OpenNebula vs Spacelift comparison

OpenNebula and Spacelift are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. OpenNebula is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.5, while Spacelift is ranked #19 with an average rating of 8.0. OpenNebula holds a 7.1% mindshare in CM, compared to Spacelift’s 0.6% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of OpenNebula users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Spacelift users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

OpenNebula and Spacelift compete in the cloud infrastructure management domain. OpenNebula holds an advantage in terms of cost-effectiveness and community support, whereas Spacelift is superior in automation and integration capabilities.

Features: OpenNebula provides simplicity in virtualization management, supporting a wide range of hypervisors and offering seamless onboarding. Its open-source nature and community support are valuable. Spacelift excels with advanced automation features, continuous integration and delivery tools, and a focus on infrastructure as code, making it appealing for modern DevOps environments.

Room for Improvement: OpenNebula could enhance integration with more modern DevOps tools and expand its feature set to compete with proprietary solutions. Improving user interface design might increase usability. Spacelift could lower its pricing to be more competitive and simplify initial setup processes for new users. Providing more comprehensive documentation can assist enterprises encountering complex setups.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: OpenNebula offers straightforward deployment with strong community-driven support ideal for organizations seeking open-source solutions. Spacelift, on the other hand, provides a scalable deployment model with dedicated customer service aimed at complex enterprise needs, emphasizing personalized assistance.

Pricing and ROI: OpenNebula appeals to cost-sensitive organizations with its low setup costs and flexible expansion options, providing significant ROI by saving on licensing fees. Spacelift's higher pricing reflects its premium features and focuses on long-term value for companies prioritizing scalability and modernization, potentially offering substantial ROI for those needing advanced cloud management capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed OpenNebula vs. Spacelift Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

OpenNebula vs. Spacelift

June 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 853,960 peers since 2012

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

IBM Turbonomic

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 5.6%, down from 6.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenNebula is 7.1%, up from 6.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spacelift is 0.6%, up from 0.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

Dan Ambrose

Infrastructure Engineer 4 at Hyland

Helps visibility, bridges the data gap, and frees up time

We use IBM Turbonomic in a hybrid cloud environment. Although it supports multi-cloud capabilities, we currently operate in a single-cloud setting. Turbonomic offers visibility into our environment's performance, spanning across applications, underlying infrastructure, and protection resources. The visibility and analytics help to bridge the data gap between disparate IT teams such as applications and infrastructure. This is important for awareness collaboration, cost saving, and helping to design and improve our application. Enhanced visibility and data analytics have contributed to a significant reduction in our mean time to resolve. Tools like Turbonomic provide crucial visualization and insights, empowering us to make data-driven decisions instead of relying on assumptions as we did before. This newfound transparency translates to a massive improvement, going from complete darkness to having a clear 100 percent view of the situation. Although our applications are not optimized for the cloud we have seen some improvement in response time. IBM Turbonomic empowers us to achieve more with fewer people thanks to automation. Previously, customers frequently contacted us requesting resource increases to resolve issues. Now, we have a tool that allows us to objectively assess their needs, leading to a deeper understanding of our applications. This solution also generates significant cost savings in the cloud and optimizes hardware utilization within our data centers. Its AI algorithm intelligently allocates servers on hosts, maximizing efficiency without compromising performance. By fine-tuning resource allocation without causing performance bottlenecks, Turbonomic extends the lifespan of existing hardware, postponing the need for new purchases. This effectively stretches our capital expenditure budget. We started to see the benefits of IBM Turbonomic within the first 60 days. IBM is a fantastic partner. Their tech support has been outstanding, and the product itself is excellent - a very solid offering. By automating resource management with Turbonomic, our engineers are freed up to focus on more strategic initiatives like innovation and ongoing organizational projects. Previously, manually adding resources was a time-consuming process that interrupted workflows. Now, automation handles scaling efficiently, saving us thousands of man-hours and significant costs. It has illuminated the need for SetOps. It has highlighted areas of overspending, and the actions we've taken have demonstrated significant cost savings. IBM Turbonomic has positively impacted our overall application performance. IBM Turbonomic has helped reduce both CAPEX and OPEX. It has also significantly reduced cloud build times.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

Moloko Mokubedi

Junior DevOps Engineer at Kartoza (Pty) Ltd

The GitOps feature automatically picks up changes from my GitHub projects

There are a few areas for improvement. For instance, getting notification webhooks is not easy. In the free version, there's no straightforward way to be notified once a deployment is finished. Spacelift requires creating a notification policy, which involves using the open policies framework. However, this feature is not available on the free plan. Additionally, for each new project, I need to create a new IAM role, which is not optimal. It would be better if I could use a single role for all interactions with my AWS account.

