IBM Spectrum Computing vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

IBM and VMware are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. IBM is ranked #27 with an average rating of 8.0, while VMware is ranked #1 with an average rating of 7.8. IBM holds a 1.1% mindshare in CM, compared to VMware’s 11.8% mindshare. Additionally, 57% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of VMware users who would recommend it.

IBM Spectrum Computing

Read 8 IBM Spectrum Computing reviews

348 Views
147 Comparison Views

57% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Automation

Read 170 VMware Aria Automation reviews

4,998 Views
2,182 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

IBM Spectrum Computing

VMware Aria Automation

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

IBM Spectrum Computing and VMware Aria Automation are competing in the domain of cloud management and automation. While IBM Spectrum Computing is favored for pricing and support, VMware Aria Automation is distinguished by its extensive features, providing value aligning with its higher costs.

Features: IBM Spectrum Computing offers powerful scalability and workload management, optimizing resource allocation in varied settings. Additionally, it provides effective high-performance computing solutions and integration capabilities with OpenStack. VMware Aria Automation excels in automation capabilities, integrating seamlessly with various platforms, and its blueprint functionality is intuitive and enhances operational efficiency.

Room for Improvement: IBM Spectrum Computing's complexity in setup could be simplified, as could its integration with other vendor tools. The system might also benefit from more user-friendly interfaces. VMware Aria Automation can enhance its cost transparency and simplification of initial configuration processes. Improvements in support for non-VMware ecosystems would increase its competitiveness.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Aria Automation provides a streamlined deployment with comprehensive documentation and responsive customer service, making setup and maintenance efficient. IBM Spectrum Computing focuses on post-deployment support, ensuring system optimization. Although deployment is generally smooth, enhancing initial setup assistance could improve user experience.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Spectrum Computing is known for its cost-effectiveness and dependable ROI, attracting budget-conscious enterprises. VMware Aria Automation, with its superior features, justifies its higher initial investment through significant ROI, due to enhanced automation and integration capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Spectrum Computing vs. VMware Aria Automation Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Computing vs. VMware Aria Automation

June 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

IBM Spectrum Computing

Ranking in Cloud Management

27th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Hadoop (6th)

VMware Aria Automation

Ranking in Cloud Management

1st

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

170

Ranking in other categories

Configuration Management (7th), Network Automation (3rd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (17th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (4th)

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Spectrum Computing is 1.1%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 11.8%, up from 11.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

Avra Jyoti Ghosh

Data QualityTechnical Architect at Mindtree

One of the best tools in the data management and services area

I mainly used Spectrum Computing for data management, governance, quality, and ETL activity Spectrum Computing's best features are its speed, robustness, and data processing and analysis. Spectrum Computing is lagging behind other products, most likely because it hasn't been shifted to the…

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Le Quang Long

Cloud Engineer at BIDV - Ngân hàng TMCP Đầu tư & Phát triển Việt Nam

Significantly streamlined operations with good automation that helps with simplifying workflows

It helps me build a big catalog and provide it to my end users. It helps us automate the workflow of creating many VMs and the TensorFlow key method. I do not meet many people to operate it live beforehand. It operates for both of my products, but as a product, it is complicated to integrate and automate with other products.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The comparison was challenging, but the IBM Spectrum Scale offered a balanced solution. Our engineers rated itsanalytics capabilities equally high as Pure Storage. For workload management, Spectrum Computing provided effective solutions that met our needs. Workload management is part of a complete solution that uses different tools. There were the cloud and HPC parts; within HPC, there were parts like liquid cooling, simple computing, storage, and orchestration. The orchestration team handled the workload management."

"The most valuable aspect of the product is the policy driving resource management, to optimize the computing across data centers."

"IBM's ability to cluster compute resources is impressive, with built-in support for scenarios like VR and active-active configurations,"

"Spectrum Computing's best features are its speed, robustness, and data processing and analysis."

"This solution is working for both VTL and tape."

"The most valuable feature is the backup capability."

"Easy to operate and use."

"We are satisfied with the technical support, we have no issues."

"The ability to programmatically describe the desired state of a single, or an entire fleet of servers, on-premises, and in a cloud environment."

