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VMware Aria Automation vs Zesty 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

VMware Aria Automation
Ranking in Cloud Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
170
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (7th), Network Automation (3rd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (17th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (4th)
Zesty
Ranking in Cloud Management
23rd
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Cost Management (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 11.1%, down from 11.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zesty is 0.4%, down from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
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.
Jeffery Smith - PeerSpot reviewer
Effortless cost management with automated instance adjustment and helpful support
There are different resource types that we would like to leverage and get reserved instances for, such as RDS instances. Currently, no mechanism within Zesty allows this, but this may be due to AWS limitations. Another point is that Zesty needs to react to any changes AWS makes, but they have been proactive in their communication regarding material impacts.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We have also found it to be intuitive and user-friendly. It's something that, because it has the workflows that are very easily graphed out - you can follow what it's doing, it's very picturesque, you can see what it's doing easily - it's something that you can hand over to a user who is not familiar with it and they can wrap their brain around it pretty quickly."
"The operations manager does a fantastic job on the front end because it includes on-premises and cloud use cases."
"The most valuable feature that we have is that it's able to deploy several different operating systems, it's able to deploy whatever we want. We can take a template, spin it up, revise it, save it back off, and be able to have that for other departments. We can have one for our Dev team and one for our research team which has some specific requirements. We can keep track of them and deploy things automatically."
"We provided the ability to request virtual machines to our end users. Before, this was a very manual process, which took engineers to do. Now, it's an automated process."
"Having an enterprise service catalog and being able to automate various parts of our infrastructure are among the most important components."
"We have integrated our CICD pipeline into an automatic catalog request through some API calls. It can request and provision new virtual machines behind the NSX load balancer, straight out of the CIDC pipeline and add those nodes to the load balancer, request SSL certs, do SSL termination at the load balancer so that it's not encrypted behind the scenes, all of which has really been helpful."
"Scalability is probably the best part about it. You can take things that you've already defined, that you've already built once, and build them again multiple times, without significant effort."
"It is also intuitive and user-friendly... With vRealize, we can have a Help Desk individual, who might not be that techy, provision the different elements quite easily, with no almost training at all."
"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

"I don't find it to be entirely user-friendly. There are a lot of complicated menus within menus within menus. Things move around from version to version."
"The integration is a bit tight. I need the right package to use it properly. The new automation processes for VMware are messy, and support could be better."
"It is difficult to set up."
"The initial setup was not straightforward. It was not simple, and we had a PoC. We had VMware help us deploy it, and it took them an exorbitant amount of time."
"The initial setup was complex because we have a high availability cluster. Especially when it comes to upgrades, we have a lot of downtimes and problems. The upgrade experience has been painful."
"in general, it took us a long time to get it off the ground. We had a lot of issues upfront and we determined that we just needed to scrap it. I think we scrapped it two or three times before we actually got it built the way we wanted, and we're still not where we need to be. We have had downtime. There have been some issues, but we're also two iterations behind on version."
"As a product, it is complicated to integrate and automate with other products."
"In terms of usability, It has had its challenges. It requires a lot of custom code to integrate into our environment. It can take a little while to get it to do what we want, takes some code instead of having built-in functionality. Part it is how we use it. It would be a lot easier to use in a greenfield scenario versus brownfield, which is the way we using it."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"SaltStack is an open-source product."
"The pricing is very high."
"It is an open-source product."
"vRealize automation really should be a front door to the whole VMware suite of products."
"It made the provisioning of the virtual machines easier and faster. We can react more quickly to customers' demands."
"The solution has helped to increase infrastructure, agility, speed, and provisioning in the time to market."
"The pricing for this solution is roughly 20% lower than the competitive products in the market."
"The solution is free of cost."
"The solution’s pricing is reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
9%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Real Estate/Law Firm
7%
 

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...
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?
Their pricing is brilliant. It is a percentage of what they save us by using reserved instances. If they save us $25,000, they might charge five percent of that, which is work we wouldn't do on our...
What needs improvement with Zesty?
There are different resource types that we would like to leverage and get reserved instances for, such as RDS instances. Currently, no mechanism within Zesty allows this, but this may be due to AWS...
What is your primary use case for Zesty?
We predominantly use Zesty to manage our spend in AWS, specifically around reserving instances for our compute workload. Our workload is dynamic, and it would be cumbersome and difficult for us to ...
 

Also Known As

VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
Walkme, Wiz, Gong, Grubhub, Singular
Find out what your peers are saying about VMware Aria Automation vs. Zesty and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.