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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
35th
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
171
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (7th), Network Automation (6th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (19th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Red Hat CloudForms is 1.6%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 7.1%, down from 10.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
VMware Aria Automation7.1%
Red Hat CloudForms1.6%
Other91.3%
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…
Le Quang Long - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"They are a very mature product."
"The most valuable features of Red Hat CloudForms are the benefit of the collective functionality."
"Red Hat CloudForms is stable once it is up and running."
"The solution is compatible and integrates with various infrastructures or providers."
"I am impressed with the product's reports."
"Today, if I want to provision one VM, it takes me five minutes. Earlier, it would take a minimum of 30 minutes to go and choose everything. Now, I can just do one click and it can provision my whole VM. We also integrated with our Alexa, so even through voice functionality, I can create a VM. One of the guys at VMware, along with our partner, deployed that in our environment. If I say, "Hey, Alexa, I need a VM with four gigs of RAM," it will go and start creating it."
"The automation of the redundant tasks and the implementation of ServiceNow are huge for us..."
"It's extremely convenient to be able to spin something up and be able to work on other things, because it's already done it, making my workload lighter."
"I want to build automation that is intelligent, part of the fabric of our environment, and is somewhat self-sustaining. I think SaltStack can help me do this."
"The solution has helped us to increase infrastructure agility, mostly because, in addition to it being able to do its thing on its own, it has tie-ins to other parts of our CICD pipeline. We use Jenkins for our build process which, of course, vRA has plugins for, to be able to integrate with it. We use Chef and there is the Chef build as part of our image that we standardized to deploy, and that can tie in with our section of the pipeline that it does for applications."
"Having an enterprise service catalog and being able to automate various parts of our infrastructure are among the most important components."
"The setup is getting better with each version."
"The initial setup is straightforward. It's not that difficult."
 

Cons

"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."
"It is difficult to create a complete dashboard that includes all the needed features or catalogs."
"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."
"The complexity of the solution is a bit high in comparison to VMware."
"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. 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."
"The solution is still quite immature."
"The solution's provisioning engine needs to be improved."
"The stability on the 6.2 version is very bad. It crashes. VMware tech support knows the IIS component is a bit buggy."
"I don't think it's intuitive or user-friendly. I think it's a good tool. Any automation tool, these days, the learning curve is kind of high. You're teaching sysadmins who never developed stuff. Maybe they modified a little bit of code and now you tell them, "Hey, here's the tool, use it." But you have to know a little bit of DevOps. So you have to train them how to do the scripting."
"I would also like to see them streamline the install. It's split between Windows and Linux appliances, and it would be easier if it was all appliances. I think they're going that way."
"Deploying and configuring the solution takes a lot of time."
"The back-end has a steep learning curve."
"vRO can get out of sync with vRA. We've run into every once in a while."
"As a product, it is complicated to integrate and automate with other products."
"There is certainly room for improvement with some of the little things I was talking about, like either better managing of the upgrade process, or just making the infrastructure deployment a little bit easier. It feels like all of the pieces have been automated on one level or another, like with the PowerShell scripts, doing all the IS, Windows boxes preparation. They just need to get it to be more end-to-end."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Red Hat CloudForms is a bit expensive."
"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."
"The product's licensing is based on the number of servers."
"The solution is free of cost."
"So much can be done with the Open Source side, and especially for smaller shops. I personally think the pricing for Enterprise is hard to justify."
"Customers say this solution is costlier compared to its competitors."
"This is an expensive product and the high price is starting to become an issue for us."
"From a budget point of view, the pricing is a bit on the higher side."
"SaltStack is an open-source product."
"It is an open-source product."
"It made the provisioning of the virtual machines easier and faster. We can react more quickly to customers' demands."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
9%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business32
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise130
 

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: December 2025.
879,425 professionals have used our research since 2012.