SolarWinds Network Automation Manager vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

SolarWinds and VMware are both solutions in the Network Automation category. SolarWinds is ranked #13, while VMware is ranked #3 with an average rating of 7.8. SolarWinds holds a 3.6% mindshare in NA, compared to VMware’s 10.3% 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

359 Views
214 Comparison Views

50% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Automation

Read 170 VMware Aria Automation reviews

1,778 Views
1,076 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: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

SolarWinds Network Automation Manager vs. VMware Aria Automation

April 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

13th

Average Rating

5.6

Reviews Sentiment

8.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (110th)

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) (6th)

Mindshare comparison

As of May 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 10.3%, down from 12.2% 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."

"Even with the virtualization, it would take us at least three or four days to create a VM. With vRA we have brought that down to seven minutes. The solution has helped increase infrastructure, agility, speed of provisioning, time to market, application agility. Everything got super fast."

"I personally spend a lot of time in vRealize Orchestrator, so being able to directly tie into the back end on the APIs, I find that to be what really is the most advantageous thing for me."

"vRA helps automate deployment for developers. We do a lot of orchestration or customization within our environment so it will suit each of our customers. So, we have different business units who have their own templates."

"Having an enterprise service catalog and being able to automate various parts of our infrastructure are among the most important components."

"The most valuable feature that we have is that it's able to deploy several different operating systems, it's able to deploy whatever we want. We can take a template, spin it up, revise it, save it back off, and be able to have that for other departments. We can have one for our Dev team and one for our research team which has some specific requirements. We can keep track of them and deploy things automatically."

"The most valuable features for us are capacity planning as well as environment life management; putting in specific templates and workflows that we know are secure. That solidifies the environments that we're in or that are being provisioned. We also know that every environment being provisioned has a lifespan. It affects capacity, so it's great for budgeting, from my perspective, and good for my team."

"The extensibility of the solution when it comes to writing your own ABX actions is a valuable feature. You can write it in PowerShell, JavaScript, or Python, which is great."

"We have integrated our CICD pipeline into an automatic catalog request through some API calls. It can request and provision new virtual machines behind the NSX load balancer, straight out of the CIDC pipeline and add those nodes to the load balancer, request SSL certs, do SSL termination at the load balancer so that it's not encrypted behind the scenes, all of which has really been helpful."

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."

"It would be nice if, at the director level, the manager level, there was a pretty graphic. They don't like to see numbers and line items, they want to see graphs and scales and real world pictures. That would support better reporting."

"I would like them to improve the product training."

"The solution could be lighter. As an administrator, I would like to simplify the number of services I need to deploy. They took a significant step in that direction by removing all the Windows dependencies that we had in the past, but there are still a lot of services consuming resources."

"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."

"VMware needs to make it to where it is not as custom. Right now, you spend a lot of time making the services work. In order to get it up and running initially, that takes time."

"I don't find the solution to be intuitive and user- friendly. The GUI is really complicated. Tracking down logs and errors is very hard. Then, it takes a specialized JavaScript person to build. Also, I'm not sure how the upgrades are going now, but they definitely need to evolve the upgrade process. Finally, the logs are very generalized. Giving more of an indicator of what's actually going wrong, rather than just a generic error code, would help."

"It is complex to use for new users. It should have automated tools or drag-and-drop functionality."

"The stability on the 6.2 version is very bad. It crashes. VMware tech support knows the IIS component is a bit buggy."

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."

"The tool is expensive since it is an enterprise product."

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

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

"We do plan to see ROI with any new implementation of new technologies being implemented within our environment."

"SaltStack is an open-source product."

"As far as value is concerned, it has been essential to our environment. We have been able to deploy VMs quickly and the developers have their own sandbox, so they can spin up and destroy VMs at their own will."

More VMware Aria Automation pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

45%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

13%

Government

Manufacturing Company

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 87% of the time

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Compared 16% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 14% 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 7% of the time

More VMware Aria Automation Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Network Automation

April 2025

SolarWinds Network Automation Manager report

Download SolarWinds Network Automation Manager product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Automation

April 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

April 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: April 2025.

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