SolarWinds Network Automation Manager vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

SolarWinds and Broadcom are both solutions in the Network Automation category. SolarWinds is ranked #14, while Broadcom is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.0. SolarWinds holds a 3.6% mindshare in NA, compared to Broadcom’s 6.7% mindshare. Additionally, 50% of SolarWinds users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

SolarWinds Network Automati...

Read 2 SolarWinds Network Automation Manager reviews

890 Views
401 Comparison Views

50% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Automation

Read 171 VMware Aria Automation reviews

7,806 Views
1,249 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: January 2026).

Buyer's Guide

SolarWinds Network Automation Manager vs. VMware Aria Automation

January 2026

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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

14th

Average Rating

5.6

Reviews Sentiment

8.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (95th)

VMware Aria Automation

Ranking in Network Automation

6th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

171

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Management (3rd), Configuration Management (7th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (19th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (5th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Network Automation category, the mindshare of SolarWinds Network Automation Manager is 3.6%, up from 2.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 6.7%, down from 11.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
VMware Aria Automation	6.7%
SolarWinds Network Automation Manager	3.6%
Other	89.7%

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."

"It is very stable, especially for high availability features."

"value; It has provided my development team a pure self-service portal. We deploy thousands of machines and reclaim. So, their time to business, and their time to market has been improved exponentially."

"The setup was straightforward. We upgraded to a newer version seamlessly. It worked really well."

"Now the customer can manage their own server requirements directly. This is very important because, before that, the process included signing off on forms and sending them to the IT Director. It took at least 10 days to create a VM and send it to the person who needed it. Now, it's no more than a half hour to activate a new VM at the customer's site."

"Our speed of provisioning has improved. We used to build systems manually, which would take four hours or a day. Nowadays we're able to spin something up off a template... and it takes about 20 minutes."

"It has integration with the rest of VMware solutions."

"We are able to provide self-service to all of our IT/development teams to expand and decrease their environments at will."

"I used the technical support during upgrades. They came onsite and are very technical. They are very good"

More VMware Aria Automation pros

Cons

"The price could be a bit lower."

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

"The basic support is not there for Google Cloud and Azure. They are unable to provision nor do cost controls. Google is still left out. It is great that they have done AWS, but we are a retailer which means nothing to us because it is a competitor. Azure is good, but Google is where a lot of our development environments are."

"The most important thing that we missed in vRanger was the possibility to mount several images instantaneously and present it so we can run it immediately."

"The deployment mechanisms for the initial deployment of the product line lacks the appropriate documentation to give someone who's never used it before... There might be cases where someone wants to go to the website, go to the doc section, and do a step-by-step on how to deploy it. That's really not as brushed-up as other documents I've seen that they have. That would definitely be an improvement on their end."

"The stability needs a lot of work. The troubleshooting component of vRealize is a pain. The administration and the upgrades are not up to the mark. If they were able to improve on that, that would be the best thing and would make it much easier to run it in the enterprise."

"The back-end has a steep learning curve."

"VMware should go the way of vROps, with everything in one machine, the ability to scale out, and a more distributed environment instead of having the usual centralized SQL database."

"It needs to be more dynamic with variable customization to make new workloads more reliable. It also needs to be faster. We are exploring vRA version 8 right now and maybe what I'm requesting is available in the new version, but we haven't yet explored it fully."

"In terms of additional features, I would like it to be able to poll my vCenter infrastructure more rapidly and adapt to changes quickly. It should alert me and let me know when there are broken components, as a result of underlying infrastructure changes. It needs to be more stringent."

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."

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

"The solution is free of cost."

"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."

"This is an expensive product and the high price is starting to become an issue for us."

"The cost of the solution is reasonable for us. Although it is relatively high, we prioritize stability and integration over cost."

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

"From the customer perspective, the value was worth it."

"The pricing for this solution is roughly 20% lower than the competitive products in the market."

More VMware Aria Automation pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Government

13%

Performing Arts

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	32
Midsize Enterprise	24
Large Enterprise	130

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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Compared 8% of the time

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Compared 15% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 9% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 8% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 5% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Network Automation

January 2026

SolarWinds Network Automation Manager report

Download SolarWinds Network Automation Manager product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Automation

January 2026

Download VMware Aria Automation product report

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.

Broadcom

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

January 2026

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: January 2026.

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