VMware Aria Automation vs XM Cyber comparison

VMware and XM Cyber are both solutions in the Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) category. VMware is ranked #17 with an average rating of 7.8, while XM Cyber is ranked #25 with an average rating of 8.0. VMware holds a 0.3% mindshare in CSPM, compared to XM Cyber’s 0.9% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of VMware users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of XM Cyber users who would recommend it.

VMware Aria Automation

Read 170 VMware Aria Automation reviews

314 Views
159 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

XM Cyber

Read 2 XM Cyber reviews

767 Views
485 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Automation

XM Cyber

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between VMware Aria Automation and XM Cyber based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed VMware Aria Automation vs. XM Cyber Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Automation vs. XM Cyber

April 2025

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Helped 850,028 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

VMware Aria Automation

Ranking in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

17th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

170

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Management (1st), Configuration Management (7th), Network Automation (3rd), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (6th)

XM Cyber

Ranking in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

25th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Continuous Controls Monitoring (7th), Vulnerability Management (30th), Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) (4th)

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) category, the mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 0.3%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of XM Cyber is 0.9%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

Featured Reviews

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.

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HolgerHeimann

Ffounder at It.sec

Reliable with no false-positives and helpful support

There's a lot of improvement possible, however, most of it is in the details. I personally like the concept, as it's pretty straightforward and the product is not trying to overload functionality. It's a clean and straightforward approach. You know what you get. Most of the improvements are detail improvements. They're pretty open to future requests as well, so we send them a lot of suggestions. For example, at the moment, they have something called Battleground. That's a visualization of the network, and it's a visualization of the attack paths that are possible. The program uses so-called scenarios, and we say, "Okay, I'm watching traffic for maybe 24 hours," and then you get a result for that scenario, what happens in that time with what the attack paths are, et cetera. The result of the same scenario yesterday or tomorrow may be different as something might change. In that, one of the things I'm currently missing, which is on the list to be added, is some kind of diff visualization. For example, showing a two-screen split of activity. On the left side of the screen, that's how it was yesterday; on the right side, that's how it is today; and here are the differences. We'd like to see a cheaper price.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Even with the virtualization, it would take us at least three or four days to create a VM. With vRA we have brought that down to seven minutes. The solution has helped increase infrastructure, agility, speed of provisioning, time to market, application agility. Everything got super fast."

"I can make a blueprint with an Active Directory deployment. With everything prepared, people can start installing our products."

"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 big benefit is it will spin up VMs quickly so it would take about 13 to 15 minutes to deploy a virtual machine. Whereas, if I were doing it based on an email from users who are requesting VMs, it might take time for me to hear back from them. This could be anywhere from an hour to a day."

"I want to build automation that is intelligent, part of the fabric of our environment, and is somewhat self-sustaining. I think SaltStack can help me do this."

"It is mostly for our tech support to test new versions, find bugs, and troubleshoot what is happening at customer sites."

"value; It has provided my development team a pure self-service portal. We deploy thousands of machines and reclaim. So, their time to business, and their time to market has been improved exponentially."

"The product's most valuable features are ease of automation."

More VMware Aria Automation pros

"What I personally like very much, from my experience, is that it is very reliable."

"The platform's most valuable feature is attack simulation."

Cons

"SaltStack's features are minimal."

"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."

"It has a learning curve."

"There is a little bit of pain when it comes to libraries and what is needed to run the product."

"They could extend the ability to use vRealize Orchestrator Automation for organizations with multiple tenants. It should be easier to operate and extend different capabilities from vRealize Orchestrator. Currently, it's difficult to build advanced services in Aria Automation because you need to use the vRealize Orchestrator."

"I'm not wanting any particular feature; but there should be cost reductions. VMware comes at a high cost, and that's why we are in the process of transitioning to a more affordable alternative."

"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."

"Deploying and configuring the solution takes a lot of time."

More VMware Aria Automation cons

"XM Cyber could identify all areas of vulnerability. They could expand the identification span for different areas."

"We'd like to see a cheaper price."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"SaltStack is an open-source product."

"There is confusion between licensing levels. There are three different licensed versions of vRealize Automation, and there are different things which can happen in each of them."

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

"It is an open-source product."

"VMware Aria Automation is expensive."

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

"A simplified version for small businesses would be good."

"It is an expensive product. After VMware's acquisition by Broadcom, there was a rise in the price of VMware Aria Automation."

More VMware Aria Automation pricing and cost advice

"We have to pay standard licensing fees."

See which vendors are best for you

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

13%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

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...

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 ...

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What do you like most about XM Cyber?

The platform's most valuable feature is attack simulation.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for XM Cyber?

We have to pay standard licensing fees. There are no additional costs. It is an expensive product. I rate the pricing a seven out of ten.

See all answers

What needs improvement with XM Cyber?

XM Cyber could identify all areas of vulnerability. They could expand the identification span for different areas.

See all answers

Comparisons

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 11% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 10% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 7% of the time

More VMware Aria Automation Competitors

Pentera vs XM Cyber

Compared 22% of the time

Cymulate vs XM Cyber

Compared 16% of the time

Wiz vs XM Cyber

Compared 13% of the time

SafeBreach vs XM Cyber

Compared 9% of the time

Qualys VMDR vs XM Cyber

Compared 6% of the time

More XM Cyber Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Automation

April 2025

Download VMware Aria Automation product report

Buyer's Guide

Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)

May 2025

Download XM Cyber product report

Also Known As

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

No data available

Overview

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

XM Cyber is a leading hybrid cloud security company that’s changing the way innovative organizations approach cyber risk. Our attack path management platform continuously uncovers hidden attack paths to your critical assets across cloud and on-prem environments, so you can cut them off at key junctures and eradicate risk with a fraction of the effort. This overcomes the big disconnect that security teams experience when they’re presented with endless alerts, yet can’t see which exposures impact risk the most, how they come together to be exploited by an attacker, or how to efficiently eliminate them. This approach is a complete game-changer, which is why some of the world’s largest, most complex organizations choose XM Cyber to help eradicate risk. Founded by top executives from the Israeli cyber intelligence community, XM Cyber has offices in North America, Europe, and Israel.

XM Cyber

Sample Customers

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

Hamburg Port Authority, Plymouth Rock Corporation

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Automation vs. XM Cyber

April 2025

Free Report: VMware Aria Automation vs. XM Cyber

Find out what your peers are saying about VMware Aria Automation vs. XM Cyber and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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