"I used the technical support during upgrades. They came onsite and are very technical. They are very good"

"To manage when VM's aren't being used, we have it set up so that it will auto-destroy them after a certain amount of time, obviously with permission from the user who owns it."

"The big benefit is it will spin up VMs quickly so it would take about 13 to 15 minutes to deploy a virtual machine. Whereas, if I were doing it based on an email from users who are requesting VMs, it might take time for me to hear back from them. This could be anywhere from an hour to a day."

"We haven't hit any limits yet, scalability is good."

"The automation function itself and how to group and publish those groupings is quite easy for customers to learn with Aria."

"VMware Aria Automation supports integration with ServiceNow, Kubernetes, and other tools. It is cloud-agnostic, making it a stronger platform than Ansible."

"Among the valuable features are the ease and speed of creating the VMs. Originally, we provisioned them manually and it would take us two days to do the provisioning... but with the automation, we are able to provision a VM with the click of a button, within seconds. It cut down on the time as well as cut down on the expense and employee cost in provisioning."

More VMware Aria Automation pros

Cons

"We have not been able to use deduplication."

"SMB storage and HPC is not compatible and it should be supported by IBM Spectrum Computing."

"IBM's sales and support structure can be challenging."

"In Pakistan, IBM's disadvantage is the lack of OEM support and presence."

"Lack of sufficient documentation, particularly in Spanish."

"We'd like to see some AI model training for machine learning."

"Spectrum Computing is lagging behind other products, most likely because it hasn't been shifted to the cloud."

"This solution is no longer managing tapes correctly."

"The stability is why I rated it a seven and not higher. There were several cases where we had to restart some services because it wasn't working correctly anymore. People cannot extend their machine or replay their machine. There is no alert to say that there is a problem and that we should stop the service. The monitoring system is not very good."

"I would like to see better integration capabilities. Maybe if they could develop libraries within Aria Automation for simpler integration with other third-party solutions, instead of just basic integration."

"I would also like to see them streamline the install. It's split between Windows and Linux appliances, and it would be easier if it was all appliances. I think they're going that way."

"vRealize Automation on the back-end is still a little complicated. It has a lot of moving pieces, simplifying that from a pure infrastructure point of view would be a good thing. I would then like to have more out-of-the-box functionality and integrations with VMware components."

"As a product, it is complicated to integrate and automate with other products."

"I have not found this solution to be user-friendly. It's really complicated. The demo shows that you can automate anything but they only show basic scenarios. If you want to do anything more complicated than that, it becomes very complicated to set up."

"SaltStack's features are minimal."

"The setup is difficult. You need a technical person to help you set it up."

More VMware Aria Automation cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This solution is expensive."

"Spectrum Computing is one of the most expensive products on the market."

"It is an open-source product."

"It is an expensive product. After VMware's acquisition by Broadcom, there was a rise in the price of VMware Aria Automation."

"The cost of the solution is reasonable for us. Although it is relatively high, we prioritize stability and integration over cost."

"It made the provisioning of the virtual machines easier and faster. We can react more quickly to customers' demands."

"We do plan to see ROI with any new implementation of new technologies being implemented within our environment."

"A simplified version for small businesses would be good."

"I would rate the pricing a ten out of ten, with ten being very expensive."

"The solution is pretty expensive but provides good workload management."

More VMware Aria Automation pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

41%

Computer Software Company

Real Estate/Law Firm

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about IBM Spectrum Computing?

Easy to operate and use.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Spectrum Computing?

It is expensive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Computing?

IBM's sales and support structure can be challenging. To work on an IBM deal, you often need to involve multiple specialists, each knowledgeable about only part of the product, rather than having a...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

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 ...

