Spacelift vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

Spacelift and Broadcom are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. Spacelift is ranked #20 with an average rating of 8.0, while Broadcom is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.0. Spacelift holds a 1.2% mindshare in CM, compared to Broadcom’s 7.1% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Spacelift users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

Spacelift

Read 5 Spacelift reviews

605 Views
490 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Automation

Read 171 VMware Aria Automation reviews

7,806 Views
4,293 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: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Spacelift vs. VMware Aria Automation

December 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 881,114 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

AI Software Development (18th)

VMware Aria Automation

Ranking in Cloud Management

3rd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

171

Ranking in other categories

Configuration Management (7th), Network Automation (6th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (19th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (5th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Spacelift is 1.2%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 7.1%, down from 10.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
VMware Aria Automation	7.1%
Spacelift	1.2%
Other	91.7%

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

Sudheer Kumar Jamjam

Technical Lead Cloud DevOps Engineer at Deloitte

Everything can be visibly managed, scheduling and state management features are pretty good

We've integrated it with source control management tools like GitLab and Bitbucket. The scheduling and state management features are pretty good using Spacelift. It integrates with tools like Terraform and Kubernetes for policies, but we haven't worked on the compliance part. Spacelift streamlines collaboration among our development and operations teams. We use it for CI/CD as well. It can handle automation strategies. Whenever you put your YAML files and integrate them with Spacelift, it will scan the code and show where you need to make changes.

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"Being able to give provisioning of environments over to our developers and the different teams has enabled them to put up environments faster and also freed up time for the IT team. This is really one of our bread and butter solutions for our developers."

"It provides visibility into the VM space."

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

"Upgrades have been extremely simple with their Lifecycle Manager product."

"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."

"We needed vRA to easily integrate with our hypervisor, orchestration, security (tenant segmentation, PCI), workflows, custom code, and internal monitoring/management tools. Since we didn’t have time to develop our own web front-end during the development sprints, vRA saved considerable time and resource cycles. Its ability to easily integrate with all of the VMware cloud products as well as public cloud providers, like AWS and Azure, out-of-the-box, makes it an even more powerful tool."

"We monitor the configurations against CIS standards. We run CIS benchmarks and maintain configurations with higher CIS values for each server."

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."

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

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

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

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

"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."

"Technical support could be improved. I definitely feel that the product is accelerating faster than the support engineers are able to keep up with the knowledge needed to know what's going on. The developers maintaining vRealize Automation are doing a great job improving it, but VMware is not doing a great job of training the people who we call to get support for it."

"For the administrator, it can be a little challenging. For the administrator, there are a lot of moving parts. It is fine once you figure out where the knobs are you need to twiddle, but it can be a challenge to get it up and running."

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

"Multitenancy management is a little bit difficult to do, so it is an area that can be improved."

"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."

"Automation or scripting should be simplified so that administrators who are not experts can have a better grasp of automation."

"They should make it a little bit more dynamic, a little bit easier to deal with large-scale AD deployments. They need to make it a little more enterprise-ready. That is the one thing that kills us."

More VMware Aria Automation cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is a bit expensive product."

"SaltStack is an open-source product."

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

"The solution is free of cost."

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

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

"The pricing is very high."

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

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

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

881,114 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Computer Software Company

Educational Organization

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

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?

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. Spa...

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

env zero vs Spacelift

Compared 50% of the time

Scalr vs Spacelift

Compared 32% of the time

HPE OneSphere vs Spacelift

Compared 9% of the time

Morpheus vs Spacelift

Compared 9% of the time

More Spacelift Competitors

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs VMware Aria Automation

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

More VMware Aria Automation Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Spacelift

January 2026

Download Spacelift product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Automation

January 2026

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.

Broadcom

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

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

Buyer's Guide

Spacelift vs. VMware Aria Automation

December 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: December 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

881,114 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.