Densify vs VMware Aria Operations comparison

Densify and VMware are both solutions in the Virtualization Management Tools category. Densify is ranked #11, while VMware is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.6. Densify holds a 2.5% mindshare in VM, compared to VMware’s 31.3% mindshare. Additionally, 80% of Densify users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of VMware users who would recommend it.

Densify

Read 9 Densify reviews

951 Views
247 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Operations

Read 375 VMware Aria Operations reviews

6,636 Views
2,654 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Densify

VMware Aria Operations

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 13, 2024

VMware Aria Operations and Densify are leading competitors in the cloud management and optimization sector. VMware Aria Operations holds an edge in deployment flexibility and customer service, whereas Densify shines with its optimization capabilities.

Features: VMware Aria Operations is tailored for comprehensive cloud management with features such as performance monitoring, troubleshooting, and capacity optimization meeting enterprise requirements. It facilitates performance analytics, proactive alerting, and resource allocation recommendations. It also integrates smoothly with other VMware products. Meanwhile, Densify excels in precise optimization for compute resources, delivering fine-tuned scaling insights and effective cost reduction strategies. Its advanced optimization algorithms and detailed analytics empower organizations to achieve operational efficiency.

Room for Improvement: VMware Aria Operations could benefit from enhanced integrations with non-VMware ecosystems and improved real-time analytics for more actionable insights. Users have expressed a need for greater customization in alert settings and a more consolidated interface to streamline workflow. Densify, while exceptional in optimization, may need to broaden its scope to cover more general cloud management tasks. Improved customer onboarding processes and more comprehensive documentation could enhance user experience. There is room to simplify its configuration process for ease of use in diverse environments.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Aria Operations provides an efficient deployment experience backed by robust customer support, making it ideal for enterprises seeking fast integration with existing systems. Its service reliability and extensive support resources ensure responsive assistance. Densify offers competent deployments but is best suited for more specialized use cases that might require advanced configurations. While it delivers solid customer service, feedback suggests the need for more widespread support resources to facilitate smoother deployment experiences.

Pricing and ROI: VMware Aria Operations offers flexible pricing models that reflect its extensive capabilities, thus delivering significant ROI for businesses in need of versatile cloud management solutions. Its price performance ratio is often justified by the broad range of functionalities it includes. On the other hand, Densify may entail higher initial costs due to its specialized features focused on optimization, but it offers strong ROI by consistently achieving cost reduction through accurate resource management and optimization. Its targeted benefits can be particularly rewarding for organizations focused on maximizing efficiency and lowering operational costs.

To learn more, read our detailed Densify vs. VMware Aria Operations Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Densify vs. VMware Aria Operations

July 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

Densify

Ranking in Cloud Management

35th

Ranking in Virtualization Management Tools

11th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Migration (16th), Cloud Analytics (4th), Cloud Cost Management (13th)

VMware Aria Operations

Ranking in Cloud Management

3rd

Ranking in Virtualization Management Tools

1st

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

375

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Virtualization Management Tools category, the mindshare of Densify is 2.5%, down from 3.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations is 31.3%, down from 34.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Virtualization Management Tools

Featured Reviews

Amit Kantia

Infrastructure capacity & demand manager at Kyndryl

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.

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Amar Sorro

Team Lead Virtualization at Hybrid Tech

Manage and monitor crucial banking operations with deep logging and efficient alerting

The most valuable features of VMware Aria Operations include its excellent monitoring capabilities. It allows me to perform deep monitoring and logging of the entire environment, providing a quick alarm and warning system through email. These features help me in efficiently managing virtual machines. The solution also offers easy access to VMware KB articles for problem resolution, ensuring quick access to troubleshooting information.

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

"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."

"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 Densify Control Console, and Environment Status."

"The solution's tech support is excellent."

"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."

"Densify's ability to aggregate multiple on-premise vCenters and multiple cloud accounts, gives it a level of visibility not found in many places."

More Densify pros

"One of the most valuable features is the ability to compare between AWS/Azure and the local cloud. When customers deploy something on the local cloud, with the same configuration that would apply to AWS or Azure, we can calculate the estimated cost difference between the local cloud and the public cloud. We do this kind of analysis for optimization and it is one of the best features of vROps."

"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."

