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Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs OpenNebula 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

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)
Ranking in Cloud Management
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
110
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (3rd), Virtualization Management Tools (2nd), Cloud Cost Management (2nd), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (7th)
OpenNebula
Ranking in Cloud Management
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is 5.2%, down from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenNebula is 5.7%, down from 7.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)5.2%
OpenNebula5.7%
Other89.1%
Cloud Management
 

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.
Thomas Bennett - PeerSpot reviewer
Robust with great CLI tools and UI
I've found OpenNebula upgrades to be more complex than those of some of the competitors and the support to be mediocre. I would also like to see more and better ancillary tools related to OpenNebula, for example, more robust tools for backups, user support, etc. The support knows their software stack reasonably well. However, OpenNebula depends on so many open-source projects that they lack expertise. As with all enterprise software licensing, the pricing is not intuitive and must be negotiated; grandfathered contracts are better than anything offered today.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It saves time since it is a single pane of glass. Our efficiency has increased because of that. We don't have to log into multiple servers when we do upgrades. We can do it on one console. This saves us eight to 10 hours a month. Upgrade activity on servers, which was offloaded to the Nutanix platform, used to take hours on our Legacy platform."
"The product is pretty intuitive and easy to learn."
"The self-service capabilities allow us to orchestrate our deployments without writing code, and they also use artificial intelligence to improve our security posture."
"The unified platform is also very user-friendly and clickable, similar to the Windows environment, making it easier for users to navigate and maintain."
"The administration components are the most useful since, with them, we have been able to win and perform preventive measures in the administration of the hyper-converged Nutanix infrastructure."
"In the beginning, I saw the product's user manual, but when installing and managing it in a practical way, I could see that it is very friendly and reliable at the interface level, at the same time very specific, it shows characteristics of the resources never observed at least by me on similar platforms"
"The most valuable aspect of NCM is its ease of deployment."
"Its resilience and performance are excellent."
"For the entire data center, as a private cloud, I believe that user management, expert management, and the virtual data center is completely magic for the users."
"The ability to use it almost like a public cloud for an organization is a big asset, as it will create a value proposition and can control costs in a great way."
"The live migration feature has been great and is something we use very often."
"The most valuable feature of OpenNebula is that it scales very well."
"The solution provides templates for configurations that can easily be exchanged to VMs."
"OpenNebula has very good integration with SAP Storage."
"The service feature appeals most to us, thus it is the most valuable."
"It's easy to integrate OpenNebula with our IT systems."
 

Cons

"I've had some challenges with the latest versions. I think the resource requirements are a little too high. The resources that Cloud Manager needs begin to account for a larger proportion of the resources the customers buy. In the announcement for the version they released today, they said there would be a lightweight version, so hopefully that has been addressed."
"There have been bugs. We've seen what looked like some storage inefficiencies in reports and, when we went in to look, we found they were false alarms. That was something they corrected on the fly."
"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."
"LCM could be our second favorite feature right up there with One-Click Upgrades if it worked as smoothly but We have had a few issues with LCM but those appear to have been related to OEM hardware vendor not in sync with Nutanix software, not sure how this could be improved in the future."
"In terms of how Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) can be improved, there are some functionalities in the newer releases and upgrades that are not available in Prism Central, which lacks the newest versions."
"The list of blueprints and applications could be more configurable so you see all the fields you need and not just some predefined fields which are not customizable now."
"While there are multiple clouds supported, we want less friction around the ease of delivery. We want the ability to integrate other clouds, unify the accounts."
"When we tried to migrate an application from the old cluster, we couldn't run it on Nutanix’s native hypervisor."
"An area for improvement in OpenNebula is the number of features it has. The solution doesn't have that many cloud features compared to other solutions. You'd say, "Okay, simplicity over a rich feature list?" Some say, "No, I need a big machine or a cloud interface for my customers to manage resources. I don't have to go and do it for them." Some people do it that way, and it works, but I'd like to improve the limited features in OpenNebula."
"There are small things that are hard. For example, making sure that it is going to be installable on public clouds."
"The protocol for clusterization is rough and doesn't work well."
"The web interface could be better. It's not very difficult to use, but there's room for enhancement."
"The storage feature that they have is a bit confusing."
"They should add more features like object storage."
"The front-facing API can be improved to support lots of requests when the platform is huge with lots of virtual resources."
"Backup features are only available in the enterprise edition. The community version lacks a good solution for making backups."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"On a scale from one to ten, if one is a low price and ten is a high price, I rate the solution's pricing a six."
"You will see great value from it if you utilize the self-service part of Calm. The price you pay for it will only give you equal value if you use the self-service part to enable other teams. If you only use it as a deployment mechanism, I think it's rather expensive."
"In Brazil, Nutanix Cloud Manager is not cheap. However, Nutanix offers different options such as long-term contracts."
"Some people say that Nutanix is a bit more expensive. However, when we were looking at Nutanix versus Cisco and NetApp before deploying this solution, the prices were very similar. Being a government entity, we got a bit more of a discount on Nutanix so it was a bit cheaper. The time savings after the fact has been really worth it."
"In my opinion, the pricing is reasonable."
"Nutanix has good central management tools where one guy can manage the entire system. Looking at other systems, I need a guy to manage the servers and another guy to manage the cell network and storage. I need a bigger team for other solutions compared to Nutanix where I can use a small team and reduce my operations to manage the cluster. Sometimes what you hear with this solution is, "It is so expensive," but the cost and benefits that Nutanix has inside are really good."
"Its cost is reasonable. The features are very good."
"The pricing has been reasonable."
"We use the Community Edition, rather than the Enterprise Edition."
"OpenNebula gives good value for money."
"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."
"The solution is open source so is free."
"OpenNebuoa has recently come up with a new subscription model that is economical and a lot of new customers are choosing this as it is an easy subscription model."
"The licensing for OpenNebula used to be free, but now it's no longer free. A customer contacted me asking to move to another provider because of the changes in the licensing terms for OpenNebula. I have no information on how much the OpenNebula license is because the customer pays for it, and I only do the integration."
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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
16%
University
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

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 Business7
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise3
 

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 OpenNebula?
The live migration feature has been great and is something we use very often.
What needs improvement with OpenNebula?
The web interface could be better. It's not very difficult to use, but there's room for enhancement. Another area for improvement is the integration with hardware to manage the lower layer of the n...
 

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
Akamai, BBC, Fermilab, Terradue, Surf Sara, Produban, Netways, ESA, China Mobile, BlackBerry, Deloitte, Fuze, Telefonica, Trivago, Nokia, Encore Tech, Beeks.
Find out what your peers are saying about Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs. OpenNebula and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
872,706 professionals have used our research since 2012.