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OpenNebula vs Spacelift 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

OpenNebula
Ranking in Cloud Management
19th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Spacelift
Ranking in Cloud Management
9th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
AI Software Development (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of OpenNebula is 1.7%, down from 6.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spacelift is 1.2%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Spacelift1.2%
OpenNebula1.7%
Other97.1%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

FOURES Jean-Philippe - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
G Srivastava - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Cloud Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Automation of cloud infrastructure has transformed how our team manages Terraform workflows
Spacelift has other features beyond Terraform, including Ansible, Pulumi, Terragrunt, and it also helps with Kubernetes, although we haven't used it for the other tools. We have only used it for Terraform Infrastructure as Code, and it has helped us significantly. One standout feature compared to Terraform Cloud is the ability to apply policies. For example, we want to restrict engineers in our team from building servers with a particular SKU, such as in Azure, where we do not want to run servers with a SKU higher than the standard D4sv5. We can apply those policies in Spacelift, and the RBAC and access policies features are really excellent in Spacelift, which we do not find in any of the other competitor tools. The pricing is also competitive compared to Terraform Cloud. The access policy features allow us to assign specific policies since we have three environments in our company: Dev, QA, and Prod. We assign policies so that anyone can run code from Dev and QA servers, but we assign a policy for specific people, such as managers, to run code in Prod. This is a very good feature from Spacelift that we have implemented for the access policy. Spacelift has positively impacted our organization as a CI/CD tool for application deployment and development. Although we use other CI/CD tools like Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions, there wasn't a specific tool for Terraform Infrastructure as Code until Spacelift came along. It allows us to easily configure our servers and build a number of them on our cloud. While other CI/CD tools have started to include configuration features, Spacelift offers many other benefits that make it an excellent tool to use.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"OpenNebula is easy to deploy and manage compared to other solutions like OpenStack."
"OpenNebula is lightweight, stable, and easy to customize."
"The most valuable feature of OpenNebula is that it scales very well."
"The service feature appeals most to us, thus it is the most valuable."
"It's easy to integrate OpenNebula with our IT systems."
"The live migration feature has been great and is something we use very often."
"I'll definitely recommend OpenNebula because it's an open-source solution that's effortless to set up, and the total cost of ownership is low."
"Spacelift has positively impacted my organization in significant ways in terms of building infrastructure as code."
"Spacelift has positively impacted my organization by reducing manpower, as it reduced the efforts of resources in the team, where previously a job done by two or three engineers can now be easily managed by one engineer using Spacelift."
"SpaceLift impacts my organization positively by giving more agility to the teams when they are deploying, allowing us to manage the AWS resources using Spacelift, so our cloud organization improves after this implementation."
"I appreciate that I just have to connect to my AWS account with my credentials, and Spacelift handles the rest."
"Spacelift is like an extension of Terraform, where everything can be visibly managed."
"Spacelift has positively impacted our organization by speeding up our deployments and easing a lot of pain with infrastructure deployments, especially because a lot of teams are working simultaneously on the same code base using the same configs."
"Spacelift has positively impacted my organization by making it very easy to manage the different modules with a very clear interface."
"One key feature is the Spacelift policies, which we can attach to deployments to ensure compliance with our standards."
 

Cons

"The UI, monitoring, and alerting could benefit from further improvements."
"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."
"There are small things that are hard. For example, making sure that it is going to be installable on public clouds."
"Hosting platforms are limited so the deployment process needs improvement."
"The web interface could be better. It's not very difficult to use, but there's room for enhancement."
"As with all enterprise software licensing, the pricing is not intuitive and must be negotiated; grandfathered contracts are better than anything offered today."
"It should have a simple REST API like most other tools. It's the industry standard format. An XML-RPC API gives you an XML document that you have to convert and then do something with that. REST API endpoint provides outputs in a JSON document. I would also like to see support for user data or heat templates, which OpenStack offers, but OpenNebula doesn't have this yet."
"The storage feature that they have is a bit confusing."
"Spacelift could be improved by implementing some of the many AI-based tools available that support a variety of tools like Pulumi, CloudFormation, OpenTofu, and Terraform."
"The self-hosted version does not have a lot of features compared to the SaaS version, such as cloud integrations for Azure and GCP."
"Spacelift currently lacks features that can help with complex type deployments and coordination for major deployments."
"The learning curve for new users getting started with Spacelift is very steep."
"If I had to think of one area where Spacelift could improve, it would be the graph where we orchestrate, as the graph looks very complicated and complex, so perhaps it could be simplified."
"Perhaps the learning curve could be a bit steep if someone is completely new to Spacelift and only has experience with plain Terraform."
"Pricing could be a little lower to make it a very robust tool, and it can improve areas in scalability and integrate some open-source tools."
"I chose a rating of six out of ten because I think multiple other tools similar to Spacelift exist, for example, many automation tools such as Jenkins or other cloud-native tools that perform efficiently compared to Spacelift."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We use the Community Edition, rather than the Enterprise Edition."
"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."
"OpenNebula gives good value for money."
"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."
"It is a bit expensive product."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
University
7%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Educational Organization
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Spacelift?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was that licensing was somewhat unclear when HashiCorp changed their own licensing.
What needs improvement with Spacelift?
It would be nice to have out-of-the-box A/B testing with Spacelift because we still use some custom features for that. Out-of-the-box A/B testing is the main thing I would like to add about the nee...
What is your primary use case for Spacelift?
We manage a lot of AWS deployments with Spacelift configs, so we have a main use case for it. We also use it for versioning and spinning up new environments. Recently we used Spacelift for deployin...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Akamai, BBC, Fermilab, Terradue, Surf Sara, Produban, Netways, ESA, China Mobile, BlackBerry, Deloitte, Fuze, Telefonica, Trivago, Nokia, Encore Tech, Beeks.
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Find out what your peers are saying about OpenNebula vs. Spacelift and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
902,988 professionals have used our research since 2012.