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Morpheus vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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

Morpheus
Ranking in Cloud Management
8th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Aria Automation
Ranking in Cloud Management
2nd
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 July 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Morpheus is 7.9%, up from 5.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 11.1%, down from 11.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

MarkWittling - PeerSpot reviewer
Seamless upgrades, stable, and easy to deploy
We've been facing some challenges with Morpheus due to its design for public cloud usage. Their main focus is on allowing customers to deploy virtual machines to Azure, Google Cloud, AWS (and other private or public clouds they support). They provide features such as guidance and cost optimization. However, we're using Morpheus for on-prem v center clouds, which is probably not the user base norm. We are very pleased with the dashboard and multi-tenancy capabilities, but there are some challenges when deploying and configuring the more complex Telco workloads that have advanced networking. The integration of the NSX-T needs to be refactored. As I have been working on the API, there are some issues with the workflow engine in the automation that need to be addressed. For example, I need to be able to flag a task as fail or continue on fail if something goes wrong in the workflow. Currently, if one of the tasks in a twenty-task workflow fails, the remaining nineteen are not run, which can be a problem if one of those tasks is critical, such as when patching or doing security tasks. Thus, workflow enhancements and improvements are necessary. Morpheus desires the ability to control the full life cycle of a virtual machine from beginning to end. We have many vendors who want to establish virtual machines, but we want users to access them through Morpheus. We want the VMs to be provisioned from an external system and then be managed in Morpheus so users can only perform limited activities without being able to delete or provision them. We are currently working on resolving this issue, which I refer to as reconciliation. I have asked the developers to implement multi-tenancy, where each tenant has their own landing page at a unique URL. However, we are using groups, not tenants, so there are features we can do with tenants that we cannot do with groups. Specifically, I am trying to get the developers to add notifications support so that when a group member logs in to the Morpheus portal, they can be informed of their VMs' maintenance schedule at a specific time. This is a feature I have requested them to add. We are generally pleased with Morpheus, however, due to some restraints and restrictions, we are utilizing it differently than the majority of its users. This creates some difficulty.
Le Quang Long - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Morpheus is an intuitive solution that is very easy to use."
"It supports many features, and it also supports some of the automation that Cloudify supports. So, in addition to just giving you basic platform management—such as the ability to deploy virtual machines and have multitenancy to log in and perform all of your basic platform management tasks—it also supports automation. You can, for example, spin up three virtual machines, and you can have each virtual machine configure each other. You can do service chaining with it. You can run scripts in Dash and Python, or you can use tools like Ansible, Puppet, or Chef. All of this is just built into the tool. It is a very powerful tool."
"The most valuable feature for me was cost optimization."
"Provides a good automation platform."
"The multi-cloud integrations and the DevOps and operational integrations are the most valuable. Morpheus platform is a centralized set to manage different clouds and your on-premise platforms. It does a very good job of what it is designed to do. It is very good in terms of features. It is extremely stable and easy to install. It is also very scalable. Their support is also extremely good."
"The user interface of the application is exceptional."
"The most valuable feature of Morpheus is its strong integration with vSphere Cloud."
"Morpheus provides a very easy and one-click solution to scaling up and down."
"The most valuable feature is being able to deploy a virtual machine from a low level. We can automate everything including network configuration, firewall configuration, storage, storage attachment, OS deployment, middleware, and so forth."
"It allows some of the tenants to self-provision their machines, so they don't have to wait for us to create the machine for them."
"The automation part is valuable, especially where vRA integrates with vRO, because it reduces the amount of effort we have to make."
"A lot of its DevOps for infrastructure capabilities improve reliability. Much effort was put in by some customers, like a large automobile manufacturer, a large telecom, and two large banks, to achieve a certain level of capabilities in this space. These DevOps for infrastructure capabilities have saved time for developers. 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. The quicker that deployments happen, the faster that they can do their product release cycles."
"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 have also found it to be intuitive and user-friendly. It's something that, because it has the workflows that are very easily graphed out - you can follow what it's doing, it's very picturesque, you can see what it's doing easily - it's something that you can hand over to a user who is not familiar with it and they can wrap their brain around it pretty quickly."
"We monitor the configurations against CIS standards. We run CIS benchmarks and maintain configurations with higher CIS values for each server."
"It is very stable, especially for high availability features."
 

