OpenText Network Automation vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

OpenText Network Automation vs. VMware Aria Automation

Download the complete report

Helped 881,082 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

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

6th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

171

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Management (3rd), Configuration Management (7th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (19th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (5th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Network Automation category, the mindshare of OpenText Network Automation is 4.4%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 6.7%, down from 11.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
VMware Aria Automation	6.7%
OpenText Network Automation	4.4%
Other	88.9%

Network Automation

Featured Reviews

reviewer1480065

Service Operations Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

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.

Read full review

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.

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

"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."

"The ability to programmatically describe the desired state of a single, or an entire fleet of servers, on-premises, and in a cloud environment."

"value; It has provided my development team a pure self-service portal. We deploy thousands of machines and reclaim. So, their time to business, and their time to market has been improved exponentially."

"We have also found it to be intuitive and user-friendly. It's something that, because it has the workflows that are very easily graphed out - you can follow what it's doing, it's very picturesque, you can see what it's doing easily - it's something that you can hand over to a user who is not familiar with it and they can wrap their brain around it pretty quickly."

"Among the valuable features are the ease and speed of creating the VMs. Originally, we provisioned them manually and it would take us two days to do the provisioning... but with the automation, we are able to provision a VM with the click of a button, within seconds. It cut down on the time as well as cut down on the expense and employee cost in provisioning."

"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."

"Our time to deliver a fully unified three-tier app, at the right version, is one-twentieth what it was before. There is no manual intervention. No IP management. It just dramatically simplifies all of our processes."

"The self-service capabilities are by far the best that we've seen in terms of features. If the user is being able to log in and make requests himself, from the onboarding process all the way to the end, that's very helpful."

"I like its capacity, the self-service portal, and operational automation. The most beneficial feature is that it saves time when creating new virtual machines, deploying security measures, and writing infrastructure code, making things easier and faster. We have a standard we follow, reducing the time spent repeatedly rewriting everything."

More VMware Aria Automation pros

Cons

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

"The tool performs slowly."

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

"We would like them to improve the automation part. This is an upcoming area that we would like to focus on."

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

"It is complex to use for new users. It should have automated tools or drag-and-drop functionality."

"I don't find it to be user-friendly or intuitive because, in my case, when I have to deploy SAP systems, I need to jump between the vRA, the vRO, and the actual vCenter itself. I need to go back and forth to do different things... I wish they could make it just one application, just vRA, that does all that. There might be a way to do it but I haven't figured out how to do it yet."

"With the workflow aspect, which has manual intervention, a policy needs to be approved by somebody. There could be better management of that piece with better templates. It is like a workflow engine, but does not have enough example templates to do certain things. A lot of people waste a lot of time trying to figure out the same thing, and everybody is trying to figure out the same thing, e.g., how to make a MySQL cluster in a Windows environment?"

"The stability is 95 percent. There are some situations where it gets a little bit clumsy. When it gets really big, when you're dealing with a very large deployment, it can be a little bit difficult, but it's better than nothing. It does a significant job, given what it's tasked to do."

"Multitenancy management is a little bit difficult to do, so it is an area that can be improved."

"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."

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."

"vRealize automation really should be a front door to the whole VMware suite of products."

"SaltStack is an open-source product."

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

"I would rate the pricing a ten out of ten, with ten being very expensive."

"VMware Aria Automation is expensive."

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

"The solution is free of cost."

"It made the provisioning of the virtual machines easier and faster. We can react more quickly to customers' demands."

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.

See recommendations

881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Performing Arts

23%

Government

16%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	32
Midsize Enterprise	24
Large Enterprise	130

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 19% of the time

OpenText Network Node Manager vs OpenText Network Automation

Compared 14% of the time

BMC TrueSight Automation for Networks vs OpenText Network Automation

Compared 14% of the time

Cisco DNA Center vs OpenText Network Automation

Compared 13% of the time

NetBox.dev vs OpenText Network Automation

Compared 13% of the time

More OpenText Network Automation Competitors

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 15% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 9% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 8% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 5% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 4% 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.

Broadcom

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