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Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Cloud Director 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.0
Nutanix Cloud Manager enhances efficiency and reliability, saving costs by optimizing workloads and reducing hardware and operational tasks.
Sentiment score
6.5
VMware Cloud Director offers varied ROI, balancing fast efficiency gains with high costs and mixed customer support experiences.
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.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
8.2
Nutanix Cloud Manager's support is praised for quick response, knowledgeable staff, proactive solutions, and exceptional customer service worldwide.
Sentiment score
6.9
VMware Cloud Director's service is praised for helpfulness and documentation, though technical support experiences mixed reviews regarding efficiency.
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.
We have easier access to high-level engineers compared to VMware, where you have to navigate multiple channels for support.
Around 70-80% of issues can be easily troubleshot by public documentation and KB articles.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Nutanix Cloud Manager offers scalable, flexible, and automated management of diverse IT environments, enhancing performance and integration capabilities.
Sentiment score
7.4
VMware Cloud Director offers robust scalability for diverse cloud needs, praised for rapid provisioning and high user capacity.
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.
VMware Cloud Director is quite scalable; I would rate it nine out of ten.
I would rate scalability for VMware Cloud Director as 8, especially from the on-premises environment.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Nutanix Cloud Manager is praised for stability with minimal downtime, self-maintenance, and reliability, suitable for critical applications.
Sentiment score
7.7
VMware Cloud Director is reliable and resilient, though some integration issues exist; users generally report high stability and performance.
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.
There are occasional problems when trying to increase the parameters of a virtual machine.
 

Room For Improvement

Nutanix Cloud Manager needs enhanced cloud platform support, improved efficiency, streamlined management, and better third-party integration and usability.
VMware Cloud Director needs better third-party integration, enhanced features, improved GUI, stable components, and clearer documentation.
Our primary reason for choosing Nutanix was for mission-critical applications and Kubernetes.
Quick resolution of disconnection issues and errors in plugins is crucial.
If there are licensing errors, for example, being told I have 96 cores licensed but Nutanix Flow not licensed despite having assigned units, it complicates things unnecessarily.
Cross-cloud migration refers to if a customer has something on Azure, wanting to bring it up on VMware or maybe from VMware to AWS, vice versa.
The console methods make management difficult until VMware tools are installed.
 

Setup Cost

Nutanix Cloud Manager provides flexible pricing and cost-effectiveness, appealing to diverse budgets, with discounts often in government sectors.
VMware Cloud Director is costly but offers unique features and flexibility, with potential discounts mitigating expenses for some users.
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.
The pricing for VMware Cloud Director is more or less reasonable, especially when compared to Cisco, which is significantly more expensive.
From a pricing perspective, I would rate VMware Cloud Director as 7 because being the available feature set, Broadcom always offered more price compared to another product.
 

Valuable Features

Nutanix Cloud Manager offers a simple interface, robust automation, centralized management, and enhanced data protection for efficient IT operations.
VMware Cloud Director provides secure, scalable cloud management with multi-tenancy, automation, and seamless integration for diverse enterprise needs.
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.
A notable feature is the Independent Disk, which allows detaching a virtual drive from one virtual machine and attaching it to another, enabling more flexibility in operations.
The most valuable feature of VMware Cloud Director is segregating the underlying infrastructure for the end user.
 

Categories and Ranking

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)
Ranking in Cloud Management
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
107
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (4th), Virtualization Management Tools (2nd), Cloud Cost Management (2nd), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (7th)
VMware Cloud Director
Ranking in Cloud Management
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
69
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is 5.3%, down from 6.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 5.6%, down from 7.6% 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)5.3%
VMware Cloud Director5.6%
Other89.1%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Kumargaurav Kadam - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
KuldeepSingh4 - PeerSpot reviewer
Experienced users benefit from resource isolation and valuable self-service portal while seeing potential in enhanced infrastructure visibility
VMware is not going further with VMware Cloud Director. They are integrating the VMware Cloud Director feature with Aria Automation only for the upcoming versions, primarily with the VCF 9, and slowly they are integrating some of the parts they have already integrated, and they might not continue with VMware Cloud Director in the future. They can make it more granular to ensure hardware-level segregation, the underlying infrastructure level of segregation for the end user, and a separate security boundary where users can access the end-to-end layer. End-to-end layer means my software layer along with the hardware layer. If they want to do a certain level of troubleshooting primarily on the ESXi part, that is what I feel is lacking for now because for an end user accessing the SSP, the underlying infrastructure is a kind of black box for them. For VMware Cloud Director, it can be more comprehensive if we enable public cloud integration as well. In today's date, customers are adopting a multi-cloud environment where VMware Cloud Director is much feasible to leverage the underlying VMware backend architecture. If VMware Cloud Director could be made to have more integration with the public cloud and do the day one, day two jobs for public cloud interface as well, that would be beneficial. Additionally, I recommend leveraging the VMware Cloud Director layer if a customer has a multi-cloud environment and is planning some cross-cloud migration capability. Cross-cloud migration refers to if a customer has something on Azure, wanting to bring it up on VMware or maybe from VMware to AWS, vice versa. In that case, VMware Cloud Director should provide some cross-cloud migration capability as well.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
32%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Government
5%
Computer Software Company
20%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business23
Midsize Enterprise22
Large Enterprise64
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise36
 

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...
Would you change anything about VMware vCloud Director if you could?
VMware vCloud Director works very well and there are not many things that I would like to see changed. However, a single thing comes to mind when I think of improvements and that is integration. In...
What is the biggest improvement you saw at your company after you started using VMware vCloud Director?
For my company, VMware vCloud Director noticeably increased operational efficiency. When I started working here a few years ago, my organization was using another cloud management tool. We switched...
Is vCloud Director convenient for building applications?
When it comes to building applications, vCloud Director offers you various methods to create cloud-ready ones. For example: Your DevOps team is supported through Infrastructure as Code services w...
 

Also Known As

Nutanix Cloud Manager Intelligent Operations, Nutanix Cloud Manager Self-Service, Nutanix Cloud Management Cost Governance, Nutanix Cloud Manager Security Central
vCloud Director
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

JetBlue, International Speedway Corporation, Volkswagen SAIC, Brighton and Hove City Council, Foresters Financial, Janus International Group, Cloud Comrade, Serco
MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.
Find out what your peers are saying about Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs. VMware Cloud Director and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
867,341 professionals have used our research since 2012.