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SkyKick Cloud Manager vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

SkyKick Cloud Manager
Ranking in Cloud Management
60th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
1
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
172
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (11th), Network Automation (7th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (29th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of SkyKick Cloud Manager is 0.6%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 5.7%, down from 9.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Aria Automation5.7%
SkyKick Cloud Manager0.6%
Other93.7%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Robust, reasonably priced, and offers good features
The solution works really well and is very easy to use. It's possible to set up the solution in-house without integrators. The solution is stable. It can scale well. Technical support has been good. The solution is robust and offers great features that other options do not have. It has reasonable pricing.
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

"Technical support has been good."
"quality-of-latest-release; Compared to the earlier versions, from my experience, the upgrade process is easier; for example, the compatibility checks. I also don't need to go and find out the resources that are required. It tells me in one report what the current environment is like and, if I want to go to the next level, what things I need to take care of. Based on that I can make things happen."
"It has definitely increased speed of VM deployment. When a normal server-request would come in, it might take anywhere from three to four days to deploy. Now, within 15 minutes, they can click and have something up and running."
"Big-time cost savings on administrative overhead without having to constantly manage virtual machines, spin them up, spin them down, manually."
"Preparation of Hybris Commerce HY300 training laboratory environments and Hybris Expert Services demo infrastructure went from days of effort down to hours."
"All were really good at what they do, but SaltStack seemed to be much more feature rich than the competition."
"Aria Automation gives you the flexibility to deploy tenants with customized blueprints for permissions and policies."
"VMware Aria Automation has made a lot of things easier. It has really helped the operations team to spin up the virtual machines."
"We have given internal IT developers the ability to self-provision VMs for development and testing, which has drastically increased their efficiency and increased the communication and transparency between IT development and IT operations."
 

Cons

"I'm fairly new to the solution and need to explore it further."
"Maintaining the product requires effort and a good understanding of the environment, including how to set up the codes and other configurations. Pricing needs to be improved to improve the customer penetration."
"I would like to see more integration to do things like DR, from a court perspective."
"For the administrator, it can be a little challenging. For the administrator, there are a lot of moving parts. It is fine once you figure out where the knobs are you need to twiddle, but it can be a challenge to get it up and running."
"They can improve on the dashboard representations and the options for non-technical people. I would like to see the ability to customize that and maybe provide them with helpful guides to what subscriptions they have. Sometimes, I find that I have to do more explanation to people who do approvals. I would really like to customize the display to the terms they use in their particular business unit. So a little bit more of a nod to the customization of the UI for non-technical users would be helpful."
"If you are using Aria Automation by itself, you won't get the features you want, and the license cost is high."
"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."
"It is not super-intuitive. It does require some skills to understand how to use it. I had no problem, but I had spent a lot of time already learning this product ahead of moving it to an operational status. But as we did so, we had a hard time bringing some people from other groups into the fold, to script and work against this environment. So, the ability to build workflows within that automation needs to be streamlined."
"The stability is okay, but could be improved. We sometimes receive strange errors, which can only be solved with specialists."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The pricing is very high."
"It is an open-source product."
"From a budget point of view, the pricing is a bit on the higher side."
"The solution is free of cost."
"The cost of the solution is reasonable for us. Although it is relatively high, we prioritize stability and integration over cost."
"VMware Aria Automation is expensive."
"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."
"SaltStack is an open-source product."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Outsourcing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
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

Arterian
Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
Find out what your peers are saying about Nutanix, Broadcom, IBM and others in Cloud Management. Updated: October 2026.
921,148 professionals have used our research since 2012.