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Helix ALM vs Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
8.1
Helix ALM improved traceability, collaboration, and efficiency, reducing project delays and costs, while enhancing project visibility, control, and defect detection.
Sentiment score
7.1
Nutanix Cloud Manager boosts efficiency, reduces costs, and enhances reliability through streamlined management, automation, and resource optimization.
Anything that reduces bandwidth and reduces the brain work that our teams have to do to maintain systems across all environments is time-saving and cost-saving.
The biggest return on investment for me when using this product is the fast deployment and the rapid integration and migration without impacting our operations during the migration.
Playbooks and automation definitely freed up engineer time. This allows us to focus on other projects and not have to get hands-on, reducing operational costs.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.9
Helix ALM's customer service is praised for being responsive, knowledgeable, and efficient, aiding users with excellent support and onboarding.
Sentiment score
8.2
Nutanix Cloud Manager's customer service is praised for efficiency, responsiveness, proactive support, and knowledgeable staff, despite occasional time zone issues.
There is a feature that allows you to escalate the call.
The handoff with support and the knowledge of the support engineer is significantly better than experience with other vendors.
We have easier access to high-level engineers compared to VMware, where you have to navigate multiple channels for support.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
5.0
Helix ALM is praised for its scalability, integration, and stable performance, making it ideal for large, growing teams and projects.
Sentiment score
7.6
Nutanix Cloud Manager offers scalable, efficient management with seamless expansion capabilities, praised for flexibility and ease in hybrid settings.
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) scales well.
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) has not had any issues scaling with the growing needs of my company.
Scaling with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is not as straightforward as they claim, largely due to the assumption that you have IPv6 enabled on your switches.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
Helix ALM is praised for its robust performance, reliability, and high responsiveness, especially during complex tasks and updates.
Sentiment score
7.8
Nutanix Cloud Manager is highly stable, with minimal downtime, efficient maintenance, and strong support for mission-critical tasks.
We've never had any downtime related to the Nutanix product itself.
I would rate the stability a nine out of ten.
The stability and reliability of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) have been excellent.
 

Room For Improvement

Users find Helix ALM slow, unintuitive, with limited reporting, poor integration, and inadequate documentation.
Nutanix Cloud Manager could improve VM organization, user experience, feature availability, and integrations while refining automation and support.
Our primary reason for choosing Nutanix was for mission-critical applications and Kubernetes.
Quick resolution of disconnection issues and errors in plugins is crucial.
If there are licensing errors, for example, being told I have 96 cores licensed but Nutanix Flow not licensed despite having assigned units, it complicates things unnecessarily.
 

Setup Cost

Helix ALM provides scalable, flexible pricing with per-user costs based on modules, and discounts for higher user counts.
Enterprise buyers view Nutanix Cloud Manager as initially costly but recognize long-term savings and competitive pricing compared to alternatives.
It's not cheap, but there are savings and return on investment when coming from a non-Nutanix shop.
In comparison, Nutanix's pricing is significantly higher than that of other setups.
It is not cheap or expensive.
 

Valuable Features

Helix ALM excels in managing requirements, tracking issues, and test management with flexibility, customization, robust traceability, and integration capabilities.
Nutanix Cloud Manager simplifies infrastructure management with user-friendly features, automation, and cost governance for cloud and on-premise operations.
It's easy to control resources and govern the resources, and it frees up support to focus on other things without having to help developers.
I would approximate the cost savings to be in the 20% to 25% range since we can optimize our resources and avoid the need to purchase more hardware or reuse resources in the infrastructure from one implementation.
The importance of faster outcomes for their environment is significant; for example, when I delivered the Disaster Recovery solution, we included automation for auto-configuration of VMs and resizing of VMs, which replaced many tasks that were previously done manually.
 

