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VMware Aria Automation vs VMware Cloud Director comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 27, 2025

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
7.4
VMware Aria Automation enhances efficiency, reduces workload, decreases VM creation time, improves productivity, and positively impacts business operations.
Sentiment score
6.5
VMware Cloud Director offers varied ROI, balancing fast efficiency gains with high costs and mixed customer support experiences.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.7
VMware Aria Automation's support is responsive and knowledgeable but sometimes inconsistent; premium plans offer faster resolutions.
Sentiment score
6.9
VMware Cloud Director's service is praised for helpfulness and documentation, though technical support experiences mixed reviews regarding efficiency.
We never had major issues to report or request support.
Around 70-80% of issues can be easily troubleshot by public documentation and KB articles.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
VMware Aria Automation is praised for its scalability, supporting large enterprises effectively with easy expansion and robust performance.
Sentiment score
7.4
VMware Cloud Director offers robust scalability for diverse cloud needs, praised for rapid provisioning and high user capacity.
VMware Cloud Director is quite scalable; I would rate it nine out of ten.
I would rate scalability for VMware Cloud Director as 8, especially from the on-premises environment.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
6.8
VMware Aria Automation is stable, with occasional issues during integration, upgrades, or rare service failures, generally efficiently resolved.
Sentiment score
7.7
VMware Cloud Director is reliable and resilient, though some integration issues exist; users generally report high stability and performance.
There are occasional problems when trying to increase the parameters of a virtual machine.
 

Room For Improvement

Users seek improved VMware Aria Automation integration, streamlined UI, enhanced documentation, and better cloud service pricing and interoperability.
VMware Cloud Director needs better third-party integration, enhanced features, improved GUI, stable components, and clearer documentation.
It operates for both of my products, however, as a product, it is complicated to integrate and automate with other products.
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.
The console methods make management difficult until VMware tools are installed.
 

Setup Cost

VMware Aria Automation is cost-effective for cloud stability and integration, though pricing and licensing models can be confusing.
VMware Cloud Director is costly but offers unique features and flexibility, with potential discounts mitigating expenses for some users.
The pricing for VMware Cloud Director is more or less reasonable, especially when compared to Cisco, which is significantly more expensive.
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.
 

Valuable Features

VMware Aria Automation streamlines multi-cloud operations, enhancing efficiency and agility with automation, customization, and intuitive user capabilities.
VMware Cloud Director provides secure, scalable cloud management with multi-tenancy, automation, and seamless integration for diverse enterprise needs.
It helps us automate the workflow of creating many VMs and the TensorFlow key method.
We have strong regulations for maintaining compliance and mitigating risks with this product.
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.
The most valuable feature of VMware Cloud Director is segregating the underlying infrastructure for the end user.
 

Categories and Ranking

VMware Aria Automation
Ranking in Cloud Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
171
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (6th), Network Automation (3rd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (16th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (5th)
VMware Cloud Director
Ranking in Cloud Management
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
69
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 9.8%, down from 11.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 5.6%, down from 7.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
VMware Aria Automation9.8%
VMware Cloud Director5.6%
Other84.6%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Le Quang Long - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
KuldeepSingh4 - PeerSpot reviewer
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
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
20%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business32
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise130
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise36
 

Questions from the Community

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 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 ...
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 ...
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

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.
Find out what your peers are saying about VMware Aria Automation vs. VMware Cloud Director and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
867,349 professionals have used our research since 2012.