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Red Hat CloudForms vs VMware Aria Automation 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

Red Hat CloudForms
Ranking in Cloud Management
37th
Average Rating
6.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Aria Automation
Ranking in Cloud Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
172
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (8th), Network Automation (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (20th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Red Hat CloudForms is 1.9%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 5.5%, down from 11.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Aria Automation5.5%
Red Hat CloudForms1.9%
Other92.6%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Ilhami Arikan - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
VasilisGiannitsiotis - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT at ITSolutions
Automation has streamlined complex financial workflows but still needs more intuitive orchestration
Something to improve in VMware Aria Automation would be related to VCF 9, as I do not know what it is trying to bring because they exposed it as the solution of everything. So VCF 9 will bring VCF Automation and VCF Operations, the new product line of VMware. I have not seen what this brings or what else it includes. Maybe in the area of vRealize Orchestrator, this would be beneficial because VRO can do everything. Perhaps a more user-friendly way to use that tool would be helpful because the possibilities there are endless. I am looking for more user-friendly navigation in VMware Aria Automation.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The optimization of the solution is quite interesting, as it means we can prepare a bunch of VMs with self-service provisioning."
"The solution is compatible and integrates with various infrastructures or providers."
"The integration with other open-source tools is pretty good; it integrates particularly well with Kubernetes and Docker, and they are a very mature product."
"The most valuable features of Red Hat CloudForms are the benefit of the collective functionality."
"The stability of the solution is very good, and we haven't had any issues with it."
"They are a very mature product."
"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."
"The optimization of the solution is quite interesting."
"We are able to provide self-service to all of our IT/development teams to expand and decrease their environments at will."
"For ours, it's a match that I wish we would have had immediately; it has paid dividends."
"We have integrated our CICD pipeline into an automatic catalog request through some API calls. It can request and provision new virtual machines behind the NSX load balancer, straight out of the CIDC pipeline and add those nodes to the load balancer, request SSL certs, do SSL termination at the load balancer so that it's not encrypted behind the scenes, all of which has really been helpful."
"The self-service capabilities are by far the best that we've seen in terms of features."
"Using this solution has greatly reduced the time it takes to deploy a server; it used to take at least one month, whereas now, to deploy a server takes two hours."
"vRealize Automation has improved the speed of provisioning just by automating things, making people think about whether a human really needs to do something or can we make the machines do it for us. It is a lot faster to deploy things now."
"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."
"We've been using this product for a while and the stability is fantastic."
 

Cons

"Red Hat CloudForms could improve by allowing more customization of reports. We have to do a lot of coding to accomplish what we want. Additionally, the compatibility with the multi-cloud could improve. The latter versions of the solution removed Google support and the cost comparison between other clouds was high."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The solution is still quite immature."
"The complexity of the solution is a bit high in comparison to VMware."
"The solution's provisioning engine needs to be improved."
"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."
"The customer does not feel comfortable with the new pricing model of VMware Aria Automation. I am not sure regarding the pricing and what the future of it is because customers are already looking for other solutions that are not so pricey."
"The infrastructure part and VM reconfigure need improvement so that the end user can smoothly perform all the tasks which they are directly performing on the endpoints."
"Each new version seems to bring a new set of bugs to the table and upgrading is risky, especially for a tool at the core of the operations and infrastructure."
"I know you can spin up virtual desktops in vRA, but they're not thin-provisioned. I don't know if that's because the other product, Horizon View, is there, but it would be nice to see more integration."
"The basic support is not there for Google Cloud and Azure. They are unable to provision nor do cost controls."
"7.5 is not user-friendly, in fact, it's a nightmare. They changed everything on the graphic user interface, the mode where the user interacts with the product."
"Our primary challenge is upgrading the product to the latest version. This process requires careful communication with the vendor to mitigate risks."
 

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 product's licensing is based on the number of servers."
"Red Hat CloudForms is a bit expensive."
"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."
"Customers say this solution is costlier compared to its competitors."
"We do plan to see ROI with any new implementation of new technologies being implemented within our environment."
"I would rate it high because, compared to other solutions, VMware’s pricing is quite expensive. VMware products have become significantly more costly in recent years, leading to higher costs."
"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."
"The cost of the solution is reasonable for us. Although it is relatively high, we prioritize stability and integration over cost."
"SaltStack is an open-source product."
"The pricing is very high."
"Better pricing is always handy, but I feel it's at the right price point."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Construction Company
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
7%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise131
 

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...
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 ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack
 

Overview

 

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
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat CloudForms vs. VMware Aria Automation and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
902,270 professionals have used our research since 2012.