Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs Orca Security comparison

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 8, 2024

Orca Security and Nutanix Cloud Manager compete in the cloud management space. Nutanix Cloud Manager appears to have an edge with its comprehensive feature set over Orca Security, which receives praise for its cost-effective pricing and support.

Features: Nutanix Cloud Manager is known for its integrated functionalities, versatile feature set, and ability to streamline multiple cloud operations. Orca Security stands out with serverless security, real-time threat detection, and a pricing model that appeals to many users.

Room for Improvement: Nutanix Cloud Manager needs better integration with third-party tools, an enhanced user interface, and improved documentation. Orca Security could enhance support in hybrid environments, provide more detailed reporting, and expand its policy options to address users' requests.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Orca Security offers a straightforward deployment process with responsive customer service. Nutanix Cloud Manager users typically enjoy quick setups but have reported slower responses from customer support at times.

Pricing and ROI: Orca Security is highlighted as cost-effective with significant ROI, while Nutanix Cloud Manager, despite being pricier, offers strong ROI through its robust features. Opinions on cost versus benefits vary, with Nutanix Cloud Manager considered a good investment due to its extensive features.

To learn more, read our detailed Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs. Orca Security Report (Updated: September 2025).

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs. Orca Security

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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

7.3

Number of Reviews

109

Ranking in other categories

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (3rd), Cloud Management (1st), Virtualization Management Tools (2nd), 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

Ranking in other categories

Vulnerability Management (14th), Container Security (18th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (10th), API Security (8th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (11th), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (7th), Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) (3rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) category, the mindshare of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is 0.7%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Orca Security is 6.5%, down from 9.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)	0.7%
Orca Security	6.5%
Other	92.8%

Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)

Featured Reviews

Kumargaurav Kadam

Senior Information Technology Advisor at Dell Technologies

Offers centralized management, cost-effectiveness, and scalability

The licensing is much cheaper than other competitors such as VMware, Cisco UCS, or Microsoft Hyper-V for on-premises data centers. It is very user-friendly and can be managed through Prism Central, a centralized console that allows management of multiple clusters. Due to the recent conversion from VMware to Broadcom, Broadcom has increased their prices five times the existing rates. Most customers are transferring to Nutanix infrastructure because it is scalable, reliable, and performance-focused. The main differentiator from competitors is its cost-effectiveness, and customers have been running and upgrading their technologies for 10 to 15 years. In terms of client satisfaction, performance, upgrades, or protection against ransomware attacks and vulnerabilities, they are regularly releasing patches and upgrading the system. These activities contribute to customer satisfaction and differentiate them from competitors.

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CHINTAN MEHTA

Cloud Security Automation Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"In six years, I can recall just a couple instances, three in total, where we've experienced outages due to hardware or firmware issues during upgrades, but none of these incidents noticeably affected us."

"The 1-Click Centralized Upgrades are really nice. When you go in and want to upgrade your Cluster, you just click a button and everything will upgrade. You don't have to go to each individual server to do the upgrades."

"I find that the support from Nutanix is very good, as I have worked with them many times."

"In terms of features, we have general availability with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), allowing me to manage my Nutanix cluster the same as I could on-premises, and the fact that I can quickly and easily stand up servers is very beneficial."

"Nutanix Cloud Manager is a stable product compared to other vendors."

"Nutanix gives us access to a single pane of glass by which we're able to see everything."

"The executive dashboard is valuable and provides a complete sense of the whole infrastructure."

"Compared to other cloud management solutions such as VMware, Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) offers a single pane of glass where a single service can manage everything, thanks to Prism Central and Prism Element metrics."

More Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) pros

"One of the valuable features of Orca Security is its design and options that allow flexible filtering and user-friendly visualization."

"Orca gives you great visibility into your assets. It shows you the issues and the things that you need to attend to first, by prioritizing things. You can see a lot of information that is not always visible, even to DevOps, to help you know about the machines and their status. It's very easy to see everything in a single dashboard. That makes it a very useful tool."

"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."

"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."

"Orca's dashboard is excellent. My team needs to be able to focus on specific areas for improvement in our cloud environment. And most recently, we've started to get good use out of sonar, the search capabilities, and the alert creation."

"There are so many valuable features that I could list, but one that I appreciate is the PCI DSS compliance report."

"The most valuable feature of Orca Security is the automated scanning tool, user-friendliness, and ease of use."

More Orca Security pros

Cons

"I consider it a very complete platform, for now, I believe it is very good. It could be advanced and more updated over time. I would like to see updates like the creation of basic applications for monitoring through tables, telephones, external updates, sending manuals, or informational brochures by mail to go hand in hand with the platform and its updates."

"Our sister company currently uses an outdated database technology, Sybase, which presents challenges in migrating to a newer database. Despite our efforts to encourage them to move to a different database, the company's 25 years of code and data basic make it difficult to do so. We are open to any level of support or guidance that can help us manage the Sybase database, even if it's not a fully managed solution. Direction on how to scale, improve, and optimize tables and queries within Sybase would be greatly appreciated."

