Spacelift vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

Spacelift and VMware are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. Spacelift is ranked #20 with an average rating of 8.0, while VMware is ranked #3 with an average rating of 7.8. Spacelift holds a 0.7% mindshare in CM, compared to VMware’s 10.6% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Spacelift users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of VMware users who would recommend it.

Spacelift

Read 5 Spacelift reviews

280 Views
280 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Automation

Read 170 VMware Aria Automation reviews

8,330 Views
4,498 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Spacelift

VMware Aria Automation

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

VMware Aria Automation and Spacelift compete in the automation software category. VMware Aria Automation seems to have the upper hand in enterprise-level features and integrations, while Spacelift stands out with its simplicity and modern interface.

Features: VMware Aria Automation offers extensibility and integration capabilities ideal for complex environments. It includes infrastructure automation, multi-machine blueprints, and integration with other VMware products. Spacelift integrates seamlessly with Terraform, provides a user-friendly interface, and supports infrastructure as code, making it appealing for uncomplicated cloud management. Additionally, it incorporates GitOps for DevOps workflow support. The primary distinction is VMware's comprehensive customization and integration versus Spacelift's emphasis on ease of use.

Room for Improvement: VMware Aria Automation could benefit from better documentation, easier platform integration, and enhanced user interfaces. The complexity in managing its components is another area for improvement. Spacelift lacks features for complex deployments, particularly in orchestration and dependency management. The SaaS version of Spacelift surpasses the self-hosted one, suggesting a need for feature parity.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Aria Automation is generally deployed on-premises or in private clouds. While the technical support is commendable, some complexity in deployment phases exists. In contrast, Spacelift focuses on public cloud deployment simplicity, offering community-driven support praised for its effectiveness. VMware has established customer support, whereas Spacelift relies more on community resources.

Pricing and ROI: VMware Aria Automation, while expensive, is viewed as valuable due to its feature-rich offerings, particularly for large enterprises. Its pricing is often bundled with other VMware products, a point of contention for some users. Spacelift offers a more cost-effective solution compared to competitors like Terraform Enterprise, making it appealing for enterprises aiming for reduced expenses. VMware’s pricing is higher but justified by its features, whereas Spacelift is noted for significant cost savings through effective use.

To learn more, read our detailed Spacelift vs. VMware Aria Automation Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Spacelift vs. VMware Aria Automation

July 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 865,384 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

Spacelift

Ranking in Cloud Management

20th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VMware Aria Automation

Ranking in Cloud Management

3rd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

170

Ranking in other categories

Configuration Management (7th), Network Automation (3rd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (17th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (5th)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Spacelift is 0.7%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 10.6%, down from 11.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

Moloko Mokubedi

Junior DevOps Engineer at Kartoza (Pty) Ltd

The GitOps feature automatically picks up changes from my GitHub projects

There are a few areas for improvement. For instance, getting notification webhooks is not easy. In the free version, there's no straightforward way to be notified once a deployment is finished. Spacelift requires creating a notification policy, which involves using the open policies framework. However, this feature is not available on the free plan. Additionally, for each new project, I need to create a new IAM role, which is not optimal. It would be better if I could use a single role for all interactions with my AWS account.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I appreciate that I just have to connect to my AWS account with my credentials, and Spacelift handles the rest."

"Spacelift is like an extension of Terraform, where everything can be visibly managed."

"One key feature is the Spacelift policies, which we can attach to deployments to ensure compliance with our standards."

"A valuable feature of Spacelift is that you can attach labels, and it is a modernized tool for infrastructure deployments. It is pull request-based, and you can see all the Terraform plan and apply logs on the pull request itself, which is not available across any other CI/CD tools."

"Knowing the HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) makes it easier to use without issues."

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

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

"With the advent of the automation, we've been able to give DevOps the ability to spin up environments, give them lease times, and then have it automatically reclaim the environment."

"The setup was complex in many ways. The first reason is that we have many teams who work on it so it gets complicated gathering all of the people. The second reason is that it can be complicated to install it quickly, within a reasonable amount of time."

"The feature of automated balancing which implemented between two data centers solely for the purpose of a recovery plan is valuable."

"It has saved us a lot of time and work. It helped us to reorganize some of our service lines, so we could be more efficient. For example, on our open system server team, we had 15 people building servers, now we have two."

