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Red Hat CloudForms vs VMware Cloud Director 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
36th
Average Rating
6.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Cloud Director
Ranking in Cloud Management
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
70
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Red Hat CloudForms is 1.9%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 2.7%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Cloud Director2.7%
Red Hat CloudForms1.9%
Other95.4%
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…
KuldeepSingh4 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Experienced users benefit from resource isolation and valuable self-service portal while seeing potential in enhanced infrastructure visibility
VMware is not going further with VMware Cloud Director. They are integrating the VMware Cloud Director feature with Aria Automation only for the upcoming versions, primarily with the VCF 9, and slowly they are integrating some of the parts they have already integrated, and they might not continue with VMware Cloud Director in the future. They can make it more granular to ensure hardware-level segregation, the underlying infrastructure level of segregation for the end user, and a separate security boundary where users can access the end-to-end layer. End-to-end layer means my software layer along with the hardware layer. If they want to do a certain level of troubleshooting primarily on the ESXi part, that is what I feel is lacking for now because for an end user accessing the SSP, the underlying infrastructure is a kind of black box for them. For VMware Cloud Director, it can be more comprehensive if we enable public cloud integration as well. In today's date, customers are adopting a multi-cloud environment where VMware Cloud Director is much feasible to leverage the underlying VMware backend architecture. If VMware Cloud Director could be made to have more integration with the public cloud and do the day one, day two jobs for public cloud interface as well, that would be beneficial. Additionally, I recommend leveraging the VMware Cloud Director layer if a customer has a multi-cloud environment and is planning some cross-cloud migration capability. Cross-cloud migration refers to if a customer has something on Azure, wanting to bring it up on VMware or maybe from VMware to AWS, vice versa. In that case, VMware Cloud Director should provide some cross-cloud migration capability as well.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I am impressed with the product's reports."
"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 most valuable features of Red Hat CloudForms are the benefit of the collective functionality."
"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."
"Red Hat CloudForms is stable once it is up and running."
"The optimization of the solution is quite interesting, as it means we can prepare a bunch of VMs with self-service provisioning."
"Red Hat CloudForms is a stable product. There is no issue with the stability."
"The stability of the solution is very good. We haven't had any issues with it."
"We use vCloud Director as a multiple cloud management solution."
"So far, we have had no problems at all, as it has been very stable. It is working well."
"The most valuable feature of vCloud Director for me is its user-friendly UI, which is much easier compared to other platforms."
"The stability is rock solid."
"vCloud Director is a scalable solution, and we have 10 customers who use it."
"The product's initial setup phase was easy."
"The initial setup was complex. There's a lot of things you have to factor in, like security, backup, disaster recovery, monitoring, and how to maintain the platform. It's something we still struggle with, but it's getting better."
"We consider it intuitive and user-friendly, and it offers a variety of functions for the customer to control the networking, virtual workloads, disk snapshots, and all of vSphere's core features."
 

Cons

"I have issues with the solution's permissions. Unlike VMware, the product doesn't allow folder-type permissions."
"Our clients had challenges or issues with the updates. Its updates should be better managed."
"The complexity of the solution is a bit high in comparison to VMware."
"The solution is still quite immature."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Lacks integration with the hyperscalers."
"We have had very minor problems with it when we've been upgrading."
"vCloud Director's pricing is high. Its integration with open-source technologies is limited."
"In the next release, we would like to see improvements with the pricing. It could be reduced."
"We get too many errors, whether it's the URL not working or errors in some of the UI features."
"What vCloud Director needs is a more simplified installation, because the process is a little bit complicated, compared to installing vRealize Automation or the set of vRealize solutions."
"It would be great if Microsoft and VMware come together and become a common tool."
"Initially, the setup was complex but VMware is working to simplify the integration."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is definitely cheaper than VMware. Everything is included. There is no challenge there."
"The product's licensing is based on the number of servers."
"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."
"Red Hat CloudForms is a bit expensive."
"The price of Red Hat CloudForms was not competitive, it was expensive."
"The solution's price is the market standard and depends on usage."
"vCloud Director is a very expensive solution."
"We are able to provision new clients faster. Every month, we take on more customers."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"The solution is expensive so pricing is rated a four out of ten."
"I believe the pricing is reasonable."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing eight and a half to nine out of ten."
"It's a costly product. The licenses may not be costly, but with every new development in their product, we need to purchase deployment services, and the deployment services are quite costly."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
8%
Construction Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Construction 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 Business24
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise39
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
Would you change anything about VMware vCloud Director if you could?
VMware vCloud Director works very well and there are not many things that I would like to see changed. However, a single thing comes to mind when I think of improvements and that is integration. In...
What is the biggest improvement you saw at your company after you started using VMware vCloud Director?
For my company, VMware vCloud Director noticeably increased operational efficiency. When I started working here a few years ago, my organization was using another cloud management tool. We switched...
Is vCloud Director convenient for building applications?
When it comes to building applications, vCloud Director offers you various methods to create cloud-ready ones. For example: Your DevOps team is supported through Infrastructure as Code services w...
 

Also Known As

No data available
vCloud Director
 

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)
MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat CloudForms vs. VMware Cloud Director and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
894,668 professionals have used our research since 2012.