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

"It is a good holistic platform that is easy to use. It works pretty well."

"The feature for optimizing VMs is the most valuable because a number of the agencies have workloads or VMs that are not really being used. Turbonomic enables us to say, 'If you combine these, or if you decide to go with a reserve instance, you will save this much.'"

"I have the ability to automate things similar to the Orchestrator stuff. I do have the ability to have it do some balancing, and if it sees some different performance metrics that I've set not being met, it'll actually move some of my virtual machines from, let's say, one host to another. It is sort of an automation tool that helps me. Basically, I specify the metric, and if I get a certain host or something being over-utilized, it'll automatically move the virtual machines around for me. It basically has to snap into my vCenter and then it can make adjustments and move my virtual machines around. It also has some very nice reporting tools built around virtual machines. It tells you how much storage, memory, or CPU is being used monthly, and then it gives you a very nice way to be able to send out billing structure to your end users who use servers within your environment."

"We have seen a 30% performance improvement overall."

"Turbonomic has helped optimize cloud operations and reduced our cloud costs significantly. Overall, we are at about 40 percent savings, and we spend about three million a year just in Azure. It reduces the size of the VMs, putting them into the right template for usage. People don't realize that you don't have to future-proof a virtual machine in Azure. You just need to build it for today. As the business or service grows, you can scale up or out. About 90 percent of all the costs that we've reduced has been from sizing machines appropriately."

"The notifications saying, "This is a corrective action," even though some of them can be automated, are always welcome to see. They summarize your entire infrastructure and how you can better utilize it. That is the biggest feature."

"We have VM placement in Automated mode and currently have all other metrics in Recommend mode."

"The proactive monitoring of all our open enrollment applications has improved our organization. We have used it to size applications that we are moving to the cloud. Therefore, when we move them out there, we have them appropriately sized. We use it for reporting to current application owners, showing them where they are wasting money. There are easy things to find for an application, e.g., they decommissioned the server, but they never took care of the storage. Without a tool like this, that storage would just sit there forever, with us getting billed for it."

More IBM Turbonomic pros

"I also like the ability to build custom functions. I can define a function where I have two types of views and configure the dependencies. The virtual data centers concept allows me to define users. If a user wants to join certain kinds of machines, the host and the other user won't see them. It gives me the flexibility to define multiple views and data centers in one place."

"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."

"OpenNebula has very good integration with SAP Storage."

"It makes maintenance very easy and stress-free for our teams."

"OpenNebula is lightweight, stable, and easy to customize."

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

"For the entire data center, as a private cloud, I believe that user management, expert management, and the virtual data center is completely magic for the users."

More OpenNebula pros

"Knowing the HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) makes it easier to use without issues."

"One key feature is the Spacelift policies, which we can attach to deployments to ensure compliance with our standards."

"I appreciate that I just have to connect to my AWS account with my credentials, and Spacelift handles the rest."

"A valuable feature of Spacelift is that you can attach labels, and it is a modernized tool for infrastructure deployments. It is pull request-based, and you can see all the Terraform plan and apply logs on the pull request itself, which is not available across any other CI/CD tools."

"Spacelift is like an extension of Terraform, where everything can be visibly managed."

Cons

"If they would educate their customers to understand the latest updates, that would help customers... Also, there are a lot of features that are not available in Turbonomic. For example, PaaS component optimization and automation are still in the development phase."

"I do not like Turbonomic's new licensing model. The previous model was pretty straightforward, whereas the new model incorporates what most of the vendors are doing now with cores and utilization. Our pricing under the new model will go up quite a bit. Before, it was pretty straightforward, easy to understand, and reasonable."

"The planning and costing areas could be a little bit more detailed. When you have more than 2,000 machines, the reports don't work properly. They need to fix it so that the reports work when you use that many virtual machines."

"We're still evaluating the solution, so I don't know enough about what I don't know. They've done a lot over the years. I used Turbonomics six or seven years ago before IBM bought them. They've matured a lot since then."

