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Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs Orca Security comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 8, 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 Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)
7th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
100
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (4th), Cloud Management (2nd), Virtualization Management Tools (4th), Cloud Cost Management (2nd)
Orca Security
Ranking in Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)
9th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (13th), Container Security (16th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (10th), API Security (4th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (11th), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (6th), Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) category, the mindshare of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is 0.4%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Orca Security is 7.7%, down from 10.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)
 

Featured Reviews

Vipin Kumar Sha - PeerSpot reviewer
Stands out with auto-scaling, auto-scheduled snapshots, and single-vendor support
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. The second suggestion is regarding the different clusters in Nutanix. Although Nutanix is very user-friendly and codeless, the individual clusters cannot be logged in at the same time via Prism, which takes time and can be wasteful. We have multiple clusters within Nutanix. Prism serves as the central management interface, allowing us to access these different clusters. When we log in through Prism, it takes a certain amount of time—sometimes several minutes—to log into each individual cluster. This can be quite time-consuming. Another important issue, especially for our customers in India and other data centers, is the need for proper VM tool reports. We require detailed information such as VM names, IP addresses, CPU assignments, and CPU utilization. This data should be exported in an Excel format. For example, if a virtual machine has four CPUs, the Excel report should include entries like: VM name, IP address, 4 CPUs, and current utilization (e.g., if 2 out of 4 CPUs are being used). We also need to capture other parameters, such as memory and disk configurations (e.g., hard disk 1 and hard disk 2), whether any ISOs are mounted (like CD/DVDs), USB drives attached to the VM, storage types (like NVM), and any RDMs associated with the VM. By extracting all this information into an Excel file, we would create a handy inventory for all the engineers. This detailed VM list would be extremely beneficial for cloud engineers and managers working with Nutanix.
CHINTAN MEHTA - PeerSpot reviewer
Consolidating security tools with comprehensive cloud visibility
The documentation for Orca Security could be improved. The compliance framework also needs enhancements, especially concerning integrations with other tools like ServiceNow's vulnerability modules, which are not as mature as expected. It should also increase its capability to ingest data from other security tools like CloudSight for endpoint detection and provide real-time monitoring.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution’s ease of use is mind-blowing."
"It is a scalable solution."
"NCM gives us greater insight into our infrastructure because we have more reporting and alert capabilities. We can get a breakdown of VM efficiency and determine which ones are over-provisioned, constrained, or using up too many resources in an instance."
"Nutanix Cloud Manager is easier for technicians than VMware, so fewer people are needed to do the same tasks. It's critical because if we do things faster, we do them at a lower price, especially if we use fewer human resources."
"The most valuable features of Nutanix Prism Pro are the user interface is quite easy to understand and it provides easy management for administrators."
"Nutanix Prism Pro and Nutanix AOS have greatly improved our organization by providing a reliable and simple solution that requires little to no maintenance in order to successfully offer a stable service to our clientele, as opposed to the competitors."
"Its resilience and performance are excellent."
"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."
"With its Cloud Security Posture Management capability, we have the ability to read across all of our cloud-based environments, which includes AWS and Azure. We have visibility into those environments. Seeing all vulnerabilities and configurations is really powerful for us, but ultimately, the ability to use the API to query across the fleet to understand what is the current state, what is the patch level, which ones are potentially exposed for a new CVE that just came out is even more valuable. It allows us to gather really specific intelligence through simple queries."
"There are so many valuable features that I could list, but one that I appreciate is the PCI DSS compliance report."
"The product itself is really good. It helped us streamline the way we access our servers."
"It's for protection. It's an agentless tool. We don't need to install anything at a customer's premises. We can just scan the entire assets in the cloud."
"I find Orca Security's CIEM feature invaluable, as it focuses on entitlement and posture management, identifying assets with older OS versions, and asset misconfiguration."
"I find Orca Security's CIEM feature invaluable, as it focuses on entitlement and posture management, identifying assets with older OS versions, and asset misconfiguration."
"Orca Security has patented technologies. It's an agentless solution, so you don't need to install an agent. Instead, it contacts your account provider and fetches metadata, eliminating the need for snapshots or reserved space to copy client infrastructure."
"The best features of Orca Security include its ability to perform a lot of security controls without requiring any installation of agents, making it very easy to set up."
 

