Densify vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP comparison

Densify and NetApp are both solutions in the Cloud Migration category. Densify is ranked #13, while NetApp is ranked #2 with an average rating of 9.3. Densify holds a 3.4% mindshare in CM, compared to NetApp’s 7.4% mindshare. Additionally, 80% of Densify users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of NetApp users who would recommend it.

Densify

Read 9 Densify reviews

1,106 Views
288 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Read 64 NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP reviews

4,695 Views
798 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Densify

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Densify and NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP compete in cloud management and optimization, with Densify shining in competitive pricing and strong deployment support, while NetApp stands out for comprehensive features and a substantial investment.

Features: Densify offers cloud resource optimization with cost-saving analysis and performance insights. It focuses on resource efficiency, predictive analytics, and comprehensive visibility across platforms. NetApp provides advanced data management with secure storage capabilities, seamless data backup, and robust disaster recovery options. It enhances data protection, scalability, and flexible deployment across hybrid environments.

Room for Improvement: Densify could improve its data integration flexibility and scalability in larger enterprise environments. Enhancing reporting capabilities and expanding automation features would also be beneficial. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP might work on simplifying its deployment processes, reducing initial investment costs, and improving integration with third-party applications for enhanced data mobility.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Densify features straightforward deployment with rapid implementation, offering efficient customer assistance. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP presents a more complex deployment requiring detailed configurations, but its strong support systems facilitate setup and ongoing management.

Pricing and ROI: Densify offers an attractive pricing model with a lower initial setup cost, encouraging quicker ROI through cost insights. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP requires a higher initial investment but provides long-term savings and extensive functionality, aligning with data-intensive enterprise needs.

To learn more, read our detailed Densify vs. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Densify vs. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

December 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 881,082 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

Densify

Ranking in Cloud Migration

13th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Management (39th), Virtualization Management Tools (12th), Cloud Analytics (7th), Cloud Cost Management (25th)

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Ranking in Cloud Migration

2nd

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Storage (3rd), Cloud Backup (27th), Public Cloud Storage Services (13th), Cloud Software Defined Storage (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Cloud Migration category, the mindshare of Densify is 3.4%, up from 2.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is 7.4%, down from 15.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Migration Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP	7.4%
Densify	3.4%
Other	89.2%

Cloud Migration

Featured Reviews

Amit Kantia

Infrastructure capacity & demand manager at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Its most valuable feature is the ability to capture attributes in the console, but it is not a stable solution

I recommend others to use Densify. They can not only use it for reporting but for automation as well. They can implement the policies on the console easily during the build-out procedure. Stability is the primary concern to us as it is causing lots of problems. We can only make significant decisions if Densify allows us, and it takes lots of time. Thus, I rate the tool as a six out of ten.

Read full review

Punit Waghela

Technical Specialist at Softcell Technologies Limited

Offers advanced features with notable emphasis on innovation

The best features of NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP include deduplication, compaction, and autonomous ransomware technology that native cloud storage solutions in AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud do not support. Moreover, NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP allows the use of multiple protocols including NFS, CIFS, and iSCSI, whereas native options may only support NFS and iSCSI. Customers already using on-premises NetApp storage such as FAS, AFF, or ASA can experience the same functionality on the cloud with NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, which adds significant value. For data protection, customers can take advantage of the Snapshot technology available with NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP. This technology facilitates data recovery by allowing snapshots to be stored either on the same storage or on a disaster recovery (DR) storage. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP helps us to take snapshots and store them on the same storage, with options for migration or replication of those snapshots to different storage, including on-premises DR storage or other cloud storage, providing excellent disaster recovery capabilities.

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

"The Densify Control Console, and Environment Status."

"The solution's tech support is excellent."

"I would say that the initial thing is that it provides us with a technological basis to expand capacity management beyond Excel."

"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 ability to increase server density inside of my environment, which has helped me drive reduction in costs."

"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."

"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."

"One would be the automatic rebalancing of the environment. That was one feature which helped. With that, we could improve our efficiency of our VMware infrastructure."

More Densify pros

"ONTAP is great for helping you migrate on-premise workflows to cloud environments."

"CVO gives us the ability to access data as quickly as possible, which is critical because of the mission set we handle. Some things cannot wait. For example, we tried having the data in the cloud itself, but it took too long for us to retrieve it from cold or deep storage. If we have it ONTAP or on-prem, it's so much easier to pull it within minutes."

"Snapshots are one valuable feature within ONTAP, but CVO's appeal is that it acts just like the on-prem solution. It's the same OS, but in the cloud. We can continue to use ONTAP as we did on-premise."

"The ease of use in terms of how the product works is valuable. We are able to work with it and deploy the storage that we need."