"While using Nutanix, we need to switch off the VM in case we are doing an update. We have to turn off the VM if we are updating the memory or hard disk space. In a normal scenario, we switch off the VM, update it and then update the RAM. Once updated, we need to switch on the machine and wait for the RAM to initialize. The same goes for hard drives as well."

"Initial setup can be complex and requires professional services."

"The solution's virtualization could be even better."

"I would like to see it be able to apply a category to a project, and then have that category applied to all the VMs that are deployed within a project."

"I would appreciate seeing more in-depth features in the Intelligent Operations piece."

"There should be more APIs to integrate with different vendors and to integrate with the existing solutions that we use on-prem."

More Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) cons

"The documentation for Orca Security could be improved."

"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."

"I would like to see better customization options for security frameworks and better integration with reporting tools like Power BI or Grafana dashboards."

"Orca needs improvement in snoozing or dismissing specific alarms."

"The solution could improve by making the dashboards more elaborative and more descriptive."

"It's not all clouds that they are currently onboarded with. For instance, they are not yet with public cloud and many other private clouds."

"A notable limitation with Orca Security is its scanning feature. The automatic scan only runs every 24 hours, and if an alert is remediated within an hour, it still remains until the next scheduled scan."

"Orca Security could improve its ticket creation process. Currently, it allows for creating tickets in only one bucket, which requires monitoring to redirect tickets to the appropriate team."

More Orca Security cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

"I think it can be more cost-effective."

"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."

"Nutanix is really smart to understand that the most important fact is the value to the customer, not the price tag. While you do get some sticker shock sometimes, as soon as you show this and you prove the value, all of a sudden, it looks exceptionally affordable."

"The pricing was very good. We were very pleased with what we were offered by our account manager. Because of that, we expanded Nutanix Cloud Manager, and we hope to expand even more. Right now, we are in Azure, and as we build up more and more within the NCM platform, we hope to expand into AWS as well."

"The solution is expensive."

"Nutanix changes its licensing models frequently, and it is difficult to figure out how and what is included in which package."

More Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) pricing and cost advice

"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."

"It is the cost of the visibility that you get. When you really sit down and think about what do you need to do to secure an environment with a low impact on the business, and you take a look out into the world, I think this tool is well justified around cost."

"Overall, the pricing is reasonable and the discounts have been acceptable."

"Orca Security is cheaper compared to other solutions in the same space."

"The pricing depends on how many assets you have running in your cloud and how many environments you have. If you have a dev environment, test environment, and a production environment then it's really important that you have coverage for all of them."

"Its license is a bit expensive."

"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."

More Orca Security pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) solutions are best for your needs.

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869,202 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

31%

Financial Services Firm

Marketing Services Firm

Government

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	24
Midsize Enterprise	23
Large Enterprise	64

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	9
Midsize Enterprise	7
Large Enterprise	5

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?

I really love the way Orca Security worked. A potential improvement could be additional security features for the two-step authentication, such as fingerprint recognition similar to what Checkpoint...

What is your primary use case for Orca Security?

We used Orca Security ( /products/orca-security-reviews ) for about two to three months until I left the company. The product itself is really good. It helped us streamline the way we access our se...

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Product Reports

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)

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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

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is a cloud management tool that drives consistent governance across private and public clouds for its users. The solution brings simplicity and ease of use to managing and building cloud deployments by providing a unified multicloud management that addresses common cloud adoption challenges.

Nutanix Cloud Manager offers four key value drivers:

Intelligent operations: They include monitoring, insights, and automated remediation.
Self-service and orchestration: This capacity category of the product includes tools for managing application and infrastructure workloads across multicloud environments.
Cost governance: NCM offers cost governance through accurate visibility into public and private cloud metering, cost optimization, and chargeback.
Security central: The solution facilitates users' security operations through alert automations with intelligent analysis and compliance controls.

Nutanix Cloud Manager provides coverage for Nutanix private clouds as well as for VMware's. The solution also supports several popular public cloud providers, including Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). NCM provides additional flexibility for users, as it is also available as a fully managed Software as a Service (SaaS). This product allows companies to benefit from all of Nutanix multicloud self-services, application automation, security compliance, and governance, without depending on Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Features

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) has features in the four key categories already mentioned. Some of the main capacities of the solution include:

Codeless task automation: This Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) feature allows IT teams to build automation and improve productivity with zero coding required.
Automated optimization: This feature detects the performance of VM deviates and raises an anomaly alert automatically without the need for configuration.
Capacity usage and scenario analysis: This feature’s runways enable pay-as-you-grow scaling and improves capacity usage with optimizations.
Self-service provisioning: This feature allows users to publish blueprints directly to end users through Nutanix Marketplace.
Application lifecycle management: Through this NCM feature, users can provision, configure, scale, upgrade, and delete applications across cloud environments as well as provide access to multiple teams at a time.
Hybrid multicloud orchestration: This Nutanix Cloud Manager feature allows users to automate the provisioning of hybrid cloud architectures from a single control plane.
Showback, chargeback, and budgeting: Nutanix Cloud Manager uses this feature to allow users to automatically create cloud consumption reports, define chargeback policies, and set up budget alerts.
Automated right-sizing and intelligent purchases: Through leveraging machine learning (ML) algorithms, users can benefit from the automatic detection of anomalous spending patterns.
Security monitoring and remediation: This feature of Nutanix Cloud Manager allows users to utilize over 250 audits for public clouds and over 500 for Nutanix on-premises.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Benefits

