OpenNebula vs Red Hat CloudForms comparison

OpenNebula and Red Hat are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. OpenNebula is ranked #9 with an average rating of 7.0, while Red Hat is ranked #33. OpenNebula holds a 2.5% mindshare in CM, compared to Red Hat’s 1.9% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of OpenNebula users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 66% of Red Hat users who would recommend it.

OpenNebula

Read 15 OpenNebula reviews

2,805 Views
2,665 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Red Hat CloudForms

Read 10 Red Hat CloudForms reviews

1,091 Views
1,080 Comparison Views

66% willing to recommend

OpenNebula

Red Hat CloudForms

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Red Hat CloudForms and OpenNebula are competing tools in the cloud management platform space. Red Hat CloudForms is favored for its pricing satisfaction and support, while OpenNebula is often preferred for its robust feature set.

Features: Red Hat CloudForms excels in hybrid cloud management, automation capabilities, and offers advanced monitoring and reporting, whereas OpenNebula impresses with integrated multi-cloud orchestration, a focus on scalability, and simplicity.

Room for Improvement: Red Hat CloudForms can improve by simplifying its initial setup processes, enhancing ease of use, and expanding flexibility in integration. OpenNebula could benefit from enhanced support options, expanding its feature documentation, and increased focus on advanced analytics.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: OpenNebula is known for straightforward deployment and efficient, tailored customer service. Red Hat CloudForms offers comprehensive support but may require more complex initial setup, which can be beneficial for enterprises needing deep customization.

Pricing and ROI: Red Hat CloudForms generally presents a higher initial setup cost with significant ROI through its extensive feature suite, while OpenNebula offers a cost-effective entry with lower scripting overhead and operational expenses, delivering faster ROI due to streamlined deployment.

To learn more, read our detailed OpenNebula vs. Red Hat CloudForms Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

OpenNebula vs. Red Hat CloudForms

March 2026

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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

OpenNebula

Ranking in Cloud Management

9th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Red Hat CloudForms

Ranking in Cloud Management

33rd

Average Rating

6.4

Reviews Sentiment

5.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of OpenNebula is 2.5%, down from 8.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat CloudForms is 1.9%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
OpenNebula	2.5%
Red Hat CloudForms	1.9%
Other	95.6%

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

FOURES Jean-Philippe

Products Manager at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Reliable, simple to manage, and offers great technical support

The support of VXLAN fits with our network management. Thanks to this we can propose mixed solutions using virtual resources on OpenNebula and bare metal servers hosted in our facilities linked to each other on the sale network. This use case is very useful when some applications need bare metal power (Kubernetes workers, huge databases, AI models computations, et cetera). The cluster management is very useful for splitting our different clusters (mutual vs dedicated). We can manage deployments and capacity planning without pain. The API is also really simple and it helped us to develop the Terraform provider to manage OpenNebula like any other cloud infrastructure.

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Ilhami Arikan

Cloud Services Automation Technologies Manager at Garanti Teknoloji

A stable solution that helps to provision servers

We use the solution to provision servers. I am impressed with the product's ability to create dynamic catalogs. The solution's provisioning engine needs to be improved. I would rate the solution's stability an eight out of ten. I would rate the product's scalability a seven out of ten and…

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."

"What's best about OpenNebula that people like is that it's easy to deploy. It's also easy to manage. It's interesting because people choose OpenNebula over other solutions because of the ease of management."

"The service feature appeals most to us, thus it is the most valuable."

"With a single click, we could set things up and initiate them."

"It's easy to integrate OpenNebula with our IT systems."

"OpenNebula is easy to deploy and manage compared to other solutions like OpenStack."

"The live migration feature has been great and is something we use very often."

More OpenNebula pros

"Red Hat CloudForms is stable once it is up and running."

"I am impressed with the product's reports."

"The multi-tenancy feature has been very helpful for our clients. It has been working fine and seamlessly for them. Its interface is also very simplified, and it is also an open and easy-to-scale solution."

"The solution is compatible and integrates with various infrastructures or providers."

"They are a very mature product."

"The most valuable features of Red Hat CloudForms are the benefit of the collective functionality."

"The optimization of the solution is quite interesting."

"I am impressed with the product's ability to create dynamic catalogs."

More Red Hat CloudForms pros

Cons

"The UI, monitoring, and alerting could benefit from further improvements."

"They have been saying for the past two and a half years that they would develop a feature to hot-add RAM and CPU, but it does not work."

"There are no payment gateways in OpenNebula."

"There are small things that are hard. For example, making sure that it is going to be installable on public clouds."

"They should add more features like object storage."

"As with all enterprise software licensing, the pricing is not intuitive and must be negotiated; grandfathered contracts are better than anything offered today."

"The storage feature that they have is a bit confusing."