"I highly recommend that customers using native cloud storage from hyperscalers transition to NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP as it offers numerous features and functionalities such as inline deduplication, compression, compaction, autonomous ransomware protection, snapshot technology, and flex cache that are unavailable with other hyperscalers."

"NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is easy to use and gets the job done, and the granular ability to divide up the performance and the amount of storage you want is really fantastic."

"It is much easier to control data since we can run queries across all our platforms with just one solution. Not only that, we can also monitor all the platforms with Active IQ, where we can see all the alerts, messages, and space consumption through a single application. This is regardless if the data is on-prem or AWS. It is much more efficient."

"The most valuable feature is the ease of file storage."

More NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP pros

Cons

"It seems that the mechanism for integration is, it goes so far but I think there could be some standard integration to normal remedy service now etc. I think that should be out of the box."

"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."

"The solution's stability is the primary concern for me."

"In terms of integration, the tool has great data. However, it's not always meaningful because the true business attributes of how most Fortune 500 companies operate are not maintaining in one tool, they're in a school of many tools."

"A closer integration to the service management processes."

"Normalization of CPU utilization is required. At present, the data is available based on entitlement level."

"Unfortunately the tools and mechanisms which really came to maturity in the cloud, and were not mainstream on-premise, are still not implemented."

"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."

"It definitely needs improvement with respect to clustering and with respect to more collaborative integrations with Azure. Right now, we have very limited functionalities with Azure, except for storage. If CVO could be integrated with Azure that would help. When there is any sort of maintenance happening in the cloud, it disrupts the service in Cloud Volumes ONTAP."

"In terms of improvement, I would like to see the Azure NetApp Files have the capability of doing SnapMirrors. Azure NetApp Files is, as we know, is an AFF system and it's not used in any of the Microsoft resources. It's basically NetApp hardware, so the best performance you can achieve, but the only reason we can't use that right now is because of the region that it's available in. The second was the SnapMirror capability that we didn't have that we heavily rely on right now."

"The product is more restricted with underlying cloud."

"There is room for improvement with the capacity. There's a very hard limit to how many disks you can have and how much space you can have. That is something they should work to fix, because it's limiting. Right now, the limit is about 360 terabytes or 36 disks."

"Scale-up and scale-out could be improved. It would be interesting to have multiple HA pairs on one cluster, for example, or to increase the single instances more, from a performance perspective. It would be good to get more performance out of a single HA pair."

"How it handles erasure coding. I feel it the improvement should be there. Basically, it should be seamless. You don't want to have an underlying hardware issue or something, then suddenly there's no reads or writes. Luckily, it's at a replication site, so our main production site is still working and writing to it. But, the replication site has stopped right now while we try to bring that node back. Since we implemented in bare-metal, not in appliance, we had to go back to the original vendor. They didn't send it in time, and we had a hardware memory issue. Then, we had a hard disk issue, which brought the node down physically."

"The data tiering needs improvement. E.g., moving hard data to faster disks."

"The navigation on some of the configuration parameters is a bit cumbersome, making the learning curve on functions somewhat steep."

More NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There was some sticker shock, as this is not just another software product to spit out graphs."

"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."

"Cost is a big factor, because a lot of companies can't afford enterprise grade equipment all the time. They skimp where they can. I would recommend that they improve the cost."

"Some flexibility around the licensing model would help. The product is licensed based on capacity. Basically, the largest capacity license that you can buy is 368 terabytes. At this point, NetApp is addressing some people's concerns around this."

"If a customer is only using, say, less than 10 terabytes, I don't think CVO would be a good option. A customer using at least 100 or 200 terabytes should get a reasonable price from NetApp."

"I know the licensing is a bit on the high-end. That's when we had to downsize our MetroCluster disks and just migrate to disks that were half used. We migrated into those just to reduce maintenance costs."

"The pricing could be improved. It is a good product, but it is very expensive for me."

"The standard pricing is online. Pricing depends. If you're using the PayGo model, then it's just the normal costs on the Microsoft page. If you're using Bring Your Own License, which is what we're doing, then you get with your sales contact at NetApp and start figuring out what price is the best, in the end, for your company."

"Once we deploy the pay as you go model, we cannot convert this product as a BYOL model. This is a concern that we have."

"They allow a special price if you are working closely with them. Since we have a lot of NetApp systems, we got some kind of discount. That's something they do for other customers, not just for us. The price was fair. In addition to the licensing fees, you're paying Amazon for your usage..."

More NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Migration solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Retailer

16%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

16%

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	1
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	9

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	53

Questions from the Community

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

What do you like most about NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP?

So a lot of these licenses are at the rate that is required for capacity. So they're they're able to reduce the license consumption and also the consumption of the underlying cloud storage.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP?

