VMware Aria Automation vs Zesty comparison

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VMware Aria Automation

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

VMware Aria Automation and Zesty compete in the automation and optimization domain. Zesty holds a stronger position with advanced optimization features, while VMware Aria Automation excels in terms of comprehensive support and pricing strategies.

Features: VMware Aria Automation offers robust integration capabilities, custom workflow configurations, and flexibility for diverse enterprise environments. Zesty provides advanced automated cloud optimization features, efficient resource utilization, and significant cost-saving capabilities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Aria Automation provides a structured deployment process, extensive documentation, and robust customer service for a seamless setup experience. Zesty features rapid deployment with an intuitive setup; however, it offers less comprehensive customer service support, making implementation quicker but service less extensive.

Pricing and ROI: VMware Aria Automation is cost-effective, balancing initial setup costs with significant long-term ROI due to its comprehensive feature set. Zesty, requiring a higher initial investment, offers substantial ROI through reduced cloud expenses and enhanced operational efficiency, highlighting VMware's affordability against Zesty's focus on optimization-driven ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed VMware Aria Automation vs. Zesty Report (Updated: December 2025).

VMware Aria Automation vs. Zesty

December 2025

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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 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)

Zesty

Ranking in Cloud Management

27th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

8.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Cost Management (14th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 7.1%, down from 10.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zesty is 0.7%, up from 0.3% 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%
Zesty	0.7%
Other	92.2%

Cloud Management

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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Srinivas Rayudu

Director at Zensa Technologies

Managing complex onboarding has been challenging but automated cost optimization delivers strong savings

Zesty is a good solution; however, the learning curve can be complex for new users without a solid tech background, posing a challenge in training and the initial setup process. I would deduct one point for this aspect since everything else is fine. A specific example of where the learning curve caused issues is when we introduced Zesty to our new development team, which struggled to understand the platform while working on a project related to AI and ML. Our system architects explained how Zesty works, but I believe a more proactive approach to training and foundational data could help teams be more self-sufficient and less reliant on internal support.

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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

"The most valuable feature is the way that it plugs into our monitoring systems, and Infoblox and Puppet."

"The product is very user-friendly."

"We have it deployed in a highly-available environment and scalability is nice because we just had another ESX host and then we are able to increase the capacity."

"We use it to deploy databases and testing environments. It spins up quickly and also break down fast."

"It helps me build a big catalog and provide it to my end users."

"The whole VMR ecosystem allows us to serve multiple customers, multiple organizations and also multiple units per customer. We can cover every level without using the whole VRA and the rest of the ecosystem. We don't need to use a separate product to provide separate functionalities for the customer. We can cover all the use cases using only one product on our side which is really helpful. T"

"It has definitely increased speed of VM deployment. When a normal server-request would come in, it might take anywhere from three to four days to deploy. Now, within 15 minutes, they can click and have something up and running."

"It has integration with the rest of VMware solutions."

More VMware Aria Automation pros

"Zesty has positively impacted our organization by providing a good return on investment, with a total reported percentage of savings around 40 to 50%."

"One of the reasons we decided to onboard Zesty was that it started supporting Windows instances."

"The turnkey aspect of Zesty is very valuable."

Cons

"The solution could include more integrations and supportability around the container space."

"It was a complex setup. We had to use the consultant from VMware to make the solution work well."

"vRealize Automation on the back-end is still a little complicated. It has a lot of moving pieces, simplifying that from a pure infrastructure point of view would be a good thing. I would then like to have more out-of-the-box functionality and integrations with VMware components."

"The stability is okay, but could be improved. We sometimes receive strange errors, which can only be solved with specialists."

"The stability is 95 percent. There are some situations where it gets a little bit clumsy. When it gets really big, when you're dealing with a very large deployment, it can be a little bit difficult, but it's better than nothing. It does a significant job, given what it's tasked to do."

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

"It is complex to use for new users. It should have automated tools or drag-and-drop functionality."

"As a product, it is complicated to integrate and automate with other products."

More VMware Aria Automation cons

"I would like to get RDS-reserved instances that I could buy and sell, but that's a limitation on AWS."

"There are different resource types that we would like to leverage and get reserved instances for, such as RDS instances."

"Zesty is a good solution; however, the learning curve can be complex for new users without a solid tech background, posing a challenge in training and the initial setup process."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would rate the pricing a ten out of ten, with ten being very expensive."

"This is an expensive product and the high price is starting to become an issue for us."

"From the customer perspective, the value was worth it."

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

"I would rate it high because, compared to other solutions, VMware’s pricing is quite expensive. VMware products have become significantly more costly in recent years, leading to higher costs."

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

"We have seen significant ROI. We used to have physical servers, it took 90 days to get a server, order it, buy it, and get it in. We have it down to 10 minutes, building a server with virtualization, and now that's too slow. So, we let the customer do it at their speed. Therefore, it is pretty much up in a couple of minutes and they have a server."

"From a budget point of view, the pricing is a bit on the higher side."

More VMware Aria Automation pricing and cost advice

"The solution’s pricing is reasonable."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

14%

Insurance Company

13%

Computer Software Company

11%

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	32
Midsize Enterprise	24
Large Enterprise	130

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...

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 ...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zesty?

Pricing, setup cost, and licensing were very transparent since we got it through the AWS Marketplace, and we faced no upfront problems. It was a transparent, very good solution for us.

What needs improvement with Zesty?

What is your primary use case for Zesty?

Our main use case for Zesty is that it is a hands-off tool for onboarding our teams, specifically for AWS, helping us to offload day-to-day management and AWS savings, which includes CRIs and EC2. ...

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs VMware Aria Automation

Comparisons

Compared 15% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 9% of the time

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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

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Spot by Flexera vs Zesty

Compared 27% of the time

ProsperOps vs Zesty

Compared 21% of the time

nOps vs Zesty

Compared 19% of the time

Cloudability vs Zesty

Compared 17% of the time

Azure Cost Management vs Zesty

Compared 16% of the time

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Product Reports

Download VMware Aria Automation product report

VMware Aria Automation

January 2026

Download Zesty product report

January 2026

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.

Broadcom

Zesty offers scalable solutions that empower businesses to optimize their digital presence efficiently. Designed for dynamic online environments, Zesty integrates seamlessly, enhancing digital content management with versatile tools.

Zesty focuses on providing an adaptive content management experience for professionals seeking optimization in web content publishing. Known for its intuitive interfaces and robust architecture, Zesty allows effortless website management, content personalization, and SEO enhancements. With Zesty, businesses can efficiently curate digital content, ensuring swift loading times and superior user engagement. Its extensible features enable integration across different platforms, ensuring streamlined workflow management and enhanced data-driven decision-making.

What are the key features of Zesty?

Content Management: Easy-to-navigate CMS for efficient content updates.
SEO Tools: Built-in SEO analytics to boost online visibility.
Personalization: Customizable options for tailored content delivery.
Integration Capabilities: Links seamlessly with third-party applications.

What benefits should users consider?

Improved Efficiency: Streamlined processes reduce time spent managing content.
Enhanced Visibility: Advanced SEO ensures greater reach.
Increased Engagement: Personalized content fosters user interaction.
Cost-Effectiveness: Optimizes resources resulting in reduced operational costs.

Industries such as eCommerce, healthcare, and media have successfully implemented Zesty to streamline digital operations. For eCommerce, Zesty facilitates rapid product content updates, while healthcare sectors utilize it for managing patient information and media outlets employ it for real-time news publishing.

Sample Customers

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

Walkme, Wiz, Gong, Grubhub, Singular