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Spacelift vs VMware Cloud Director 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
5.6
Spacelift drastically cuts costs and boosts efficiency in infrastructure deployment, offering significant value, particularly for larger organizations.
Sentiment score
5.8
Organizations using VMware Cloud Director experience mixed ROI, with benefits in efficiency and cost management but variable expenses.
We are just pushing code from Git to GitHub, which then sends it to Spacelift, checking for drifts and starting continuous deployment.
Senior Cloud Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
The metrics show that fewer employees are needed, money is saved based on past experiences with different cloud management or Infrastructure as Code management tools, and efficiency has improved significantly in terms of Infrastructure as Code deployment.
cloud engineer at softwareone
Anything that reduces the amount of work needed to do repetitive tasks is a bonus.
Senior Devops Engineer at SAM Seamless
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.1
Spacelift's customer service receives mixed feedback, praised for responsiveness but compared unfavorably to major services like AWS.
Sentiment score
6.8
VMware Cloud Director's support is helpful yet occasionally slow, with effective documentation aiding independent troubleshooting, but response time varies.
I have asked them various queries, and they provided perfect solutions along with good detailed documentation.
Senior Cloud Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
The customer support is fantastic as they reply over Slack immediately and get to work on a solution whenever I need them.
Senior Manager - Platform Lead at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The SLO and SLA being really fast to answer.
Dev Ops Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Around 70-80% of issues can be easily troubleshot by public documentation and KB articles.
Technical Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Regarding the technical support team of VMware for vCloud Director, I would rate them as good and I would give them a nine out of ten.
Consultant at Lenovo India
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
5.5
Spacelift efficiently scales to manage large workloads and multiple Terraform projects, ensuring stability and functionality across deployments.
Sentiment score
7.3
VMware Cloud Director offers impressive scalability for cloud providers, suitable for medium to large enterprises, but needs private cloud enhancements.
Spacelift's scalability is very good as it scales very well with the environment because I can add agents to it with more workload, so it's quite excellent.
Senior Manager - Platform Lead at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Spacelift can handle increased workloads well, managing more servers as our organization grows, and it is indeed scalable.
Lead Devops Engineer at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
Based on the requests and the Linux Docker machines I provision, it becomes more stable, and the runs happen very quickly.
cloud engineer at softwareone
VMware Cloud Director is quite scalable; I would rate it nine out of ten.
Senior System Engineer & Project Manager at TechnoPeak
I would rate scalability for VMware Cloud Director as 8, especially from the on-premises environment.
Technical Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.5
Spacelift is highly stable and reliable, with a 99% success rate and no significant stability issues reported by users.
Sentiment score
7.6
VMware Cloud Director is stable and reliable, with minor upgrade concerns, improving over time to gain user confidence.
There are occasional problems when trying to increase the parameters of a virtual machine.
Senior System Engineer & Project Manager at TechnoPeak
 

Room For Improvement

Spacelift needs to enhance user onboarding, error clarity, pricing transparency, UI design, integrations, and documentation for improved user experience.
VMware Cloud Director faces criticism for integration issues, outdated features, high pricing, and installation complexity, deterring hybrid cloud use.
It can improve areas in scalability and integrate some open-source tools.
Senior Cloud Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
The engineering team behind Spacelift is very responsive whenever I submit a feature request, and there's a very good chance I would see it within the next year.
Senior Manager - Platform Lead at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The OPA policy writing is not very beginner-friendly either, and the error messages when a policy fails are not always clear.
Senior Cloud Platform Engineer at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees
Cross-cloud migration refers to if a customer has something on Azure, wanting to bring it up on VMware or maybe from VMware to AWS, vice versa.
Technical Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The console methods make management difficult until VMware tools are installed.
Senior System Engineer & Project Manager at TechnoPeak
At Layer 7, the load balancing does not have many features compared to other technologies such as NetScaler from Citrix or F5.
Ingeniero De Preventa De Cloud Y Servicios Profesionales at licenciasonline
 

Setup Cost

Spacelift offers competitive pricing, with substantial savings over alternatives, despite occasional clarity issues in licensing and perceived costs.
VMware Cloud Director is costly but considered valuable for its features and flexibility, with varying licensing models and discounts.
The next standard plan costs three hundred ninety-nine dollars per month for ten concurrent users.
Senior Cloud Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
The spaces have been a major aspect of managing things, and the contacts for the resources I provide internally in Spacelift are quite affordable, effective, and useful.
cloud engineer at softwareone
My experience with pricing shows that the setup cost is reasonable, and the licensing also seems reasonable.
Lead Devops Engineer at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
The pricing for VMware Cloud Director is more or less reasonable, especially when compared to Cisco, which is significantly more expensive.
Senior System Engineer & Project Manager at TechnoPeak
From a pricing perspective, I would rate VMware Cloud Director as 7 because being the available feature set, Broadcom always offered more price compared to another product.
Technical Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Valuable Features

