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Spacelift vs VMware Aria Operations comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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
19th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Aria Operations
Ranking in Cloud Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
375
Ranking in other categories
Virtualization Management Tools (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Spacelift is 1.0%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations is 6.7%, down from 8.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
VMware Aria Operations6.7%
Spacelift1.0%
Other92.3%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Moloko Mokubedi - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Amar Sorro - PeerSpot reviewer
Manage and monitor crucial banking operations with deep logging and efficient alerting
The most valuable features of VMware Aria Operations include its excellent monitoring capabilities. It allows me to perform deep monitoring and logging of the entire environment, providing a quick alarm and warning system through email. These features help me in efficiently managing virtual machines. The solution also offers easy access to VMware KB articles for problem resolution, ensuring quick access to troubleshooting information.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Spacelift is like an extension of Terraform, where everything can be visibly managed."
"I appreciate that I just have to connect to my AWS account with my credentials, and Spacelift handles the rest."
"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."
"One key feature is the Spacelift policies, which we can attach to deployments to ensure compliance with our standards."
"The one that comes to mind is the ability for us to see how our VDI environment."
"Based on those usage patterns, we can determine when our best maintenance times are and when we need to scale things up or down."
"I have found the reporting tool, capacity planning, and reports for performance monitoring the most valuable features."
"The most valuable feature is performance monitoring. It's much easier to show problems to users. If someone comes and says, “My server is slow,” I can show them exactly what's happening with the server over time and at that exact moment as well."
"The scalability is great. With vRealize Operations Manager, we are able to create remote collection nodes if we feel that it's too intensive for the current deployment. The remote collection nodes allow us to collect more metrics from other sources."
"It provides us with predictive analysis of the capacity, helping us plan the scalability of resources."
"For me, it's the dashboard."
"One of the most valuable features is the ability to see "before" and "after". It will show you the current state, and then show you what it looks like after it does the optimization."
 

Cons

"In the free version, there's no straightforward way to be notified once a deployment is finished."
"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."
"Synchronization can be difficult when using older and newer versions with Kubernetes and HashiCorp."
"The database services in the tool as backup services are friendly and can be deployed in the release to production. However, in the new features, I would like to include more online documentation that can help service generate early alerts."
"With our environment right now, stability is the one sticking point. There hasn't been a great deal of handholding in between the different versions, so we've run into problems with there being what I would call "more than just the average change between versions" and it's caused a loss of data for us in the past."
"The solution is not very stable. It often disconnects from the environment or stops collecting data, leading to challenges."
"The only problem we have is monitoring of the disk space used by the program."
"It was just a case of going in, looking around, learning it, and just getting a little bit of initial help for a few days."
"The whole interface is like an information overload, it just bombards me with messages, warnings, and alerts. When I follow through on the majority of these messages, I realize that I'm really just wasting time because they're not really real problems."
"We have started to do containers and I would like to see a feature to monitor our container infrastructure. If we can do our monitoring and performance troubleshooting of them through this tool, that would be a nice-to-have."
"I haven't had to use technical support for this version but I have had to use them in the past with other versions. There have been some challenges with them. It's hard to get through to the right person and resolving issues in previous versions was hard."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is a bit expensive product."
"This is an enterprise-level product and everything is included in the VMware Suite license."
"Most small users don't adopt VMware Aria Operations until it's necessary. Small businesses are looking for it, too. We need more monitoring and insights, so we're analyzing solutions to help us out here. I rate the solution’s pricing a five out of ten."
"The product is too expensive to implement."
"Pricing could always be cheaper, but it's acceptable."
"Don't overallocate! This means that you don't have to buy many hosts. You can save money that way."
"We did an enterprise license agreement with our VMware partner and put this in our bundle. We tried it and loved it, so we use it now."
"When we last did a comparison of solutions, the pricing was equal or similar."
"We would like to build custom dashboards in the standard license. Right now, this is available in the enterprise license, not the standard license."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Educational Organization
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business62
Midsize Enterprise62
Large Enterprise278
 

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.
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...
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.
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...
Is VMware Aria Operations a user friendly solution?
In terms of user-friendliness, VMware Aria Operations is one of the best solutions out there. It is not overly complex to set up and you can rely on the technical support to provide you with assis...
What is the most useful new feature of VMware Aria Operations?
For me, the alerts features are the most unique part of this product, no matter the current name it uses. When they introduced the new version of VMware Aria Operations, they also introduced more a...
 

Also Known As

No data available
VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), vCenter Operations Manager (VCOPS)
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Science Applications International Corporation, Tribune Media, Heartland Payment Systems, Telkom Indonesia, Columbia Sportswear, iGATE, CSS Corp, Angel Broking, Adira Finance, Hipskind, Beiersdorf Shared Services, Innovate Mas Indonesia, Adobe, Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi , Join Experience S.A, Borusan Holdings, Department of Transport - Abu Dhabi
Find out what your peers are saying about Spacelift vs. VMware Aria Operations and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,566 professionals have used our research since 2012.