Sophos Cloud Optix vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

Sophos and VMware are both solutions in the Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) category. Sophos is ranked #29 with an average rating of 7.0, while VMware is ranked #17 with an average rating of 7.8. Sophos holds a 0.3% mindshare in CSPM, compared to VMware’s 0.3% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Sophos users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of VMware users who would recommend it.

Sophos Cloud Optix

Read 4 Sophos Cloud Optix reviews

365 Views
259 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Automation

Read 170 VMware Aria Automation reviews

314 Views
159 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Sophos Cloud Optix

VMware Aria Automation

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Sophos Cloud Optix and VMware Aria Automation based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Sophos Cloud Optix vs. VMware Aria Automation Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Sophos Cloud Optix vs. VMware Aria Automation

April 2025

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Helped 850,028 peers since 2012

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

Sophos Cloud Optix

Ranking in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

29th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VMware Aria Automation

Ranking in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

17th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

170

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Management (1st), Configuration Management (7th), Network Automation (3rd), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (6th)

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) category, the mindshare of Sophos Cloud Optix is 0.3%, down from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 0.3%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

Featured Reviews

Jean Desir

Sr Network Engineer at Raptor Trading

DLP is a valuable feature that we use a lot for info audits.

The dashboard and the process for applying policies could be more intuitive. Cloud Optix isn't that difficult once you get the hang of it, but the IT folks managing this want it to be more user-friendly. Deploying the agents could be more seamless, too. Ideally, Cloud Optix would automate adding agents into your environment by integrating with Active Directory or some policy.

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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

"I find Cloud Optix to be a valuable solution since it provides a single, unified dashboard to monitor cloud assets, such as AWS and Azure."

"The most valuable feature of Sophos Cloud Optix is the simple way to manage my devices on the network. Additionally, it is easy to navigate and has a user-friendly interface."

"The most valuable feature for me would be the solution's endpoint protection."

"I find Cloud Optix to be a valuable solution since it provides a single, unified dashboard to monitor cloud assets, such as AWS and Azure."

"DLP is a valuable feature that we use a lot for info audits."

"The big benefit is it will spin up VMs quickly so it would take about 13 to 15 minutes to deploy a virtual machine. Whereas, if I were doing it based on an email from users who are requesting VMs, it might take time for me to hear back from them. This could be anywhere from an hour to a day."

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

"It benefits the speed of our development, and the speed of anything we test and send through to production."

"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."

"The extensibility of it and the customization of a lot of the Blueprints, that you can customize, and the community as a whole. There's a ton of community-generated Blueprints that might be (helpful) to set up a design for your automation needs, that you can use as a base and go on from there and make changes to it."

"VMware Aria Automation supports integration with ServiceNow, Kubernetes, and other tools. It is cloud-agnostic, making it a stronger platform than Ansible."

"The most valuable feature is vRA’s ability to integrate whether with additional VMware vRealize suites or other vendors' cloud products."

"Using the VMware vRealize self-service portal, we can better manage the lifecycle."

More VMware Aria Automation pros

Cons

"Sophos should enhance its AI-driven detection features and anomaly detection."

"The dashboard and the process for applying policies could be more intuitive. Cloud Optix isn't that difficult once you get the hang of it, but the IT folks managing this want it to be more user-friendly."

"Sophos should enhance its AI-driven detection features and anomaly detection."

"There are times when the devices are at maximum capacity, and it takes a while before the device is updated. For example, if the device has a virus, and it's not aligned to connect to the network, even after you've scanned the device, and cleaned out the virus, once the management clears the system to allow it back on the network it takes some time. It can be frustrating when you have your line manager or in management affected trying to access the network."

"The setup was a little bit complex."

"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 initial setup was not straightforward. It was not simple, and we had a PoC. We had VMware help us deploy it, and it took them an exorbitant amount of time."

"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 solution is intuitive, but not necessarily user-friendly. In particular, it's the documentation. It's a lot of going-through-the-weeds types of scenarios. There is just an abundance of information, so it's a matter of understanding how the objects or the relationships exist, and then, obviously, being able to access that information and knowing how to make use of it."

"With the workflow aspect, which has manual intervention, a policy needs to be approved by somebody. There could be better management of that piece with better templates. It is like a workflow engine, but does not have enough example templates to do certain things. A lot of people waste a lot of time trying to figure out the same thing, and everybody is trying to figure out the same thing, e.g., how to make a MySQL cluster in a Windows environment?"

"A hardened set of tests would be much appreciated."

"vCenter and vRA, I believe they share two different databases so sometimes you have to somehow sync them up. I wish there was only one database between the two or, somehow, one database would rule over the other one, so if you have both products, the vCenter might use the vRA database. Otherwise, when you do stuff in vCenter, you have to write a command on vRA to update the databases."

"The connectivity between VMs is easy, but they can be made more effective if we have a single proof point where we can configure all the biggest data at a single point."

More VMware Aria Automation cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Regarding the pricing for Sophos Cloud Optix, I would say that it was a very good price."

"The solution is pretty expensive but provides good workload management."

"A simplified version for small businesses would be good."

"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."

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

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

"It made the provisioning of the virtual machines easier and faster. We can react more quickly to customers' demands."

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

"The solution is free of cost."

More VMware Aria Automation pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

University

Government

Insurance Company

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

13%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Sophos Cloud Optix?

The most valuable feature for me would be the solution's endpoint protection.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Sophos Cloud Optix?

Sophos should enhance its AI-driven detection features and anomaly detection. The solution focuses on cloud security posture management. Fortinet, having acquired Lacework, seems to be a step ahead...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Sophos Cloud Optix?

One primary use case for Sophos Cloud Optix is cloud visibility. I use it for compliance requirements and improving end user experience. The solution provides a unified dashboard for multi-cloud en...

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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...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

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 46% of the time

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs Sophos Cloud Optix

Compared 36% of the time

AWS Security Hub vs Sophos Cloud Optix

Compared 19% of the time

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Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs VMware Aria Automation

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

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

April 2025

Download Sophos Cloud Optix product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Automation

April 2025

Download VMware Aria Automation product report

Also Known As

No data available

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

Overview

Easily identify cloud resource vulnerabilities, ensure compliance, and respond to threats faster.

Sophos

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

Information Not Available

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

Buyer's Guide

Sophos Cloud Optix vs. VMware Aria Automation

April 2025

Free Report: Sophos Cloud Optix vs. VMware Aria Automation

Find out what your peers are saying about Sophos Cloud Optix vs. VMware Aria Automation and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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