SolarWinds Network Automation Manager vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

SolarWinds and VMware are both solutions in the Network Automation category. SolarWinds is ranked #17, while VMware is ranked #3 with an average rating of 7.8. SolarWinds holds a 3.6% mindshare in NA, compared to VMware’s 10.0% mindshare. Additionally, 50% of SolarWinds users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of VMware users who would recommend it.

SolarWinds Network Automati...

Read 2 SolarWinds Network Automation Manager reviews

342 Views
10 Comparison Views

50% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Automation

Read 170 VMware Aria Automation reviews

1,603 Views
13 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

SolarWinds Network Automati...

VMware Aria Automation

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 6, 2025

VMware Aria Automation and SolarWinds Network Automation Manager are competitors in the network automation domain. VMware Aria Automation is preferred for its competitive pricing and customer support, while SolarWinds Network Automation Manager stands out for its advanced features.

Features: VMware Aria Automation is recognized for seamless integration, flexibility, and scalability, enhancing business automation processes. SolarWinds Network Automation Manager offers robust network management with advanced alerting and reporting functions, providing detailed network insights beneficial for comprehensive monitoring.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Aria Automation provides a straightforward deployment experience with responsive customer support for smooth implementation. SolarWinds Network Automation Manager also offers user-friendly deployment, supported by extensive documentation that aids in the process. While VMware is noted for its supportive team, SolarWinds benefits from an extensive knowledge base.

Pricing and ROI: VMware Aria Automation is cost-effective, contributing positively to ROI, appealing to cost-conscious buyers. SolarWinds Network Automation Manager requires higher setup costs but offers extensive features that ensure strong ROI for businesses seeking comprehensive network management.

To learn more, read our detailed SolarWinds Network Automation Manager vs. VMware Aria Automation Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

SolarWinds Network Automation Manager vs. VMware Aria Automation

June 2025

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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

SolarWinds Network Automati...

Ranking in Network Automation

17th

Average Rating

5.6

Reviews Sentiment

8.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (106th)

VMware Aria Automation

Ranking in Network Automation

3rd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

170

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Management (1st), Configuration Management (7th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (17th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (4th)

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Network Automation category, the mindshare of SolarWinds Network Automation Manager is 3.6%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 10.0%, down from 12.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Automation

Featured Reviews

Giulio Valeri

Owner at SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS SRL

Threat detection failures, poor technical support, and expensive

We use the solution to manage all of our customer's systems. We monitor and decide if everything is okay and if not, we do changes when needed. For example, if there is a need to change the antivirus software we can automate the process and install the new one. There are scripts within the software…

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Le Quang Long

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution offers so many great resources, it makes them a powerhouse in the market."

"The installation is easy."

"The product's most valuable features are ease of automation."

"It helps me build a big catalog and provide it to my end users."

"I recommend the product due to its effectiveness in automation and integration."

"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."

"We provided the ability to request virtual machines to our end users. Before, this was a very manual process, which took engineers to do. Now, it's an automated process."

"The self service portal: People don't have to come to us to request something. They can just go fill out a form. Within 30 minutes, they have what they requested."

"I like its capacity, the self-service portal, and operational automation. The most beneficial feature is that it saves time when creating new virtual machines, deploying security measures, and writing infrastructure code, making things easier and faster. We have a standard we follow, reducing the time spent repeatedly rewriting everything."

"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."

More VMware Aria Automation pros

Cons

"We did not like SolarWinds because it was not able to communicate between UPSA and our accounting system. They should have better integration."

"The price could be a bit lower."

"I would like to see more automation, more ways to automate automation tasks."

"We have seen some issues with upgrades or installations. This means we have to raise a call every time with VMware."

"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."

"I'm not wanting any particular feature; but there should be cost reductions. VMware comes at a high cost, and that's why we are in the process of transitioning to a more affordable alternative."

"They should concentrate on navigation and service improvements."

"We had a lot of issues at first. Especially with doing any kind of upgrades, it was a complete tear-down and a complete rebuild of all the Blueprints. The upgrade process was not easy or intuitive at all. But it seems to be getting better."

"Upgrades are always a pain."

"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."

More VMware Aria Automation cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of SolarWinds Network Automation Manager is fair. However, it is more expensive than ConnectWise."

"I would rate the pricing a ten out of ten, with ten being very expensive."

"I'm very interested in the integration with Puppet. However, my organization doesn't have the funding for something like Puppet right now. If VMware would integrate that feature set (Puppet) into vRA. That would be very awesome."

