 

Cons

"Some parts of the interface are rather complex and require a bit of time to navigate, but this has never stopped us as a Densify advisor is readily available to help with our "how to" queries."
"Initially we talked about some custom reporting, wherein our customer expected certain reports on a few areas, like how the storage is allocated, how the network performance is doing, and how the network utilization is happening for a virtual machine."
"A closer integration to the service management processes."
"Unfortunately the tools and mechanisms which really came to maturity in the cloud, and were not mainstream on-premise, are still not implemented."
"Densify can be improved in a couple of areas: the learning curve for new users, where it feels like an advanced optimization tool that needs time for full leverage; enhancements in reporting and filter options for more detailed custom reports; and improvements in UI performance since some users feel that the UI is a bit slow or outdated, especially with certain interfaces such as the Kubex Console or the Cloud Decks."
"Some parts of the interface are rather complex and require a bit of time to navigate, but this has never stopped us as a Densify advisor is readily available to help with our "how to" queries."
"Initially we talked about some custom reporting, wherein our customer expected certain reports on a few areas, like how the storage is allocated, how the network performance is doing, and how the network utilization is happening for a virtual machine."
"Service management level integration is probably the biggest area for improvement."
"The other area would be visibility into bandwidth utilization."
"The only area of improvement that I can think of is re-sizing recommendations are not able to be based upon working hours of a day or typical load times."
"Before IBM bought it, the support was fantastic. After IBM bought it, the support became very disappointing."
"The current UI (Adobe Flash) is very clunky and inefficient; however, their new HTML5 UI (in Demo mode) will be GA in late 2017."
"Training was a bit disjointed at first, but the second session was improved."
"Interface needs to loose Flash completely and switch to HTML5."
"The dashboard is too basic, could use more details."
"Turbonomic's current UI is coded in Flash though they have stated an HTML5 version is coming soon."
"There are certain issues with capturing the information on vSphere application metrics. vROps doesn't clearly capture those metrics."
"We used technical support quite a lot. They worked hard to find solutions to our problems and helped us with product updates, but I think they need to improve."
"The only thing is, we're on Essentials Plus. There are some things we want to do that that particular version of the license will not allow, so we would need to upgrade to a higher one."
"When it comes to policies, they need to fine tune things to make it easier. It is a bit difficult setting up policies."
"The policy and some few metrics are not very clear. More explanations would be great."
"One thing that is not ideal is that I actually have to buy a third-party plug-in for things like NetApp."
"There's a lot of stuff around usability and reporting. Their reporting library needs to improve."
"We have used technical support sometimes. It could be a little bit challenging."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cost is always involved, but then I feel that this solution is better than other products that we have."
"Setup cost is negligible, as it scales fairly well."
"Densify has licensing setup so you can collect data without licensing. It gives you the ability to collect on everything, then choose later what you would like to license."
"There was some sticker shock, as this is not just another software product to spit out graphs."
"It was an annual buy-in. You basically purchase it based on your host type stuff. The buy-in was about 20K, and the annual maintenance is about $3,000 a year."
"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."
"I have not seen Turbonomic's new pricing since IBM purchased it. When we were looking at it in my previous company before IBM's purchase, it was compatible with other tools."
"In the last year, Turbonomic has reduced our cloud costs by $94,000."
"What I can advise is to trial the product, taking advantage of the Turbonomic pre-sales implemention support and kickstart training."
"I consider the pricing to be high."
"We see ROI in extended support agreements (ESA) for old software. Migration activities seem to be where Turbonomic has really benefited us the most. It's one click and done. We have new machines ready to go with Turbonomic, which are properly sized instead of somebody sitting there with a spreadsheet and guessing. So, my return on investment would certainly be on currency, from a software and hardware perspective."
"I'm not involved in any of the billing, but my understanding is that is fairly expensive."
"Bundle it in with your license rather than buying it as a separate product. It saves a lot of money that way."
"We have seen ROI in performance. It used to be our company was giving out eight CPUs to all servers. That was bad performance-wise. People were seeing slow compute times for their applications."
"There has been a bit of cost savings in that we could decide to move workloads around a bit better."
"Don't overallocate! This means that you don't have to buy many hosts. You can save money that way."
"The solution is slightly expensive."
"I would like to see a free offering. Cost is always a factor in any sort of line. Obviously, the value added is there and it's worth it."
"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."
"As we continue to implement it across multiple environments, it reduces costs as well."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Retailer
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise10
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business41
Midsize Enterprise57
Large Enterprise147
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business65
Midsize Enterprise62
Large Enterprise278
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Densify?
Densify can be improved in a couple of areas: the learning curve for new users, where it feels like an advanced optim...
What is your primary use case for Densify?
My main use cases for Densify include cloud cost optimization, predictive resource sizing, assistance in multi-cloud ...
What advice do you have for others considering Densify?
My advice for others looking into using Densify is to focus on setting up governance policy early, integrate optimiza...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Turbonomic?
It offers different scenarios. It provides more capabilities than many other tools available. Typically, its price is...
What needs improvement with Turbonomic?
The implementation could be enhanced.
What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?
We use IBM Turbonomic to automate our cloud operations, including monitoring, consolidating dashboards, and reporting...
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 y...
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 compl...
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 i...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), vCenter Operations Manager (VCOPS)
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

AIG, Bank of America, Cigna, Citi
IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
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
Find out what your peers are saying about Broadcom, Nutanix, Veeam Software and others in Virtualization Management Tools. Updated: March 2026.
885,667 professionals have used our research since 2012.