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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
171
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (6th), Network Automation (3rd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (16th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Morpheus is 7.5%, up from 6.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 9.4%, down from 10.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
VMware Aria Automation9.4%
Morpheus7.5%
Other83.1%
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."
"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."
"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 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."
"The user interface of the application is exceptional."
"Morpheus provides a very easy and one-click solution to scaling up and down."
"Provides a good automation platform."
"The most valuable feature for me was cost optimization."
"It provides velocity both from management and customer perspectives, from ingesting new catalog items, developing new workflows for additional features, and/or allowing customer access to multiple guest OS instances at scale in a shorter time frame."
"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."
"It is possible to completely automatize the creation and removal of a virtual machine."
"Our QA department is able to spin up a new instance of Windows virtual machine and test whatever use case they have, then turn it back down whenever they are done."
"The benefits are that it gives you a heads-up display and dashboard of the way everything's running. The ability to automate around those tasks is really where we get the value."
"We automated many tool deployments with the help of the product, cutting short manual deployments and eliminating the need for human interaction. Its most valuable features include integrating various tools and working with different products using plugins."
"The most valuable feature is the way that it plugs into our monitoring systems, and Infoblox and Puppet."
"The IT support for developers is nice as well because they are able to manage the environment themselves."
 

Cons

"The solution's pricing and customization need to improve."
"We had to put in much effort ourselves since Morpheus's support wasn't always available to help us."
"We've been facing some challenges with Morpheus due to its design for public cloud usage."
"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."
"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 service is limited and somewhat lacking."
"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."
"I faced a few problems while deploying."
"Maintaining the product requires effort and a good understanding of the environment, including how to set up the codes and other configurations. Pricing needs to be improved to improve the customer penetration."
"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 initial setup is very complex because we have a bunch of customization workflows. They were built-in features that we had to program as code with Orchestration."
"One of the features that's a struggle today is some of the public cloud extensibility. Some of the plugins that are native to vRA and vRO, I'd like to see them come out earlier for vRO. I understand that in vRA, the plugins are a little bit more polished because the VRA is the GUI. But we'd like to see them released earlier in vRO, prior to a GUI being released. Azure, for example, is a public cloud provider but we have some instability issues with the plugin in vRO. It's okay for us if we separate the vRA from vRO plugin releases. So I'd like to see some increased stability in some of those public cloud plugins."
"It would be nice if, at the director level, the manager level, there was a pretty graphic. They don't like to see numbers and line items, they want to see graphs and scales and real world pictures. That would support better reporting."
"They should make it a little bit more dynamic, a little bit easier to deal with large-scale AD deployments. They need to make it a little more enterprise-ready. That is the one thing that kills us."
"Upgrades are always a pain."
"It is complex to use for new users. It should have automated tools or drag-and-drop functionality."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is cheaper if you have less number of servers, but it becomes very expensive for a large number of servers."
"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 license is based on the number of virtual machines that Morpheus is managing. So, it is a pay-as-you-grow model."
"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."
"Initially, the license may seem like a good deal, but as we grow, it becomes costly."
"A simplified version for small businesses would be good."
"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."
"It is an expensive product. After VMware's acquisition by Broadcom, there was a rise in the price of VMware Aria Automation."
"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."
"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."
"From the customer perspective, the value was worth it."
"They should provide one license for all the sub-products."
"The solution is pretty expensive but provides good workload management."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
University
6%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business32
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise130
 

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: September 2025.
872,655 professionals have used our research since 2012.