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is actually quite reasonable in price compared to other native cloud storage options. For example, a customer using 100 TB of AWS storage would not benefit from deduplica...

See all answers

What needs improvement with NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP?

It would be nice to see technology supporting the Elastic Fabric Adapter on Amazon AWS, therefore getting RDMA technology for more low-latency connections.

See all answers

Comparisons

IBM Turbonomic vs Densify

Compared 32% of the time

CloudSphere vs Densify

Compared 11% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs Densify

Compared 9% of the time

Cloudability vs Densify

Compared 7% of the time

OpenText Migrate vs Densify

Compared 7% of the time

More Densify Competitors

Azure NetApp Files vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Compared 11% of the time

Amazon S3 vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Compared 11% of the time

Amazon FSx vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Compared 9% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Compared 6% of the time

Portworx Enterprise vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Compared 4% of the time

More NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Densify

January 2026

Download Densify product report

Buyer's Guide

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

January 2026

Download NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP product report

Also Known As

No data available

ONTAP Cloud, CVO, NetApp CVO

Overview

Densify is a hybrid cloud and container resource management platform that makes workloads self-aware of their precise resource requirements and automates the resource management and selection process. This solution helps you control your cloud spend and also helps your apps perform and scale better. Densify enables you to match your cloud requirements with the optimal cloud supply. Additionally, Densify is the only technology that leverages patented, predictive machine learning-powered analytics to perform advanced modeling of workload patterns, and provide precise optimization directives. It is ideal for cloud engineers, container platform owners, and IT finance.

Densify works by:

Establishing application demand patterns that are based on business cycles, seasonality, peaks, valleys, and other variables.
Building normalized models of cloud supply and ingesting the entire cloud catalog and latest technologies.
Considering numerous factors, such as performance benchmarks, cost, technical rules, tags, and policies. The solution uses business and functional tags, operational realities, and granular policy control.

Densify Features

Densify has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Integration with management and provisioning systems
Machine learning-based analytics
Automated resource optimization
App owner collaboration
Tailored efficiency reports
Observability
Controllability
Capacity optimization
Policy driven, automated governance
VM placement
Predictive analytics

Densify Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing Densify. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Automated resource management: Densify provides your organization with automated resource management at scale, with elasticity at an affordable low cost.

Full stack visibility: The Densify solution offers full stack visibility with improved efficiency by determining container size and node resources.

Financial visibility: In addition to full stack visibility, one of Densify’s other advantages is that it offers full financial visibility and cost intelligence for both reporting as well as chargebacks.

Resizing and rebalancing: Densify analyzes your private cloud infrastructure, providing resizing and rebalancing recommendations.

Helps you choose the right host environment: Densify automatically routes workloads to the best hosting environment based on detailed workload requirements. For workloads not requiring immediate placement, it reserves capacity to ensure it is available when required.

A true SaaS implementation: Because Densify is a true SaaS implementation, there is no software to maintain or to learn.

Better for IT finance: The solution is good for IT finance because it collects and analyzes your detailed billing data, giving you visibility into your spending, what services you’re buying, and how to better manage your costs. In addition, it can also generate reports that cover your spending and your utilization of reservations and reserved instances and savings plans.

Reduce risk and costs: Machine learning-based analytics help your organization optimize consumption to eliminate waste and overprovisioning while ensuring performance.

Cost-efficient: The Densify solution is cost-efficient, helping you drastically reduce per-processor software license costs by placing workloads intelligently.

Densify

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is an efficient storage management solution for managing and storing data in the cloud. It offers seamless integration with cloud providers, advanced data replication capabilities, and high data protection. With reliable performance, it is ideal for industries like healthcare and finance.

NetApp

Sample Customers

AIG, Bank of America, Cigna, Citi

1. Accenture 2. Acer 3. Adidas 4. Aetna 5. AIG 6. Apple 7. Bank of America 8. Barclays 9. Bayer 10. Berkshire Hathaway 11. BNP Paribas 12. Cisco 13. Coca-Cola 14. Comcast 15.ConocoPhillips 16. CVS Health 17. Dell 18. Deutsche Bank 19. eBay 20. Eli Lilly 21. FedEx 22. Ford 23. Freescale Semiconductor 24. General Electric 25. Google 26. Honeywell 27. IBM 28. Intel 29. Intuit 30. JPMorgan Chase 31. Kellogg's 32. KeyCorp 33. Liberty Mutual 34. L'Oréal 35. Mastercard

Buyer's Guide

Densify vs. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

December 2025

Free Report: Densify vs. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Find out what your peers are saying about Densify vs. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Densify vs. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP report.

See our list of best Cloud Migration vendors.

We monitor all Cloud Migration 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.