Red Hat CloudForms vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

Red Hat and VMware are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. Red Hat is ranked #31 with an average rating of 6.0, while VMware is ranked #2 with an average rating of 7.8. Red Hat holds a 1.5% mindshare in CM, compared to VMware’s 11.1% mindshare. Additionally, 66% of Red Hat users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of VMware users who would recommend it.

Red Hat CloudForms

Read 10 Red Hat CloudForms reviews

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657 Comparison Views

66% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Automation

Read 170 VMware Aria Automation reviews

8,852 Views
4,692 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Red Hat CloudForms

VMware Aria Automation

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

VMware Aria Automation and Red Hat CloudForms compete in automation capabilities. VMware Aria seems to have the upper hand due to its seamless AD group integration and advanced automation features.

Features: VMware Aria Automation offers seamless AD group integration which facilitates broad user access and the creation of custom service designs using vCO. It integrates with SaltStack for rapid service alerts and automation of scaling, providing multi-cloud support and remote execution advantages. Red Hat CloudForms provides extensibility through open-source tools, offering robust cross-platform support but often requires manual configuration for achieving full functionality.

Room for Improvement: VMware Aria Automation could enhance its logging capabilities and improve integration with public clouds and DevOps tools. Additionally, users have requested more comprehensive documentation and better testing procedures to resolve bugs in new versions. Red Hat CloudForms is noted for its complexity and challenging user-friendliness. Users suggest the product needs more intuitive plug-and-play features and easier integration processes.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Aria Automation is typically deployed in private clouds and receives mixed reviews regarding technical support. Some users benefit from swift assistance, while others experience delays in escalation and case handling. Red Hat CloudForms appreciates community-based support for its open-source components, but users report delays with official support channels. VMware Aria is favored for organizations seeking extensive customization.

Pricing and ROI: VMware Aria Automation’s pricing is perceived as high due to its multi-tiered licensing model, though it often yields ROI through reduced deployment times and operational efficiencies. Red Hat CloudForms is less expensive for open-source users but commands higher costs for enterprise solutions. It is less flexible in scaling without additional resources, but both solutions show substantial ROI through reducing manual intervention.

To learn more, read our detailed Red Hat CloudForms vs. VMware Aria Automation Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat CloudForms vs. VMware Aria Automation

July 2025

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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

Red Hat CloudForms

Ranking in Cloud Management

31st

Average Rating

6.4

Reviews Sentiment

5.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VMware Aria Automation

Ranking in Cloud Management

2nd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

170

Ranking in other categories

Configuration Management (7th), Network Automation (3rd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (17th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (4th)

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Red Hat CloudForms is 1.5%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 11.1%, down from 11.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

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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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

"They are a very mature product."

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

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

"The stability of the solution is very good. We haven't had any issues with it."

"The optimization of the solution is quite interesting."

"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."

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

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

More Red Hat CloudForms pros

"We provided the ability to request virtual machines to our end users. Before, this was a very manual process, which took engineers to do. Now, it's an automated process."

"The initial setup was straightforward. It's easy to deploy."

"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."

"It helps me build a big catalog and provide it to my end users."

"I used the technical support during upgrades. They came onsite and are very technical. They are very good"

"The setup was straightforward. We upgraded to a newer version seamlessly. It worked really well."

"It provides visibility into the VM space."

"It's quite user friendly. Everyone can use it, even non-technical people. This is good, since we use it to build a self-service portal which even users with not a lot of technical background can use."

More VMware Aria Automation pros

Cons

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

"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."

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

"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."

"The problem is that the platform requires it to be maintained and updated. Also, a few cases are still pending with the Red Hat support team since they are not closed yet."

"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."

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

"The solution is still quite immature."

More Red Hat CloudForms cons

"I would like to see more integration to do things like DR, from a court perspective. Today, for us, SRM doesn't scale because each of our customers has a local vCenter environment as well as the vCenter in our environment. So we can't get SRM to scale to the point to which we need. From an integration perspective, DR inside of that would be good."

"It was a complex setup. We had to use the consultant from VMware to make the solution work well."

"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?"

"vRO can get out of sync with vRA. We've run into every once in a while."

"The deployment mechanisms for the initial deployment of the product line lacks the appropriate documentation to give someone who's never used it before... There might be cases where someone wants to go to the website, go to the doc section, and do a step-by-step on how to deploy it. That's really not as brushed-up as other documents I've seen that they have. That would definitely be an improvement on their end."

"It is not intuitive or user-friendly. It's complicated as heck. We actually hired VMware Professional Services to come in. I understand the newer version, which we're not quite on yet, is easier and that the interface is better. But the product is really a profession unto itself. The user interface could be improved on."

"The initial setup was not straightforward. It was not simple, and we had a PoC. We had VMware help us deploy it, and it took them an exorbitant amount of time."

"The solution could be lighter. As an administrator, I would like to simplify the number of services I need to deploy. They took a significant step in that direction by removing all the Windows dependencies that we had in the past, but there are still a lot of services consuming resources."

More VMware Aria Automation cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

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

"Red Hat CloudForms is a bit expensive."

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

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

"There is confusion between licensing levels. There are three different licensed versions of vRealize Automation, and there are different things which can happen in each of them."

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

"From a budget point of view, the pricing is a bit on the higher side."

"As far as value is concerned, it has been essential to our environment. We have been able to deploy VMs quickly and the developers have their own sandbox, so they can spin up and destroy VMs at their own will."

"VMware Aria Automation is expensive."

"I'm very interested in the integration with Puppet. However, my organization doesn't have the funding for something like Puppet right now. If VMware would integrate that feature set (Puppet) into vRA. That would be very awesome."

"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

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

19%

Manufacturing Company

15%

University

10%

Government

10%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

10%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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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...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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Comparisons

Morpheus vs Red Hat CloudForms

Compared 24% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs Red Hat CloudForms

Compared 23% of the time

OpenNebula vs Red Hat CloudForms

Compared 21% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs Red Hat CloudForms

Compared 16% of the time

More Red Hat CloudForms 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 11% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 9% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 7% of the time

More VMware Aria Automation Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat CloudForms

July 2025

Download Red Hat CloudForms product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Automation

July 2025

Download VMware Aria Automation product report

Also Known As

No data available

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

Overview

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

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

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)

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

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat CloudForms vs. VMware Aria Automation

July 2025

Free Report: Red Hat CloudForms vs. VMware Aria Automation

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