"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."

"For repeated installations and provisioning of VMs, we now have a clear definition of what has been installed, and we can monitor all that stuff."

More VMware Aria Automation pros

Cons

"The self-hosted version does not have a lot of features compared to the SaaS version, such as cloud integrations for Azure and GCP."

"Spacelift currently lacks features that can help with complex type deployments and coordination for major deployments."

"If you are a small enterprise organization, below 500 people, I would not recommend it."

"In the free version, there's no straightforward way to be notified once a deployment is finished."

"Synchronization can be difficult when using older and newer versions with Kubernetes and HashiCorp."

"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."

"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."

"It is not intuitive or user-friendly. It's complicated as heck. We actually hired VMware Professional Services to come in. I understand the newer version, which we're not quite on yet, is easier and that the interface is better. But the product is really a profession unto itself. The user interface could be improved on."

"Normally, on the first call to technical support, you don't get the right person. The log analysis takes a long time. This is something which should be improved."

"It would be nice in the next release if they added in tool tips. Whether you're putting it together, adding a blueprint, or you're making a change in the system, highlighting or selecting something and having it tell you what it does or what it will do would be nice. Because it's such a complex system, it's hard to work with unless you've been using it for years to know what everything is doing."

"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."

"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."

"The product's features for hybrid cloud integration could be better."

More VMware Aria Automation cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is a bit expensive product."

"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."

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

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

"The pricing is very high."

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

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

"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."

"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."

More VMware Aria Automation pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Management solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Educational Organization

11%

Media Company

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Spacelift?

I've never checked the pricing because I enjoy using it for free. Besides the notification feature, I haven't needed any paid features.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Spacelift?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Spacelift?

I use Spacelift to deploy my applications, particularly AWS applications and infrastructure to my personal AWS account.

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

Comparisons

env0 vs Spacelift

Compared 69% of the time

Scalr vs Spacelift

Compared 31% of the time

More Spacelift Competitors

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 10% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 8% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 6% of the time

More VMware Aria Automation Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Spacelift

July 2025

Download Spacelift product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Automation

July 2025

Download VMware Aria Automation product report

Also Known As

No data available

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

Overview

Spacelift provides a sophisticated infrastructure management platform with key features such as Drift Detection and Terraform integration, simplifying complex deployments and enhancing user workflows through an intuitive interface.

Spacelift excels in modernizing infrastructure management by integrating smoothly with Terraform, using a pull request-based approach for visibility into logs. It automates change detection using GitOps from GitHub and supports AWS connectivity with credential management. Despite its strengths, some users find room for improvement in supporting smaller enterprises and offering more seamless cloud integrations with self-hosted versions. Handling of HashiCorp Vault secrets and cumbersome notification webhooks may require additional setup effort.

What are the most valuable features?

Drift Detection: Ensures user edits are managed effectively, reducing configuration discrepancies.
Terraform Integration: Seamless compatibility with Terraform for robust infrastructure management.
GitOps: Automates change detection from GitHub, ensuring efficient workflows.
Compliance Policies: Helps maintain infrastructure within regulatory guidelines.
Stack Execution: Enables runs with label attachments for organized operations.

What benefits or ROI can users expect?

Improved Deployment Control: Default plan prompts support structured and controlled deployments.
Streamlined Terraform Management: Enhanced visibility into logs aids in transparent and efficient operations.
Efficient AWS Interactions: Credential management simplifies connections, making operations more fluid.
Dynamic Infrastructure Handling: Supports significant projects by replacing tools like Terraform Enterprise.

In specific industries, Spacelift is primarily utilized for infrastructure management and deployment across platforms like AWS, Azure, and GCP. In banking architecture, it replaces Terraform Enterprise, ensuring secure and efficient operations. Projects like Google Fiber benefit from its capability to import and manage data effectively, engaging users with HashiCorp Language and GitHub for CI/CD integration.

Spacelift

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

Spacelift vs. VMware Aria Automation

July 2025

Free Report: Spacelift vs. VMware Aria Automation

Find out what your peers are saying about Spacelift vs. VMware Aria Automation and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Spacelift vs. VMware Aria Automation report.

See our list of best Cloud Management vendors.

We monitor all Cloud Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.