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) provides its users with several benefits. These include:

Nutanix Cloud Manager offers intelligent operations through the automation of operational tasks.
NCM gives users self-service opportunities and centralized role-based IT governance, which allows them the freedom to control their processes better.
Companies can benefit from cost and security governance with intelligent analysis and regulatory compliance.
The product has been made available across all regions in 2022, allowing worldwide access to its services without limitations.
NCM is suitable for beginners, as it offers low to no code actions.
Nutanix Cloud Manager provides real-time security, ensuring the cloud data of companies is protected at all times.

Reviews from Real Users

An IT Operations at an energy/utilities company likes Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) because the product provides visibility, simplifies operations, and saves time and cost.

Drew P., a network systems administrator at Moda Health, rates NCM highly because the product saves man-hours with excellent speed on outcomes and provides a continuous validation process.

Nutanix

Orca Security is the pioneer of agentless cloud security that is trusted by hundreds of enterprises globally. Orca makes cloud security possible for enterprises moving to and scaling in the cloud with its patented SideScanning™ technology and Unified Data Model. The Orca Cloud Security Platform delivers the world's most comprehensive coverage and visibility of risks across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Kubernetes.

At Orca Security, we’re on a mission to make it fast, easy, and cost effective for organizations to address critical cloud security issues so they can operate in the cloud with confidence.

Key Platform Features:

Agentless: Complete, centralized coverage of the entire cloud estate, without the need for installing and configuring agents or layering together multiple siloed tools. Full visibility of cloud misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, workload protection, malware scanning, image scanning, file integrity monitoring and more.
Asset Inventory: Get a complete inventory of all your public cloud assets, including detailed information on installed OSes, software, and applications, as well as data and network assets such as storage buckets, Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), and Security Groups.

Attack Path Analysis: Visualize attack vectors to critical assets or crown jewels. See which assets are susceptible to lateral movement, assume roles, privilege escalation, and more.

Risk Prioritization: Prioritize the 1% of risks that matter the most, based on impact scores. Secure the vulnerabilities and misconfigured targets (critical assets) and eliminate the potential risks residing on the attack paths to those targets.
Cloud Threat Detection: Monitor for malicious activity within your entire cloud estate. Be aware of detected threats, user behavior anomalies and more.

Breach Forensics: Log every change and all activity into a central repository for investigation procedures to confirm or deny entry and compromises within the cloud estate.
Cloud To Dev (Shift Left): Orca’s built-in shift left capabilities enables DevOps to focus more security attention earlier in the CI/CD pipelines. Security teams are able to trace a production risk (misconfiguration or vulnerability) directly to the original source code repository from which it came, even down to the exact line of code that is at the root of the identified risk.
Compliance: Choose from over 60 preconfigured compliance frameworks, cloud security best practices, CIS Benchmarks, or design and build your own compliance framework for fast and continuous reporting.
Security Score: The Orca Security Score is found on Orca’s Risk Dashboard and is updated daily. The overall score is calculated based on performance in the following five categories - Suspicious Activity, IAM, Data at Risk, Vulnerable Assets, and Responsiveness. Since the scores are percentage based and not raw numbers, you can objectively make comparisons to other organizations within your industry or business units of different sizes. In addition to reporting to senior management, the Orca Security Score can help with internal self-monitoring, as a way of measuring risk mitigation efforts, to know where to focus efforts, and track progress.

Orca Security Benefits

Consolidate technologies to reduce costs and complexity:

“The more I can get out of this one solution, the better. I see Orca as the tool where we get all cloud-related security data.” - Joshua Scott, Head of Security and IT | Postman

Avoid costly breaches:

"I look at proactive asset discovery, configuration management, and vulnerability management as being able to find a vulnerability before the bad guys do and being able to deal with it before something exploits it. This is what Orca does for us." - Doug Graham, CSO & CPO | Lionbridge

Increase team productivity and efficiency by focusing on high-value activities and solving the 1% of risks that matter most:

"Orca is unique in that it locates vulnerabilities with precision and delivers tangible, actionable results – without having to sift through all the noise." - Aaron Brown, Senior Cloud Security Engineer | Sisense

Quick Time-to-Value with Immediate ROI:

"Orca told us we could have some visibility within 5 or 10 minutes, and I thought, ‘There’s no way.’ Well, I was wrong. They really did it." - Thomas Hill, CISO | Live Oak Bank

Reduce MTTR and remove operational friction:

“We can’t ask developers things like ‘Did you think about security? When you start a new VM on AWS, can you please let me know so I’m able to scan it? Can you please deploy an agent on that machine for me?’ We need a better way to work. Orca provides that better way by eliminating organizational friction.” - Erwin Geirnaert, Cloud Security Architect | NG Data

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

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs. Orca Security