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Firefly vs VMware Aria Automation 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Firefly
Ranking in Cloud Management
34th
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.1
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Aria Automation
Ranking in Cloud Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
172
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (8th), Network Automation (6th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (22nd), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Firefly is 0.4%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 5.5%, down from 11.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Aria Automation5.5%
Firefly0.4%
Other94.1%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

MR
Senior Software Consultant at a hospitality company with 10,001+ employees
Design workflows have been transformed and now enable rapid ad visuals and campaign launches
Firefly offers several best features in my opinion. We have the TTS feature and TTV feature. Additionally, suppose I have a single image from the creative designer and I want to generate different variations or different sizes of that image that will get adapted mostly on Google Ads. For example, I want to generate different renditions of that same image in different resolutions. I can quickly go to Firefly and from a single image generate different multiple images in different renditions. Firefly also helps us expand images. For example, I have a small image that is a portrait and I want to convert that as a full image or a hero image, which fits on a wide screen. Firefly helps us generate the images. It will not be stretching or squeezing your image. Instead, Firefly takes the context from your image and generates the next object which could appear. For example, if I am standing on a beach, it will generate the beach. It will generate a few people, it will generate some pictures of the sea, maybe some coconut trees. Firefly has positively impacted my organization a lot. I can say it is helping us reduce the effort and cost, saving the cost. For example, I have to create one image for our social media post. For that, we have to request our creative team, and then a creative designer will work on that idea and take one day or two days to get the design complete. After that, it comes to the review. With the help of Firefly, we can quickly generate the images and get them reviewed. Our go-to-market becomes easy. Within two hours or three hours, we can complete this whole process: generation, review, and all, and go to the market instantly. Additionally, if we have one image available and I want to quickly launch a Google Ad campaign that requires different renditions of the image, I can quickly use Firefly and generate different renditions of the image using the single image. So, it also reduces the dependency which we had earlier with the creative designers and the creative team.
VasilisGiannitsiotis - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT at ITSolutions
Automation has streamlined complex financial workflows but still needs more intuitive orchestration
Something to improve in VMware Aria Automation would be related to VCF 9, as I do not know what it is trying to bring because they exposed it as the solution of everything. So VCF 9 will bring VCF Automation and VCF Operations, the new product line of VMware. I have not seen what this brings or what else it includes. Maybe in the area of vRealize Orchestrator, this would be beneficial because VRO can do everything. Perhaps a more user-friendly way to use that tool would be helpful because the possibilities there are endless. I am looking for more user-friendly navigation in VMware Aria Automation.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Firefly has a positive impact on my organization by improving cloud governance, infrastructure consistency, and engineering productivity."
"Firefly saves one employee, it saves 5 million annually, and we are currently improving 40% of our go-to-market time while reducing cost by 30% and increasing revenue by approximately 20%."
"Firefly has a positive impact on my organization by improving cloud governance, infrastructure consistency, and engineering productivity."
"Firefly has impacted my work positively by making it more creative and productive."
"In one use case for a large marketplace, a typical release cycle took about 80 hours and was brought down to three hours by automating deployment for developers."
"It has helped IT to support development, for example, one of our customers has a development team and, before this solution, it would take ten days to develop and test their solution, now it is down to one day."
"Our speed of provisioning has also improved; we used to build systems manually, which would take four hours or a day, but nowadays we're able to spin something up off a template that we update every so often and it takes about 20 minutes."
"It is mostly for our tech support to test new versions, find bugs, and troubleshoot what is happening at customer sites."
"Configuration management: We were using SaltStack for orchestration in liaison with OpenStack."
"Aria Automation gives you the flexibility to deploy tenants with customized blueprints for permissions and policies. Version 7.8 consisted of multiple products, so you had to deploy a lot of virtual machines on one of the servers. Starting from 8.6, VMware consolidated all the components into one Linux appliance. This allows the option to use vRA or DevOps capabilities."
"One of the best features and advantages of VMware Aria Automation is that it has a nice user service portal where a user can log in and, through a catalog, pick and choose something from a deployment, pipeline, or a VRO workflow."
"I think the ability to create blueprints and define our lab environments and vRAs is really easy for anyone to use, with drag and drop VMs and other components into the Blueprint Composer."
 