Categories and Ranking

Helix ALM
Ranking in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
18th
Average Rating
6.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Application Requirements Management (6th), Test Management Tools (14th)
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)
Ranking in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
105
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (1st), Virtualization Management Tools (2nd), Cloud Cost Management (2nd), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites category, the mindshare of Helix ALM is 0.8%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is 0.3%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
 

Featured Reviews

Harold Pogue - PeerSpot reviewer
Helix ALM is insanely configurable, with great traceability, and flexibility
The most valuable features of Helix ALM are traceability and flexibility. One thing that distinguishes Helix ALM from other solutions is that it is a hybrid cloud model. Helix ALM is not a full cloud implementation like Valerian, Jira Jama, or Atlassian, where we just go through a browser onto the cloud. In the case of Helix, we have code that goes on our computer and then that communicates to the cloud. We have the backup and distribution capability of the cloud, but we have code executing on our machine, and we don't need to worry much about speed and internet lag problems.
Vipin Kumar Sha - PeerSpot reviewer
Stands out with auto-scaling, auto-scheduled snapshots, and single-vendor support
The areas that could be improved include the Nutanix Move tool, which is presently used for migrating VMs from one setup to a private cloud. It can be improved by adding some other setups, such as Citrix Xen, Red Hat Virtualization, and Red Hat OpenShift. There are many other cloud products that need to be added to the Nutanix Move tool, which would be really helpful for us in India, where we use different setups such as Red Hat Virtualization, OpenShift, Citrix XenCenter, Hyper-V, and VMware. The second suggestion is regarding the different clusters in Nutanix. Although Nutanix is very user-friendly and codeless, the individual clusters cannot be logged in at the same time via Prism, which takes time and can be wasteful. We have multiple clusters within Nutanix. Prism serves as the central management interface, allowing us to access these different clusters. When we log in through Prism, it takes a certain amount of time—sometimes several minutes—to log into each individual cluster. This can be quite time-consuming. Another important issue, especially for our customers in India and other data centers, is the need for proper VM tool reports. We require detailed information such as VM names, IP addresses, CPU assignments, and CPU utilization. This data should be exported in an Excel format. For example, if a virtual machine has four CPUs, the Excel report should include entries like: VM name, IP address, 4 CPUs, and current utilization (e.g., if 2 out of 4 CPUs are being used). We also need to capture other parameters, such as memory and disk configurations (e.g., hard disk 1 and hard disk 2), whether any ISOs are mounted (like CD/DVDs), USB drives attached to the VM, storage types (like NVM), and any RDMs associated with the VM. By extracting all this information into an Excel file, we would create a handy inventory for all the engineers. This detailed VM list would be extremely beneficial for cloud engineers and managers working with Nutanix.
report
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Healthcare Company
19%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Educational Organization
8%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
33%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Government
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Helix ALM?
I rate the product price a nine on a one to ten scale, where one is low price and ten is high price.
What needs improvement with Helix ALM?
Helix ALM should be able to integrate with other systems better. Helix ALM should also have an easier user interface, and the solution needs to have drag-and-drop tools included in it.
Which set of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) features do you find to be the most useful?
For me, the features related to cost savings are the best part of NCM. Of course, the whole product is worth using and when it comes to cloud management, there is a reason why it is favored by so m...
Are the setup process and further maintenance of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) difficult?
When I came into my current organization, NCM was already set up. According to the team that dealt with it, the product was fairly easy to set up. Compared to other products, our IT rates are set u...
Is Nutanix Cloud Manager’s Intelligent Operations feature effective?
Yes, this is a highly effective feature and the rebranding only made things better as they introduced more improvements. You can benefit from Zero coding task automation Automated optimization Tic...
 

Also Known As

TestTrack
Nutanix Cloud Manager Intelligent Operations, Nutanix Cloud Manager Self-Service, Nutanix Cloud Management Cost Governance, Nutanix Cloud Manager Security Central
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Invision, Softing, CACI, Hunter Industries, ITSO, Itron, EEC, Database Consultants Australia, VirtualScopics, March Networks, WorkForce
JetBlue, International Speedway Corporation, Volkswagen SAIC, Brighton and Hove City Council, Foresters Financial, Janus International Group, Cloud Comrade, Serco
Find out what your peers are saying about Helix ALM vs. Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.