"We have seen significant ROI. We used to have physical servers, it took 90 days to get a server, order it, buy it, and get it in. We have it down to 10 minutes, building a server with virtualization, and now that's too slow. So, we let the customer do it at their speed. Therefore, it is pretty much up in a couple of minutes and they have a server."

"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."

"Better pricing is always handy, but I feel it's at the right price point."

"The solution has helped to increase infrastructure, agility, speed, and provisioning in the time to market."

"They should provide one license for all the sub-products."

"Customers say this solution is costlier compared to its competitors."

More VMware Aria Automation pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

22%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

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...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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Comparisons

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Compared 86% of the time

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Compared 16% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 15% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 11% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 10% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 6% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Network Automation

June 2025

SolarWinds Network Automation Manager report

Download SolarWinds Network Automation Manager product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Automation

May 2025

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Also Known As

SolarWinds NAM

VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack

Overview

Scale environments from 1,000 to tens of thousands of nodes with comprehensive performance, traffic, WAN, and switch port monitoring, automated change and configuration management, and IP address management in an integrated network automation software solution.

SolarWinds

VMware Aria Automation is a cloud management tool that allows companies to simplify their cloud experience through a modern automation platform. The solution is designed to deliver self-service clouds, multi-cloud automation with governance, and DevOps-based security and infrastructure management. It helps organizations improve IT agility, efficiency, and productivity through its various features.

VMware Aria Automation has multiple use cases that include the following:

Self-service multi-cloud: VMware Aria Automation can be used to deliver consistent self-service consumption. Another use case in this area is for delivering infrastructure across VMware Clouds as well as public clouds.
Multi-cloud governance: The solution can be used to manage cost, performance, networking, configuration, and security at scale for multi-cloud environments. VMware Aria Automation offers all this with an everything-as-code approach.
DevOps for infrastructure: Through VMware Aria Automation, companies can enable a powerful infrastructure as code platform with support for iterative development and infrastructure pipelining.
Kubernetes automation: Users can utilize VMware Aria Automation to automate the management of Kubernetes clusters and namespaces with support for vSphere with Tanzu.
Security operations: VMware Aria Automation facilitates event-driven automation to deliver full-service IT system compliance enforcement and vulnerability remediation.

VMware Aria Automation Features

VMware Aria Automation has various features that allow users to easily perform operations. Some of the solution's capacities include:

VMware Cloud agnostic template: This feature allows organizations to use a single cloud template to deploy with Infrastructure as a Code. Deployment options include VMware Cloud as well as major public cloud platforms such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and more.
Extensibility and customization: This VMware Aria Automation feature allows users to get full extensibility and customization. This can be achieved through Aria Automation Orchestrator, Action-Based Extensibility (ABX), and built-in integrations with common third-party tools.
Self-service multi-cloud: This feature enables users to request and provision infrastructure resources. It can be done across clouds using a unified and consistent Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) consumption layer, idempotent REST API, and self-service catalog.
Centralized policies and governance: VMware Aria Automation offers a feature for users to manage multiple clouds with templatized cloud and policy definition, automated remediation, and cloud environment visibility.
Configuration management: Through this feature of the product, day 1 and 2 control can be achieved for virtualized and cloud environments. This can be done with intuitive configuration automation, compliance enforcement, and vulnerability remediation.
Infrastructure pipelining: Through this feature, organizations can access user-friendly release automation pipelines. They can be specifically tailored for CI/CD in infrastructure use cases.

VMware Aria Automation Benefits

VMware Aria Automation offers its users various benefits. Some of the biggest advantages that the solution brings to companies that utilize it include:

VMware Aria Automation provides faster time to market for companies through offloading manual tasks with advanced workflows and agile templating.
The solution offers high levels of security and control.
This product is suitable for beginners, as it offers a self-service consumption experience for users.
VMware Aria Automation accelerates innovation through Infrastructure as Code and DevOps principles.
The product provides users with flexibility, as it is compatible with the most popular public cloud solutions.
The solution offers fast deployment because of all natively integrated functions.

Reviews from Real Users

Awais J., CTO/CEO at a tech services company, likes VMware Aria Automation because it saves a lot of time, provides more visibility, and has extensive automation capabilities.

An IT consultant at a government rates VMware Aria Automation highly because the product gives you flexibility to analyze and consume resources.

VMware

Sample Customers

Maalem Financing Company, School City of Hammond

Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual

Buyer's Guide

SolarWinds Network Automation Manager vs. VMware Aria Automation

June 2025

Free Report: SolarWinds Network Automation Manager vs. VMware Aria Automation

Find out what your peers are saying about SolarWinds Network Automation Manager vs. VMware Aria Automation and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.

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