Spacelift enhances team efficiency, collaboration, and infrastructure management with automation, integrations, and Terraform support for improved deployment speed.
VMware Cloud Director offers efficient multitenancy, user autonomy, flexibility, scalability, and robust security features in a user-friendly interface.
We can apply those policies in Spacelift, and the RBAC and access policies features are really excellent in Spacelift, which we do not find in any of the other competitor tools.
Senior Cloud Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Spacelift has positively impacted my organization by reducing manpower, as it reduced the efforts of resources in the team, where previously a job done by two or three engineers can now be easily managed by one engineer using Spacelift.
Technical Lead at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
You create so many different modules and so many different versions. Having a very easy way to navigate and search through them all, and the fact that you can actually see the commit ID and description really helps in discovering what was actually in that version of the module.
Senior Devops Engineer at SAM Seamless
A notable feature is the Independent Disk, which allows detaching a virtual drive from one virtual machine and attaching it to another, enabling more flexibility in operations.
Senior System Engineer & Project Manager at TechnoPeak
The most valuable feature of VMware Cloud Director is segregating the underlying infrastructure for the end user.
Technical Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
I believe the best feature of VMware Cloud Director is the multitenant capability because I use only one deployment and can configure many clients.
Ingeniero De Preventa De Cloud Y Servicios Profesionales at licenciasonline
 

Categories and Ranking

Spacelift
Ranking in Cloud Management
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
AI Software Development (13th)
VMware Cloud Director
Ranking in Cloud Management
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Spacelift is 1.2%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 2.5%, down from 6.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Cloud Director2.5%
Spacelift1.2%
Other96.3%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

G Srivastava - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Cloud Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Automation of cloud infrastructure has transformed how our team manages Terraform workflows
Spacelift has other features beyond Terraform, including Ansible, Pulumi, Terragrunt, and it also helps with Kubernetes, although we haven't used it for the other tools. We have only used it for Terraform Infrastructure as Code, and it has helped us significantly. One standout feature compared to Terraform Cloud is the ability to apply policies. For example, we want to restrict engineers in our team from building servers with a particular SKU, such as in Azure, where we do not want to run servers with a SKU higher than the standard D4sv5. We can apply those policies in Spacelift, and the RBAC and access policies features are really excellent in Spacelift, which we do not find in any of the other competitor tools. The pricing is also competitive compared to Terraform Cloud. The access policy features allow us to assign specific policies since we have three environments in our company: Dev, QA, and Prod. We assign policies so that anyone can run code from Dev and QA servers, but we assign a policy for specific people, such as managers, to run code in Prod. This is a very good feature from Spacelift that we have implemented for the access policy. Spacelift has positively impacted our organization as a CI/CD tool for application deployment and development. Although we use other CI/CD tools like Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions, there wasn't a specific tool for Terraform Infrastructure as Code until Spacelift came along. It allows us to easily configure our servers and build a number of them on our cloud. While other CI/CD tools have started to include configuration features, Spacelift offers many other benefits that make it an excellent tool to use.
KuldeepSingh4 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Experienced users benefit from resource isolation and valuable self-service portal while seeing potential in enhanced infrastructure visibility
VMware is not going further with VMware Cloud Director. They are integrating the VMware Cloud Director feature with Aria Automation only for the upcoming versions, primarily with the VCF 9, and slowly they are integrating some of the parts they have already integrated, and they might not continue with VMware Cloud Director in the future. They can make it more granular to ensure hardware-level segregation, the underlying infrastructure level of segregation for the end user, and a separate security boundary where users can access the end-to-end layer. End-to-end layer means my software layer along with the hardware layer. If they want to do a certain level of troubleshooting primarily on the ESXi part, that is what I feel is lacking for now because for an end user accessing the SSP, the underlying infrastructure is a kind of black box for them. For VMware Cloud Director, it can be more comprehensive if we enable public cloud integration as well. In today's date, customers are adopting a multi-cloud environment where VMware Cloud Director is much feasible to leverage the underlying VMware backend architecture. If VMware Cloud Director could be made to have more integration with the public cloud and do the day one, day two jobs for public cloud interface as well, that would be beneficial. Additionally, I recommend leveraging the VMware Cloud Director layer if a customer has a multi-cloud environment and is planning some cross-cloud migration capability. Cross-cloud migration refers to if a customer has something on Azure, wanting to bring it up on VMware or maybe from VMware to AWS, vice versa. In that case, VMware Cloud Director should provide some cross-cloud migration capability as well.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Educational Organization
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Construction Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise39
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Spacelift?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was that licensing was somewhat unclear when HashiCorp changed their own licensing.
What needs improvement with Spacelift?
It would be nice to have out-of-the-box A/B testing with Spacelift because we still use some custom features for that. Out-of-the-box A/B testing is the main thing I would like to add about the nee...
What is your primary use case for Spacelift?
We manage a lot of AWS deployments with Spacelift configs, so we have a main use case for it. We also use it for versioning and spinning up new environments. Recently we used Spacelift for deployin...
Would you change anything about VMware vCloud Director if you could?
VMware vCloud Director works very well and there are not many things that I would like to see changed. However, a single thing comes to mind when I think of improvements and that is integration. In...
What is the biggest improvement you saw at your company after you started using VMware vCloud Director?
For my company, VMware vCloud Director noticeably increased operational efficiency. When I started working here a few years ago, my organization was using another cloud management tool. We switched...
Is vCloud Director convenient for building applications?
When it comes to building applications, vCloud Director offers you various methods to create cloud-ready ones. For example: Your DevOps team is supported through Infrastructure as Code services w...
 

Also Known As

No data available
vCloud Director
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.
Find out what your peers are saying about Spacelift vs. VMware Cloud Director and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.