"Most of the competitors are offering some sort of billing software to transform their installation to work as a small-sized public cloud, but those offerings from OpenNebula are still missing."

More OpenNebula cons

"Our clients had challenges or issues with the updates. Its updates should be better managed. They should provide quicker and more stable updates. Its stability can also be better. We initially faced ease-of-use and compatibility issues while integrating it. We had a lot of compatibility issues with other products. Our clients are concerned about whether it is under IBM or it is still Red Hat. Clients are not very clear about the support, and they're not really happy with it. Currently, they're getting support from Red Hat, but going forward, they're not really clear about what would be the life cycle of the product, which is a concern for them."

"The solution is still quite immature."

"Because the solution needs to integrate with other products that surround it, there is a lot of configuration required, and this can be quite complex. It's not as easy as it is with, for example, VMware."

"All of the areas of Red Hat CloudForms could improve. It doesn't do half of the things that it says it can do out of the box. It takes configuration to make any of it work, which is not uncommon for solutions similar to this. However, it is frustrating."

"Red Hat CloudForms could improve by allowing more customization of reports. We have to do a lot of coding to accomplish what we want. Additionally, the compatibility with the multi-cloud could improve. The latter versions of the solution removed Google support and the cost comparison between other clouds was high."

"It is difficult to create a complete dashboard that includes all the needed features or catalogs."

"I have issues with the solution's permissions. Unlike VMware, the product doesn't allow folder-type permissions."

"The solution's provisioning engine needs to be improved."

More Red Hat CloudForms cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We use the Community Edition, rather than the Enterprise Edition."

"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."

"OpenNebula gives good value for money."

"The solution is open source so is free."

"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."

"It is definitely cheaper than VMware. Everything is included. There is no challenge there."

"Red Hat CloudForms is a bit expensive."

"Red Hat CloudForms has a subscript-based pricing model. The cost is approximately $20,000 annually which allows you to use as many users as you want."

"The price of Red Hat CloudForms was not competitive, it was expensive."

"The product's licensing is based on the number of servers."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

10%

University

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Marketing Services Firm

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	7
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	3

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Large Enterprise	7

Questions from the Community

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...

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What is your primary use case for OpenNebula?

Previously, we were using VMware, but recently, we've started using OpenNebula for cloud management. As a big cloud provider, it helps give customers increased control over their clusters. We use L...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering OpenNebula?

I recommend it, especially if you need a management interface for a small to medium private cloud. I would rate OpenNebula an eight out of ten.

See all answers

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Comparisons

CloudStack vs OpenNebula

Compared 24% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs OpenNebula

Compared 9% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs OpenNebula

Compared 6% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs OpenNebula

Compared 6% of the time

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VMware Aria Automation vs Red Hat CloudForms

Compared 7% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs Red Hat CloudForms

Compared 5% of the time

CloudCheckr vs Red Hat CloudForms

Compared 5% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs Red Hat CloudForms

Compared 5% of the time

Cisco Intersight vs Red Hat CloudForms

Compared 3% of the time

More Red Hat CloudForms Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

OpenNebula

March 2026

Download OpenNebula product report

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat CloudForms

March 2026

Download Red Hat CloudForms product report

Overview

OpenNebula provides the most simple but feature-rich and flexible solution for the comprehensive management of virtualized data centers to enable private, public and hybrid IaaS clouds. OpenNebula interoperability makes cloud an evolution by leveraging existing IT assets, protecting your investments, and avoiding vendor lock-in.

OpenNebula is a turnkey enterprise-ready solution that includes all the features needed to provide an on-premises (private) cloud offering, and to offer public cloud services.

OpenNebula

Manage container, virtual, private, and public cloud infrastructures

Managing a complex, hybrid IT environment can require multiple management tools, redundant policy implementations, and extra staff to handle the operations. Red Hat® CloudForms simplifies IT, providing unified management and operations in a hybrid environment.

As your IT infrastructure progresses from traditional virtualization toward an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model, CloudForms evolves, protecting your investments and providing consistent user experience and functionality.

Red Hat

Sample Customers

Akamai, BBC, Fermilab, Terradue, Surf Sara, Produban, Netways, ESA, China Mobile, BlackBerry, Deloitte, Fuze, Telefonica, Trivago, Nokia, Encore Tech, Beeks.

Cox Automotive, Penn State, FICO, G-ABLE, Seneca College, ITandTEL, The Paris Lodron University of Salzburg (PLUS), MyRepublic, Macquarie, The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, CBTS, Network Data Solutions (NDS)

Buyer's Guide

OpenNebula vs. Red Hat CloudForms

March 2026

Free Report: OpenNebula vs. Red Hat CloudForms

Find out what your peers are saying about OpenNebula vs. Red Hat CloudForms and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.

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