"It can be more agnostic in terms of the solutions that it provides. It can include some other cost-saving methods for the public cloud and SaaS applications as well."

"Since the introduction of a HTML 5 based interface, our main - but minor - criticism of a less than intuitive operation managers' GUI would be the area of improvement."

"The reporting needs to be improved. It's important for us to know and be able to look back on what happened and why certain decisions were made, and we want to use a custom report for this."

"I would love to see Turbonomic analyze backup data. We have had people in the past put servers into daily full backups with seven-year retention and where the disk size is two terabytes. So, every single day, there is a two terabyte snapshot put into a Blob somewhere. I would love to see Turbonomic say, "Here are all your backups along with the age of them," to help us manage the savings by not having us spend so much on the storage in Azure. That would be huge."

More IBM Turbonomic cons

"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."

"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."

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

"Hosting platforms are limited so the deployment process needs improvement."

"They should add more features like object storage."

"Backup features are only available in the enterprise edition. The community version lacks a good solution for making backups."

"The protocol for clusterization is rough and doesn't work well."

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

More OpenNebula cons

"If you are a small enterprise organization, below 500 people, I would not recommend it."

"In the free version, there's no straightforward way to be notified once a deployment is finished."

"Synchronization can be difficult when using older and newer versions with Kubernetes and HashiCorp."

"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."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I consider the pricing to be high."

"In the last year, Turbonomic has reduced our cloud costs by $94,000."

"The pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."

"Contact the Turbonomic sales team, explain your needs and what you're looking to monitor. They will get a pre-sales SE on the phone and together work up a very accurate quote."

"We see ROI in extended support agreements (ESA) for old software. Migration activities seem to be where Turbonomic has really benefited us the most. It's one click and done. We have new machines ready to go with Turbonomic, which are properly sized instead of somebody sitting there with a spreadsheet and guessing. So, my return on investment would certainly be on currency, from a software and hardware perspective."

"I don't know the current prices, but I like how the licensing is based on the number of instances instead of sockets, clusters, or cores. We have some VMs that are so heavy I can only fit four on one server. It's not cost-effective if we have to pay more for those. When I move around a VM SQL box with 30 cores and a half-terabyte of RAM, I'm not paying for an entire socket and cores where people assume you have at least 10 or 20 VMs on that socket for that pricing."

"The product is fairly priced right now. Given its capabilities, it is excellently priced. We think that the product will become self-funding because we will be able to maximize our resources, which will help us from a capacity perspective. That should save us money in the long run."

"I know there have been some issues with the billing, when the numbers were first proposed, as to how much we would save. There was a huge miscommunication on our part. Turbonomic was led to believe that we could optimize our AWS footprint, because we didn't know we couldn't. So, we were promised savings of $750,000. Then, when we came to implement Turbonomic, the developers in AWS said, "Absolutely not. You're not putting that in our environment. We can't scale down anything because they coded it." Our AWS environment is a legacy environment. It has all these old applications, where all the developers who have made it are no longer with the company. Those applications generate a ton of money for us. So, if one breaks, we are really in trouble and they didn't want to have to deal with an environment that was changing and couldn't be supported. That number went from $750,000 to about $450,000. However, that wasn't Turbonomic's fault."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

"The solution is open source so is free."

"OpenNebula gives good value for money."

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

"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula 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."

"It is a bit expensive product."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Management solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

853,960 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

21%

University

10%

Financial Services Firm

Educational Organization

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Turbonomic?

It offers different scenarios. It provides more capabilities than many other tools available. Typically, its price is...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Turbonomic?

The implementation could be enhanced.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?

We use IBM Turbonomic to automate our cloud operations, including monitoring, consolidating dashboards, and reporting...

See all answers

What do you like most about OpenNebula?

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

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for OpenNebula?

OpenNebula gives good value for money.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Spacelift?

I've never checked the pricing because I enjoy using it for free. Besides the notification feature, I haven't needed ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Spacelift?

There are a few areas for improvement. For instance, getting notification webhooks is not easy. In the free version, ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Spacelift?

I use Spacelift to deploy my applications, particularly AWS applications and infrastructure to my personal AWS account.

