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Firefly 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Firefly
Ranking in Cloud Management
37th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Aria Operations
Ranking in Cloud Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
376
Ranking in other categories
Virtualization Management Tools (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Firefly is 0.3%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations is 4.9%, down from 8.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
VMware Aria Operations4.9%
Firefly0.3%
Other94.8%
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.
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

"Firefly simply acts as a single source of truth for my cloud inventory and governance, and it complements my existing cloud and FinOps processes rather than replacing them."
"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%."
"One of the most valuable features is the ability to perform 'what-if' scenarios."
"It has great charts and graphs which provide a high level overview of our environment. Being able to click through those to deep dive, we can easily get to the information that we are looking for."
"It removes the guess work. It gives me real data and analysis in a very user-friendly way that I can show to my management without going deep into numbers."
"For project management and new clients, the What-If Analysis is very good. You can use it for workloads. When you are adding new workloads to your platform, it helps you avoid impacting your production."
"The vRO (using Functional Programming of Javascript) is a hand-down of the favorite component of this suite."
"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."
"One of the most valuable features is that it gives us granular insight into how the infrastructure is operating and running, down to the storage level, the hypervisor level, even the hardware level. It really gives us a deep dive into what is going on and lets us see. Instead of our having to figure it out, it figures it out for us. It is also user-friendly and intuitive."
"vROps' best feature is the easy integration with the environment."
 

Cons

"However, I still see a lot of improvement scope in their service."
"If I talk about the cost, the cost is a little high."
"VMware could improve the way VROps forwards critical alerts to Microsoft Teams."
"We would like better integration with the cloud because we use a multi-vendor cloud. We use AWS, which is fine, but we also use Azure and Google. We would like better plugins to those other two providers."
"One thing I don't like is, all the scales are self-referencing. So when I get a number one, is that one out of ten, one out of a hundred? I don't know. So I can say these servers are performing ten times better than that server but I don't know where the scale goes."
"If I had a container solution deployed on top of a VMware infrastructure, or outside as well, it would be really helpful."
"The solution’s pricing could be improved."
"I know that they talk a lot about AI and a sort of forecasting ahead of time. It's a good application, but it has to wait for a certain period of time to actually do an analysis. If it would give you that ahead of time, or even forecasting, it would be really improved."
"It needs dashboards that we can present at the executive level. The GUI, overall, could be better."
"There were challenges with VMware Aria Operations; the first problem was hardware compatibility."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Most small users don't adopt VMware Aria Operations until it's necessary. Small businesses are looking for it, too. We need more monitoring and insights, so we're analyzing solutions to help us out here. I rate the solution’s pricing a five out of ten."
"The solution is slightly expensive."
"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."
"The optimization is a huge return on investment alone."
"vRealize Operations has proved to be a cost effective solution for our big environment."
"We have seen huge ROI. It has certainly reduced troubleshooting."
"The solution requires an annual license which is very expensive."
"If one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the product price an eight out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business64
Midsize Enterprise62
Large Enterprise278
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Firefly?
At times the image quality from Firefly is inconsistent. That is something that could be improved. There is limited creative visibility that could be worked on. Firefly is already a pretty good too...
What is your primary use case for Firefly?
I have been using Firefly for creator purposes, specifically for creating images, videos, vectors, and design elements. I have been working on a few projects that require documentation, and those p...
What advice do you have for others considering Firefly?
I can tell you about time savings, but the exact metrics are beyond the scope of my work, so I do not have them. Personally speaking, I have been spending less time on creating visuals for presenta...
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 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...
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...
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
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 Nutanix, Broadcom, IBM and others in Cloud Management. Updated: January 2026.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.