OpenText Network Automation vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

OpenText Network Automation vs. VMware Aria Automation

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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

OpenText Network Automation

Ranking in Network Automation

8th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VMware Aria Automation

Ranking in Network Automation

3rd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

170

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Management (3rd), Configuration Management (7th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (17th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (5th)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Network Automation category, the mindshare of OpenText Network Automation is 2.9%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 9.0%, down from 12.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Automation

Featured Reviews

reviewer1480065

Service Operations Engineer at ATOS

Allows to upload necessary firmware to your device and perform the upgrade

With OpenText Network Automation, firmware can be uploaded for specific devices. If you need to upgrade a device, you can use this tool, though it may not apply to all devices. The software allows you to upload the necessary firmware to your device and perform the upgrade. Additionally, it enables you to check multiple devices for specific configurations and automates the search process and the configuration of multiple devices.

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Le Quang Long

Cloud Engineer at BIDV - Ngân hàng TMCP Đầu tư & Phát triển Việt Nam

Significantly streamlined operations with good automation that helps with simplifying workflows

It helps me build a big catalog and provide it to my end users. It helps us automate the workflow of creating many VMs and the TensorFlow key method. I do not meet many people to operate it live beforehand. It operates for both of my products, but as a product, it is complicated to integrate and automate with other products.

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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

"When compared with SolarWinds, it is more user-friendly, and tasks can be completed more quickly."

"With OpenText Network Automation, firmware can be uploaded for specific devices. If you need to upgrade a device, you can use this tool, though it may not apply to all devices."

"Pushing the network configuration to bulk devices. This saves a considerable amount of time that the engineer spends in pushing the network configuration."

"I want to build automation that is intelligent, part of the fabric of our environment, and is somewhat self-sustaining. I think SaltStack can help me do this."

"Aria Automation gives you the flexibility to deploy tenants with customized blueprints for permissions and policies. Version 7.8 consisted of multiple products, so you had to deploy a lot of virtual machines on one of the servers. Starting from 8.6, VMware consolidated all the components into one Linux appliance. This allows the option to use vRA or DevOps capabilities."

"The blueprint functionality of the product is intuitive and user-friendly. The concept of the blueprints is visual and easy to use."

"The product saves a lot of time and cost for us. It has valuable features for creating a playbook."

"Having an enterprise service catalog and being able to automate various parts of our infrastructure are among the most important components."

"Currently, the primary feature we're using in VMware Aria Automation is its ability to execute tasks quickly. However, we haven't explored other features like workload management or the full stack yet. So it's hard to make comparisons or fully utilize its potential until we expand our usage."

"The most valuable feature that we have is that it's able to deploy several different operating systems, it's able to deploy whatever we want. We can take a template, spin it up, revise it, save it back off, and be able to have that for other departments. We can have one for our Dev team and one for our research team which has some specific requirements. We can keep track of them and deploy things automatically."

"The automation part is valuable, especially where vRA integrates with vRO, because it reduces the amount of effort we have to make."

More VMware Aria Automation pros

Cons

"Compatibility of the devices needs to be enhanced, as it seems to be limited."

"Level one administration task can be defined in Micro Focus Network Automation but it could be more simplified."

"The tool performs slowly."

"The stability on the 6.2 version is very bad. It crashes. VMware tech support knows the IIS component is a bit buggy."

"It's not a smooth upgrade process. For a DTA environment, which is very simple, it is a smooth process, but for our production environment, which is quite enhanced and has a lot of dependencies, it's not easy at all, and it results in a lot of errors... It takes a lot of retries to upgrade which ends up being costly."

"The initial setup was complex because we have a high availability cluster. Especially when it comes to upgrades, we have a lot of downtimes and problems. The upgrade experience has been painful."

"The solution could include more integrations and supportability around the container space."

"We upgraded twice. The last upgrade was a bit problematic."

"The initial setup is complex. There are too many components to integrate, especially when we integrated with different storage types and backup vendors. All the integration made it more complex."

"The upgrade experience is horrible. It's not straightforward, there are a lot of failures, a lot of support interactions. It's not something that we are able to pull off ourselves. I've been with vRA since it was termed vCSA. We've gone through multiple rounds, and it has never been easy."

"I would like to see better integration capabilities. Maybe if they could develop libraries within Aria Automation for simpler integration with other third-party solutions, instead of just basic integration."

More VMware Aria Automation cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing is reasonable, but if you compare it with other network Operation Management tools that are available on the market, it's expensive."

"The solution has helped to increase infrastructure, agility, speed, and provisioning in the time to market."

"This is an expensive product and the high price is starting to become an issue for us."

"It is an expensive product. After VMware's acquisition by Broadcom, there was a rise in the price of VMware Aria Automation."

"The cost of the solution is reasonable for us. Although it is relatively high, we prioritize stability and integration over cost."

"VMware Aria Automation is expensive."

"The solution is pretty expensive but provides good workload management."

"The tool is expensive since it is an enterprise product."

"The pricing for this solution is roughly 20% lower than the competitive products in the market."

More VMware Aria Automation pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Network Automation solutions are best for your needs.

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865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Micro Focus Network Automation?

The tool performs slowly.

What is your primary use case for Micro Focus Network Automation?

There is a team responsible for network automation to check devices for compliance. I connect to the device, make the necessary configurations, and inform the team that certain rules must be remove...

What advice do you have for others considering Micro Focus Network Automation?

When managing a large number of devices, network automation simplifies the process of locating specific configurations. For example, if you need to find a particular configuration, network automati...