Cons

"Some of the areas Firefly can improve are a simpler onboarding process for organizations with large and multi-cloud environments, more customization for generated Terraform code to better match existing coding standards and module structures, and more native integrations with DevOps and ITSM tools."
"If I talk about the cost, the cost is a little high."
"I feel that Firefly can be improved by getting more models to generate high-end videos."
"Some of the areas Firefly can improve are a simpler onboarding process for organizations with large and multi-cloud environments, more customization for generated Terraform code to better match existing coding standards and module structures, and more native integrations with DevOps and ITSM tools."
"My impression of its stability is "middle of the road." We've had some issues where it seems to be a little bit sensitive, where deployments fail and we don't really know a specific reason why. We'll dig through logs and try and figure out what's going on, but it's not always apparent as to why it failed. And you can kick it off again and it'll succeed. So stability could be better."
"We had a lot of issues at first. Especially with doing any kind of upgrades, it was a complete tear-down and a complete rebuild of all the Blueprints. The upgrade process was not easy or intuitive at all. But it seems to be getting better."
"Master/minion connections are subject to hijacking, privilege escalation, and/or information leaks."
"It doesn't have a GUI to manage VMs."
"We have seen some issues with upgrades or installations. This means we have to raise a call every time with VMware."
"It does go down from time to time. We have some issues with the appliances sometimes and we have to do reboots in the middle of the day. That affects the ability for them to deploy."
"In terms of usability, It has had its challenges. It requires a lot of custom code to integrate into our environment. It can take a little while to get it to do what we want, takes some code instead of having built-in functionality. Part it is how we use it. It would be a lot easier to use in a greenfield scenario versus brownfield, which is the way we using it."
"Broadcom has acquired the tool, which could lower its pricing. Many customers are moving away from VMware infrastructure towards enterprise systems like Azure or AWS. This shift could be due to two main reasons: pricing and uncertainty about the future, especially regarding how Broadcom will handle licenses and strategy."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The pricing for this solution is roughly 20% lower than the competitive products in the market."
"As far as value is concerned, it has been essential to our environment. We have been able to deploy VMs quickly and the developers have their own sandbox, so they can spin up and destroy VMs at their own will."
"The cost of the solution is reasonable for us. Although it is relatively high, we prioritize stability and integration over cost."
"From a budget point of view, the pricing is a bit on the higher side."
"They should provide one license for all the sub-products."
"The pricing is very high."
"vRealize automation really should be a front door to the whole VMware suite of products."
"I'm very interested in the integration with Puppet. However, my organization doesn't have the funding for something like Puppet right now. If VMware would integrate that feature set (Puppet) into vRA. That would be very awesome."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
7%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise131
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Firefly?
I feel that Firefly can be improved by getting more models to generate high-end videos. The model should be trained much more because sometimes I feel some visual effects or some realism is missing...
What is your primary use case for Firefly?
My main use case for Firefly is for text-to-image or text-to-video. I use Firefly for content creation, and I have generated many images and videos for my videos from Firefly. I use it not only for...
What advice do you have for others considering Firefly?
This interview was good, and I do not think there is anything I should change for the future. I found it valuable to discuss my use case with Firefly and other ways I have experimented with it. I g...
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...
Is there any way to try VMware Aria Automation for free?
When it comes to VMware Aria Automation, you have three choices for free runs: Hands-on Lab (HOL) Advanced lab A free trial I cannot describe in detail the second and third options as my company ...
Which sectors can benefit the most from VMware Aria Automation?
I was looking at VMware Aria Automation case studies recently and I got the impression that three main kinds of companies were using it most often: Social organizations Financial institutions and ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
Find out what your peers are saying about Firefly vs. VMware Aria Automation and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
902,894 professionals have used our research since 2012.