"We appreciate that this solution gives accurate reporting."

"It helped troubleshooting issues with storms of software data that cost a lot of IO."

"It gives us deep insight into the entire VDI environment, where we have of over 18,000 VDIs. It helps us keep up on uptime, gives us real-time monitoring, tracking, and troubleshooting."

"I like that we can see what amount of the CPU has been used and what's been handed out. We can see how we can bring the virtual machines in line with what actually has been used which has saved us cost."

"What I like most about VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is how it integrates into the vCenter. You'll get a similar hierarchical view of your host, your VMs, your resource pools, etc. I also like the granularity, particularly the fact that you could go pretty deep into the metrics and data retention as well. You could go far back several months to try and plot performance trends, eventually leading up to an issue or post-incident management. I also like the plugins in VMware vRealize Operations (vROps). I find the plugins good, especially because you could plug those into Dell. For example, there was a way to visualize how your Dell infrastructure is performing. You could build dashboards, even custom dashboards for your operational teams. You could take a look at what was going on and also look into people doing incident management, troubleshooting, etc. You could customize your experience with VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), and I found that good as well. I also like the UI of VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) because it's nice and very, very fresh."

"One of the most attractive features in vROps is collecting information, logs, and events and, after that, providing proactive predictions about usage of resources. vROps also offers recommendations. For example, in the next two months we might face problems with CPU usage. vROps predicted and forecasted these issues in advance. That's a very useful feature."

More VMware Aria Operations pros

Cons

"A closer integration to the service management processes."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"They should make it easier to find those granular things that you're always looking for. You're always running into a situation where you want to use the tool to figure out a problem, but the amount of effort needed to delve into vROps and find the exact metric you're looking for is always so difficult."

"It's complex and not intuitive. It has a long learning process. It can be frustrating trying to get the correct information from it."

"VMware Aria Operations is considered overpriced. Customers have commented on the pricing issues, noting that doubling the price is not normal. They are reviewing other options due to this pricing concern."

"I would like to see them add a little bit more functionality and the ability to create more dashboards."

"It is a bit complex, so you need to spend time with it."

"You can troubleshoot, you can do all kinds of deep-dives into the issue and find out what the root cause is and everything, but in order to get it fixed, whatever it is (doesn't matter what it is), you need to log into another tool in order to fix it."

"For the most part, we have found it to be user-friendly. It has gotten better over time since the first version of vROps that I used. The interface has really improved since then."

"I wouldn't say that this solution is user-friendly. You need to know a lot of tricks to know how to use it. It's quite buggy and quite slow when it comes to loading."

More VMware Aria Operations cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

"It is an affordable solution that doesn't require any additional costs."

"The licensing is not clear at the moment if the on-premises pricing is the same as on the cloud. I am checking on the pricing. However, you can save a lot of money with the cloud solution because you need to spend time installing, upgrading, and connecting with the on-premises solution. Also, you don't need to spend time scheduling the maintenance and maintaining the solution when using the cloud version."

"If you compare the prices of VMware and the cloud solutions along with the components that you may use, I feel that it may be costly."

"The pricing is a little bit expensive. Licensing is an issue because there are always changes, and by that I mean cost increases. And that's not only for vROps but for VMware, vSphere, and all the products that are involved."

"Get the right licensing and increase your licensing as you upgrade and grow. If you get the wrong licensing, it will be expensive, especially if you plan improperly."

"vRealize Operations has proved to be a cost effective solution for our big environment."

"When we last did a comparison of solutions, the pricing was equal or similar."

"Pricing is good for us. We're non-profit so we get a break on that."

More VMware Aria Operations pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

26%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

10%

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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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...

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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...

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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...

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Comparisons

Cloudability vs Densify

Compared 61% of the time

IBM Turbonomic vs Densify

Compared 39% of the time

More Densify Competitors

VMware Aria Automation vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 21% of the time

IBM Turbonomic vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 10% of the time

VMware vSphere vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 9% of the time

Nutanix Prism vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 8% of the time

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 8% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Densify

July 2025

Download Densify product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Operations

July 2025

Download VMware Aria Operations product report

Also Known As

No data available

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

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

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.

VMware

Sample Customers

AIG, Bank of America, Cigna, Citi

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

Densify vs. VMware Aria Operations

July 2025

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