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Comparisons

Flexera Cloud Management Platform (CMP) vs IBM Spectrum Computing

Compared 33% of the time

Cloudera Data Platform vs IBM Spectrum Computing

Compared 27% of the time

Morpheus vs IBM Spectrum Computing

Compared 25% of the time

More IBM Spectrum Computing Competitors

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 15% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 15% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 11% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 9% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 6% of the time

More VMware Aria Automation Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Hadoop

June 2025

Download IBM Spectrum Computing product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Automation

May 2025

Download VMware Aria Automation product report

Also Known As

IBM Platform Computing

VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack

Overview

IBM Spectrum Computing uses intelligent workload and policy-driven resource management to optimize resources across the data center, on premises and in the cloud. Now up to 150X faster and scalable to over 160,000 cores, IBM provides you with the latest advances in software-defined infrastructure to help you unleash the power of your distributed mission-critical high performance computing (HPC), analytics and big data applications as well as a new generation open source frameworks such as Hadoop and Spark.

IBM

VMware Aria Automation is a cloud management tool that allows companies to simplify their cloud experience through a modern automation platform. The solution is designed to deliver self-service clouds, multi-cloud automation with governance, and DevOps-based security and infrastructure management. It helps organizations improve IT agility, efficiency, and productivity through its various features.

VMware Aria Automation has multiple use cases that include the following:

Self-service multi-cloud: VMware Aria Automation can be used to deliver consistent self-service consumption. Another use case in this area is for delivering infrastructure across VMware Clouds as well as public clouds.
Multi-cloud governance: The solution can be used to manage cost, performance, networking, configuration, and security at scale for multi-cloud environments. VMware Aria Automation offers all this with an everything-as-code approach.
DevOps for infrastructure: Through VMware Aria Automation, companies can enable a powerful infrastructure as code platform with support for iterative development and infrastructure pipelining.
Kubernetes automation: Users can utilize VMware Aria Automation to automate the management of Kubernetes clusters and namespaces with support for vSphere with Tanzu.
Security operations: VMware Aria Automation facilitates event-driven automation to deliver full-service IT system compliance enforcement and vulnerability remediation.

VMware Aria Automation Features

VMware Aria Automation has various features that allow users to easily perform operations. Some of the solution's capacities include:

VMware Cloud agnostic template: This feature allows organizations to use a single cloud template to deploy with Infrastructure as a Code. Deployment options include VMware Cloud as well as major public cloud platforms such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and more.
Extensibility and customization: This VMware Aria Automation feature allows users to get full extensibility and customization. This can be achieved through Aria Automation Orchestrator, Action-Based Extensibility (ABX), and built-in integrations with common third-party tools.
Self-service multi-cloud: This feature enables users to request and provision infrastructure resources. It can be done across clouds using a unified and consistent Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) consumption layer, idempotent REST API, and self-service catalog.
Centralized policies and governance: VMware Aria Automation offers a feature for users to manage multiple clouds with templatized cloud and policy definition, automated remediation, and cloud environment visibility.
Configuration management: Through this feature of the product, day 1 and 2 control can be achieved for virtualized and cloud environments. This can be done with intuitive configuration automation, compliance enforcement, and vulnerability remediation.
Infrastructure pipelining: Through this feature, organizations can access user-friendly release automation pipelines. They can be specifically tailored for CI/CD in infrastructure use cases.

VMware Aria Automation Benefits

VMware Aria Automation offers its users various benefits. Some of the biggest advantages that the solution brings to companies that utilize it include:

VMware Aria Automation provides faster time to market for companies through offloading manual tasks with advanced workflows and agile templating.
The solution offers high levels of security and control.
This product is suitable for beginners, as it offers a self-service consumption experience for users.
VMware Aria Automation accelerates innovation through Infrastructure as Code and DevOps principles.
The product provides users with flexibility, as it is compatible with the most popular public cloud solutions.
The solution offers fast deployment because of all natively integrated functions.

Reviews from Real Users

Awais J., CTO/CEO at a tech services company, likes VMware Aria Automation because it saves a lot of time, provides more visibility, and has extensive automation capabilities.

An IT consultant at a government rates VMware Aria Automation highly because the product gives you flexibility to analyze and consume resources.

VMware

Sample Customers

London South Bank University, Transvalor, Infiniti Red Bull Racing, Genomic

Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Computing vs. VMware Aria Automation

June 2025

Free Report: IBM Spectrum Computing vs. VMware Aria Automation

Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Spectrum Computing vs. VMware Aria Automation and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.

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