Cons

"Nowadays, we see systems breaking a lot. I know that the current features of Nutanix Cloud Manager help to monitor the container world and modern applications, but as more microservices are getting deployed, more micro-management of those services needs to be done."
"One thing that comes directly to mind is how they manage version control. I would love to see Calm create a built-in source control feature, one that we could tie into a repository and it would self-manage changes in versions. All the version control is built within Calm right now. I would love to see that integrated with an external repository and make it easy to tie it into GitHub or Git repositories."
"The solution's virtualization could be even better."
"We would like to be able to provision virtual machines at the computing level, as that would give us an added value against the competition."
"The stability of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The interoperability with different clouds can be better so that one can even integrate the infrastructure of different clouds. They can interoperate better with other clouds because currently, you have to buy Nutanix resources in the cloud."
"The flow and management capabilities of the platform could be improved to handle additional features and functionalities, especially since the company currently uses some other solutions from a competitor."
"There is room for improvement in making the solution easier still. If you don't know Calm, it's not so easy to use... It is a really good solution for doing simple tasks, but it's not a good solution for complex tasks."
"Another improvement would be that, in addition to focusing on endpoint compliance, they would focus on general compliance."
"They can expand a little bit in anti-malware detection. While we have pretty good confidence that it's going to detect some of the static malware, some of the detections are heuristics. There could be a growth in the library from where they're pulling their information, but we don't get a lot of those alerts based on the design of our products. In general, that might be an area that needs to be filled since they offer it as a service within it."
"In the future, I'd like to see Orca work better with third-party vendors. Specifically, being able to provide sanitized results from third parties."
"The interface can be a bit cranky and sometimes takes a lot of time to load."
"I would like to see an option to do security checks on a code level. This is possible because they have access to all of the code running in the cloud provider, and combining their site-scanning solution with that would be a nice add-on."
"The timeout settings could be made more customizable, as sometimes if I leave the office early, it's still running unless manually turned off."
"Orca Security can be improved as there should be some kind of central pane of glass. Similar to how cloud management works, Orca Security should have something comparable."
"The documentation for Orca Security could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The five-year term for NCM's license cost and support was around five million."
"Nutanix Cloud Manager's pricing is fair at the moment."
"Compared to Dell HCI, Nutanix is a lot cheaper."
"Prism Pro is a bit more upfront. It costs a bit more for some of the features that you get. We have four clusters, and two of them don't have Prism Pro because they weren't even available with what we bought. Those two clusters also run well, but they don't have all the features."
"It is an expensive solution, but one has to make the trade-off between what you want to achieve and what you are willing to pay."
"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 my opinion, Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is expensive."
"It's always difficult to discuss Nutanix pricing because the cost varies wildly depending on the customer and the region. Desktop virtualization is simpler because there is a defined scope. You can tell the Nutanix salesperson how many users you have. In a more traditional environment, it's always best to have NCM for monitoring because you'd be crazy not to."
"While it's competitive with Palo Alto Prisma, I think Orca's list price is very high. I would advise Orca to lower it because, at that price, I might consider alternatives like Wiz, which also offers agentless services."
"Its license is a bit expensive."
"Orca Security charges are based on cloud workloads. So, it's based on workloads. If we look at one feature, it might be expensive."
"The price is a bit expensive for smaller organizations."
"I think their pricing model is aligned with market demand. Of course, Orca could probably better align their pricing model with the needs of smaller businesses as well as some larger-scale enterprises with millions of assets. But in all fairness, I think the Orca sales team has been accommodating and ensured that we're happy with the pricing."
"Orca is very competitive when compared to the alternatives and is not the most expensive in the market, that's for sure."
"Orca Security is cheaper compared to other solutions in the same space."
"The most expensive solution is Palo Alto. They claim to be very robust. The next most expensive is Wiz, followed by Orca and all the rest."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
34%
Educational Organization
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
5%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 Orca Security?
It's for protection. It's an agentless tool. We don't need to install anything at a customer's premises. We can just scan the entire assets in the cloud.
What needs improvement with Orca Security?
Orca Security can be improved as there should be some kind of central pane of glass. Similar to how cloud management works, Orca Security should have something comparable. They have something right...
What is your primary use case for Orca Security?
Our clients use Orca Security for various reasons. We implement it for the clients.
 

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
BeyondTrust, Postman, Digital Turbine, Solarisbank, Lemonade, C6 Bank, Docebo, Vercel, and Vivino
Find out what your peers are saying about Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs. Orca Security and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
859,129 professionals have used our research since 2012.