Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

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
29th
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
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
69
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Red Hat CloudForms is 1.5%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 5.6%, down from 7.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
VMware Cloud Director5.6%
Red Hat CloudForms1.5%
Other92.9%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Ilhami Arikan - PeerSpot reviewer
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
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

"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 stability of the solution is very good. We haven't had any issues with it."
"I am impressed with the product's ability to create dynamic catalogs."
"Red Hat CloudForms is stable once it is up and running."
"They are a very mature product."
"The most valuable features of Red Hat CloudForms are the benefit of the collective functionality."
"I am impressed with the product's reports."
"The optimization of the solution is quite interesting."
"The most valuable feature of VMware Cloud Director is segregating the underlying infrastructure for the end user."
"We use the infrastructure as a service cloud, that is, we use the features as infrastructure for this. We are not using any platform services."
"The most valuable feature of VMware Cloud Director is segregating the underlying infrastructure for the end user."
"vCloud Director is a scalable solution, and we have 10 customers who use it."
"The self-service portal is the most valuable. We are acting as a service provider, so our customers can take care of their virtual data centers with the self-service portal. Therefore, we don't need staff for it."
"vCloud Director works and makes my life easier. Its self-service capabilities allow us to give resources to our customers. They can spin up as many or as few machines as they like, and it works."
"The most valuable feature of vCloud Director is virtualization."
"The tool is very stable."
 

Cons

"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."
"It is difficult to create a complete dashboard that includes all the needed features or catalogs."
"The complexity of the solution is a bit high in comparison to VMware."
"The solution's provisioning engine needs to be improved."
"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."
"I have issues with the solution's permissions. Unlike VMware, the product doesn't allow folder-type permissions."
"The solution is still quite immature."
"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."
"We have had very minor problems with it when we've been upgrading."
"The solution should integrate with other cloud systems such as Azure ARC and OpenStack."
"It would be beneficial if some features were built into the platform rather than requiring integration with multiple products, reducing complexity and licensing concerns."
"Sometimes, there is a disconnection that happens between vCloud Director and its underlying VMware vCenter, where the actions are supposed to be taking place, making it an area where improvements are required."
"We are having a bit of a problem with vCloud Availability. We know that vRA has a new product, HCX. We would like to know about it, then migrate to the product."
"Technical support needs to improve its skills and respond to queries faster."
"If you use it for a lot of customers, it is too heavy for this solution."
"The product could use a billing feature so we can automate billing for clients."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's licensing is based on the number of servers."
"The price of Red Hat CloudForms was not competitive, it was expensive."
"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."
"It is definitely cheaper than VMware. Everything is included. There is no challenge there."
"Red Hat CloudForms is a bit expensive."
"vCloud Director is a very expensive solution."
"In certain cases, the price of Cloud Director is quite high, especially with the load balancing and other features they've introduced. That seems quite costly. Overall, for VSPP programming, I think it's okay. However, features like enterprise load balancing and all these other things are very costly."
"If one means a very bad price, and ten means a very good price, I rate the price as a five on a scale of one to ten."
"The license could be less expensive and we are on a perpetual license."
"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."
"We are paying around $ 15,000 per month for vCloud Director, and it would be nice if it could be made cheaper."
"We are able to provision new clients faster. Every month, we take on more customers."
"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."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Management solutions are best for your needs.
867,349 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
20%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Government
8%
University
8%
Computer Software Company
20%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise36
 

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: September 2025.
867,349 professionals have used our research since 2012.