What's the difference between VMware vRA (automation) and vROps (operations)?

vROP is a virtualization management solution from VMWare. It is efficient and easy to manage. You can find anything you need from the software interface. It provides complete visibility over applic...

Is there any way to try VMware Aria Automation for free?

When it comes to VMware Aria Automation, you have three choices for free runs: Hands-on Lab (HOL) Advanced lab A free trial I cannot describe in detail the second and third options as my company ...

Which sectors can benefit the most from VMware Aria Automation?

I was looking at VMware Aria Automation case studies recently and I got the impression that three main kinds of companies were using it most often: Social organizations Financial institutions and ...

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs OpenText Network Automation

Comparisons

Compared 24% of the time

SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager vs OpenText Network Automation

Compared 19% of the time

OpenText Network Node Manager vs OpenText Network Automation

Compared 18% of the time

NetBox.dev vs OpenText Network Automation

Compared 15% of the time

Cisco DNA Center vs OpenText Network Automation

Compared 13% of the time

More OpenText Network Automation Competitors

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 16% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 14% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 10% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 8% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 6% of the time

More VMware Aria Automation Competitors

Product Reports

Network Automation

Download OpenText Network Automation product report

VMware Aria Automation

Download VMware Aria Automation product report

Also Known As

Micro Focus Network Automation, HPE Network Automation

VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack

Overview

OpenText Network Automation helps IT organizations drive efficiencies by automating time-consuming manual compliance and network configuration tasks for the complete operational lifecycle of network devices from provisioning to policy-based network configuration management, compliance policy enforcement and reporting, and security administration. OpenText Network Automation also helps increase network stability and uptime by preventing inconsistencies and misconfigurations often created by manual processes. When combined with OpenText Network Node Manager i, it delivers a unique integrated solution that delivers network fault, availability, and performance integrated with change, network configuration, compliance, and automated diagnostics that operates from a shared network topology database.

OpenText

VMware Aria Automation is a cloud management tool that allows companies to simplify their cloud experience through a modern automation platform. The solution is designed to deliver self-service clouds, multi-cloud automation with governance, and DevOps-based security and infrastructure management. It helps organizations improve IT agility, efficiency, and productivity through its various features.

VMware Aria Automation has multiple use cases that include the following:

Self-service multi-cloud: VMware Aria Automation can be used to deliver consistent self-service consumption. Another use case in this area is for delivering infrastructure across VMware Clouds as well as public clouds.
Multi-cloud governance: The solution can be used to manage cost, performance, networking, configuration, and security at scale for multi-cloud environments. VMware Aria Automation offers all this with an everything-as-code approach.
DevOps for infrastructure: Through VMware Aria Automation, companies can enable a powerful infrastructure as code platform with support for iterative development and infrastructure pipelining.
Kubernetes automation: Users can utilize VMware Aria Automation to automate the management of Kubernetes clusters and namespaces with support for vSphere with Tanzu.
Security operations: VMware Aria Automation facilitates event-driven automation to deliver full-service IT system compliance enforcement and vulnerability remediation.

VMware Aria Automation Features

VMware Aria Automation has various features that allow users to easily perform operations. Some of the solution's capacities include:

VMware Cloud agnostic template: This feature allows organizations to use a single cloud template to deploy with Infrastructure as a Code. Deployment options include VMware Cloud as well as major public cloud platforms such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and more.
Extensibility and customization: This VMware Aria Automation feature allows users to get full extensibility and customization. This can be achieved through Aria Automation Orchestrator, Action-Based Extensibility (ABX), and built-in integrations with common third-party tools.
Self-service multi-cloud: This feature enables users to request and provision infrastructure resources. It can be done across clouds using a unified and consistent Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) consumption layer, idempotent REST API, and self-service catalog.
Centralized policies and governance: VMware Aria Automation offers a feature for users to manage multiple clouds with templatized cloud and policy definition, automated remediation, and cloud environment visibility.
Configuration management: Through this feature of the product, day 1 and 2 control can be achieved for virtualized and cloud environments. This can be done with intuitive configuration automation, compliance enforcement, and vulnerability remediation.
Infrastructure pipelining: Through this feature, organizations can access user-friendly release automation pipelines. They can be specifically tailored for CI/CD in infrastructure use cases.

VMware Aria Automation Benefits

VMware Aria Automation offers its users various benefits. Some of the biggest advantages that the solution brings to companies that utilize it include:

VMware Aria Automation provides faster time to market for companies through offloading manual tasks with advanced workflows and agile templating.
The solution offers high levels of security and control.
This product is suitable for beginners, as it offers a self-service consumption experience for users.
VMware Aria Automation accelerates innovation through Infrastructure as Code and DevOps principles.
The product provides users with flexibility, as it is compatible with the most popular public cloud solutions.
The solution offers fast deployment because of all natively integrated functions.

Reviews from Real Users

Awais J., CTO/CEO at a tech services company, likes VMware Aria Automation because it saves a lot of time, provides more visibility, and has extensive automation capabilities.

An IT consultant at a government rates VMware Aria Automation highly because the product gives you flexibility to analyze and consume resources.

VMware

Sample Customers

Tech Mahindra, Avea, China Merchants Bank, NNIT, Distinctive Software Solutions, Virgin Media, NEC Australia, Osiatis, Hostworks, Retegal, Allianz Shared Infrastructure Services SE (ASIC), State of Kansas Division of Information Services and Communications (DISC)

Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual

OpenText Network Automation vs. VMware Aria Automation