Cons

"Morpheus is working hard on creating an integration framework due for release in Q2 2021 which will allow clients to create their own interfaces and integrations into any 3rd party product that has a full-function API. Morpheus is also heavily focussed on enhancing the container management side to compete head-to-head with Openshift and CloudForms in Q3 2021."
"The solution's pricing and customization need to improve."
"The product has become overly complex. The biggest problem is that we find a bug, they fix the bug, but then another one pops up. We can never really deliver on the vision we had using Morpheus."
"The tool could support virtual network functions better. It is really good at doing enterprise-type of things, but one of the things on which we're working with them is loading very complex virtual machines with it, such as Juniper SRX routers. It needs to support more complex virtualized resources a little bit better. Aside from that, it is a terrific tool. We really like it."
"I faced a few problems while deploying."
"We had to put in much effort ourselves since Morpheus's support wasn't always available to help us."
"The service is limited and somewhat lacking."
"There is room for enhancement in integrating Morpheus with other solutions."
"The connectivity between VMs is easy, but they can be made more effective if we have a single proof point where we can configure all the biggest data at a single point."
"I would like to see more integration to do things like DR, from a court perspective. Today, for us, SRM doesn't scale because each of our customers has a local vCenter environment as well as the vCenter in our environment. So we can't get SRM to scale to the point to which we need. From an integration perspective, DR inside of that would be good."
"The stability needs a lot of work. The troubleshooting component of vRealize is a pain. The administration and the upgrades are not up to the mark. If they were able to improve on that, that would be the best thing and would make it much easier to run it in the enterprise."
"I don't think it's intuitive or user-friendly. I think it's a good tool. Any automation tool, these days, the learning curve is kind of high. You're teaching sysadmins who never developed stuff. Maybe they modified a little bit of code and now you tell them, "Hey, here's the tool, use it." But you have to know a little bit of DevOps. So you have to train them how to do the scripting."
"There is certainly room for improvement with some of the little things I was talking about, like either better managing of the upgrade process, or just making the infrastructure deployment a little bit easier. It feels like all of the pieces have been automated on one level or another, like with the PowerShell scripts, doing all the IS, Windows boxes preparation. They just need to get it to be more end-to-end."
"I would like to see a simpler way of provisioning it. As is, we can automate the provisioning of a VM, however, when it comes to the external IPs, that is outside of VMware. But that has to be automated as well. If there was a way for us to have the virtual machines connect to switches that are external to VMware, that would be great. That way, it would handle the entire workflow from creation and provisioning of a VM to the connectivity to the external IP addresses which allow our customers to have access to the VM. Currently, that IP configuration has to be done manually."
"The upgrade experience is horrible. It's not straightforward, there are a lot of failures, a lot of support interactions. It's not something that we are able to pull off ourselves. I've been with vRA since it was termed vCSA. We've gone through multiple rounds, and it has never been easy."
"It would be better if VMware would provide API documentation for developers and customers on the Internet."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Initially, the license may seem like a good deal, but as we grow, it becomes costly."
"Licensing is on an annual basis, and it is upfront for the year. There is no extra cost unless you want additional support or specific deployment packs."
"The solution is cheaper if you have less number of servers, but it becomes very expensive for a large number of servers."
"Morpheus doesn't directly support cost optimization, but its API integration can facilitate resource optimization. It doesn't dynamically optimize resources like an aeronautic system would; it operates step by step."
"The license is based on the number of virtual machines that Morpheus is managing. So, it is a pay-as-you-grow model."
"The cost of the solution is reasonable for us. Although it is relatively high, we prioritize stability and integration over cost."
"I would rate it high because, compared to other solutions, VMware’s pricing is quite expensive. VMware products have become significantly more costly in recent years, leading to higher costs."
"Customers say this solution is costlier compared to its competitors."
"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."
"They should provide one license for all the sub-products."
"There is confusion between licensing levels. There are three different licensed versions of vRealize Automation, and there are different things which can happen in each of them."
"This is an expensive product and the high price is starting to become an issue for us."
"We have seen significant ROI. We used to have physical servers, it took 90 days to get a server, order it, buy it, and get it in. We have it down to 10 minutes, building a server with virtualization, and now that's too slow. So, we let the customer do it at their speed. Therefore, it is pretty much up in a couple of minutes and they have a server."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Morpheus?
The most beneficial features for us were the API integrations with various cloud vendors like Nutanix, VMware, AWS, Azure, and GCP. It saved us the effort of doing that work ourselves.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Morpheus?
We've been a Morpheus customer since the early days. I know what they're trying to sell now, and you'd really need a strong use case to justify the cost.
What needs improvement with Morpheus?
The product has become overly complex. The biggest problem is that we find a bug, they fix the bug, but then another one pops up. We can never really deliver on the vision we had using Morpheus. We...
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

Morpheus Cloud Management Platform, Morpheus CMP
VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Morpheus CMP, mcdonalds, blackrock, HSBC, astrazeneca, arris, WGU, GBG, pennstate, beyondtrust
Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
Find out what your peers are saying about Morpheus vs. VMware Aria Automation and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
863,901 professionals have used our research since 2012.