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Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs Nutanix Prism comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 13, 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
6.9
Organizations reported improved efficiency, reduced costs, faster deployment, and enhanced resource management with Nutanix Cloud Manager's streamlined integration and scalability.
Sentiment score
6.9
Nutanix Prism enhances management efficiency, reduces costs, and provides ROI through staff reduction and streamlined operations despite higher initial costs.
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.
Initially, the CapEx was higher than VMware's, but considering the operational cost over time, it has been beneficial.
You will get 60% ROI with Nutanix Prism on-premises.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
8.1
Nutanix Cloud Manager's support is praised for quick response, knowledgeable staff, proactive issue detection, and effective communication.
Sentiment score
7.7
Nutanix Prism support is praised for prompt, knowledgeable service, high reliability, and effective resolution of complex 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.
Even when a node goes down, it doesn't impact our infrastructure because it gets load-balanced between the available nodes.
Basic means standard business hours support, Production means 24/7, Mission Critical means faster SLA with technical account managers connectivity, and Ultimate means full white-glove support with a dedicated team.
Nutanix support is excellent, and their response time is extremely fast.
If there is any hardware issue with HP or Dell, customers don't need to raise tickets with the hardware OEM. They can raise tickets on the Nutanix portal itself.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
Nutanix Cloud Manager offers scalable, automated cluster management for businesses of all sizes, ensuring performance and seamless expansion.
Sentiment score
7.8
Nutanix Prism is highly praised for its effortless scalability, supporting large environments with minimal downtime and straightforward expansion.
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) scales well.
The key aspects include mix-match hardware and hyper-converged infrastructure, combining compute, storage, and network in a single platform.
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) has not had any issues scaling with the growing needs of my company.
Nutanix Prism is completely scalable; you can add nodes and disks without using downtime, allowing for easy scaling.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Nutanix Cloud Manager is highly stable, reliable, and resilient, with minor issues quickly resolved, ensuring seamless user experiences.
Sentiment score
7.8
Nutanix Prism is highly reliable and stable, with quick bug resolutions, minor update challenges, and excellent user satisfaction.
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.
The entire Nutanix solution is stable.
I have not experienced any downtimes, crashes, or performance issues with Nutanix Prism.
 

Room For Improvement

Nutanix Cloud Manager needs better VM organization, simplified pricing, improved interface, and enhanced features for smoother cloud integration.
Nutanix Prism needs interface, pricing, and automation improvements, better third-party integration, enhanced analytics, migration ease, and licensing flexibility.
It supports different hardware types without vendor lock-in, which is an advantage over Azure Stack HCI, which may only work with specific vendors such as HP or Dell.
Our primary reason for choosing Nutanix was for mission-critical applications and Kubernetes.
Quick resolution of disconnection issues and errors in plugins is crucial.
The presales and marketing team should inform clients about resource requirements, such as RAM used by CVM, to help manage expectations.
Regarding Nutanix Prism's single pane overview, the limitation is that you cannot troubleshoot all errors from Prism Central; you sometimes need to log into the CLI to change settings such as the IP address of the CVM in the AHV.
 

Setup Cost

Nutanix Cloud Manager offers flexible pricing, delivering ROI through management consolidation, reduced overhead, and scalable, negotiable plans.
Enterprise buyers find Nutanix Prism's pricing variable, appreciating features but noting high costs and complex licensing 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.
While VMware costs depend on ESXi hypervisor pricing, the AHV hypervisor for Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is free.
At first, the cost seemed heavy, but over time, its cost-effectiveness became evident.
I hear that Nutanix Prism is more expensive than others, but as a technical person, I don't know the details about the pricing aspect.
 

Valuable Features

Nutanix Cloud Manager offers centralized upgrades, simple interface, automation, and manages on-premises and cloud environments for efficient resource management.
Nutanix Prism excels with unified management, intuitive interface, automation, and analytics, enhancing IT operations and infrastructure management.
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.
Nutanix Prism is completely scalable; you can add nodes and disks without downtime, allowing for easy scaling.
One of the most useful features is the disaster recovery setup, which includes two clusters, one for our production server and another for our recovery site.
 

Categories and Ranking

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)
Ranking in Virtualization Management Tools
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
110
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (3rd), Cloud Management (1st), Cloud Cost Management (2nd), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (7th)
Nutanix Prism
Ranking in Virtualization Management Tools
5th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
63
Ranking in other categories
Data Center Infrastructure Management (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Virtualization Management Tools category, the mindshare of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is 8.9%, down from 9.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nutanix Prism is 13.0%, down from 14.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Virtualization Management Tools Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)8.9%
Nutanix Prism13.0%
Other78.1%
Virtualization Management Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Phani Venkata Sai BKD - PeerSpot reviewer
Manages hybrid infrastructure seamlessly with flexible cluster scaling and comprehensive oversight
The most important aspect of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is that it helps us manage the infrastructure as a hyperconverged infrastructure in HCI mode. If I have different physical servers, I can map them into a cluster and manage the storage together. It provides flexibility to make use of storage in a clustered format instead of using it in an individual storage endpoint. We have the flexibility to have Nutanix-based licensing based on the core model, instead of having a specific cost on the cluster. The costing on a core model gives customers flexibility to add multiple cores to a single physical host and adjust the infrastructure accordingly, and we can scale up the cluster as needed. While other cloud providers, AWS or Azure, are mostly into cloud-based solutions, and Azure has introduced Azure Stack HCI for managing on-premises infrastructure, Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) provides flexibility from day one. We can manage both on-premises and Azure solutions using a single pane of glass, eliminating the need to navigate different windows or screens. It provides a comprehensive view of the infrastructure and highlights specific areas through alerts, giving us good visibility of infrastructure conditions.
Khurram Hussain - PeerSpot reviewer
Efficiently manage virtual machines with robust disaster recovery
Nutanix Prism is mainly used for our daily operations, similar to VMware. Despite the lack of extraordinary features, it efficiently manages our daily operations now that we are managing our VMs. One of the most useful features is the disaster recovery setup, which includes two clusters, one for our production server and another for our recovery site.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
30%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
Government
5%
Computer Software Company
26%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise23
Large Enterprise64
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business25
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise28
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What do you like most about Nutanix Prism?
Nutanix Prism offers web scaling, which facilitates easy scaling.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Nutanix Prism?
At first, the cost seemed heavy, but over time, its cost-effectiveness became evident.
What needs improvement with Nutanix Prism?
I have not noticed any downsides or drawbacks in Nutanix Prism. However, if you want to manage multiple clusters, you need Prism Center. The Prism Element and Prism Center versions are available. P...
 

Also Known As

Nutanix Cloud Manager Intelligent Operations, Nutanix Cloud Manager Self-Service, Nutanix Cloud Management Cost Governance, Nutanix Cloud Manager Security Central
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

JetBlue, International Speedway Corporation, Volkswagen SAIC, Brighton and Hove City Council, Foresters Financial, Janus International Group, Cloud Comrade, Serco
JetBlue, International Speedway Corporation, SAIC Volkswagen
Find out what your peers are saying about Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs. Nutanix Prism and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
872,655 professionals have used our research since 2012.