See all answers

Comparisons

VMware Aria Operations vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 16% of the time

Azure Cost Management vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 11% of the time

VMware vSphere vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 8% of the time

Cloudability vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 7% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 5% of the time

More IBM Turbonomic Competitors

CloudStack vs OpenNebula

Compared 50% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs OpenNebula

Compared 14% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs OpenNebula

Compared 13% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs OpenNebula

Compared 9% of the time

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs OpenNebula

Compared 3% of the time

More OpenNebula Competitors

env0 vs Spacelift

Compared 72% of the time

Scalr vs Spacelift

Compared 28% of the time

More Spacelift Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Turbonomic

May 2025

Download IBM Turbonomic product report

Buyer's Guide

OpenNebula

May 2025

Download OpenNebula product report

Buyer's Guide

Spacelift

May 2025

Download Spacelift product report

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager

No data available

Interactive Demo

IBM

Demo not available

OpenNebula

Demo not available

Spacelift

Overview

IBM Turbonomic offers automation, planning, and right-sizing recommendations to streamline resource management, improve efficiencies, and optimize costs across virtualized environments and cloud platforms.

IBM Turbonomic is valued for its capability to optimize resource allocation and monitor virtual environments efficiently. It facilitates automated decision-making in VM sizing, load balancing, and cost optimization for both on-premises and cloud deployments. Users can leverage insights for workload placement, ensure peak performance assurance, and effectively right-size across VMware and Azure. The ongoing transition to HTML5 aims to improve visual and navigational ease, while expanded reporting features are anticipated. Opportunities for improved training, documentation, and integrations enhance platform usability and functionality.

What Are the Key Features?

Automation: Streamlines resource allocation and VM management.
Planning Tools: Supports capacity management and growth projections.
Right-Sizing: Optimizes VM configurations for efficient resource use.
Customizable Dashboards: Provides quick insights into environment health.
Reporting Capabilities: Offers valuable data for informed decision-making.
Cloud Integration: Ensures cost-effective resource utilization.

What Benefits Should Be Looked For?

Performance Enhancement: Improves application performance efficiency.
Cost Reduction: Minimizes operational expenses through optimizations.
Infrastructure Efficiency: Maximizes use of IT infrastructure resources.

In finance, IBM Turbonomic aids in maintaining platform efficiency during market fluctuations. Healthcare organizations leverage its capability for resource optimization during high-demand periods to enhance patient care support. Retailers use it for planning in peak seasons, ensuring resources align with fluctuating demand to maintain performance continuity.

IBM

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

Spacelift provides a sophisticated infrastructure management platform with key features such as Drift Detection and Terraform integration, simplifying complex deployments and enhancing user workflows through an intuitive interface.

Spacelift excels in modernizing infrastructure management by integrating smoothly with Terraform, using a pull request-based approach for visibility into logs. It automates change detection using GitOps from GitHub and supports AWS connectivity with credential management. Despite its strengths, some users find room for improvement in supporting smaller enterprises and offering more seamless cloud integrations with self-hosted versions. Handling of HashiCorp Vault secrets and cumbersome notification webhooks may require additional setup effort.

What are the most valuable features?

Drift Detection: Ensures user edits are managed effectively, reducing configuration discrepancies.
Terraform Integration: Seamless compatibility with Terraform for robust infrastructure management.
GitOps: Automates change detection from GitHub, ensuring efficient workflows.
Compliance Policies: Helps maintain infrastructure within regulatory guidelines.
Stack Execution: Enables runs with label attachments for organized operations.

What benefits or ROI can users expect?

Improved Deployment Control: Default plan prompts support structured and controlled deployments.
Streamlined Terraform Management: Enhanced visibility into logs aids in transparent and efficient operations.
Efficient AWS Interactions: Credential management simplifies connections, making operations more fluid.
Dynamic Infrastructure Handling: Supports significant projects by replacing tools like Terraform Enterprise.

In specific industries, Spacelift is primarily utilized for infrastructure management and deployment across platforms like AWS, Azure, and GCP. In banking architecture, it replaces Terraform Enterprise, ensuring secure and efficient operations. Projects like Google Fiber benefit from its capability to import and manage data effectively, engaging users with HashiCorp Language and GitHub for CI/CD integration.

Spacelift

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.

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

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

OpenNebula vs. Spacelift

June 2025

Free Report: OpenNebula vs. Spacelift

Find out what your peers are saying about OpenNebula vs. Spacelift and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

853,960 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our OpenNebula vs. Spacelift report.

See our list of best Cloud Management vendors.

We monitor all Cloud Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.