VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Tanzu Platform comparison

VMware Aria Operations and VMware Tanzu Platform are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. VMware Aria Operations is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.6, while VMware Tanzu Platform is ranked #24 with an average rating of 8.5. VMware Aria Operations holds a 6.8% mindshare in CM, compared to VMware Tanzu Platform’s 1.1% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of VMware Aria Operations users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of VMware Tanzu Platform users who would recommend it.

VMware Aria Operations

Read 375 VMware Aria Operations reviews

6,466 Views
3,750 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

VMware Tanzu Platform

Read 22 VMware Tanzu Platform reviews

7,257 Views
218 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Operations

VMware Tanzu Platform

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 15, 2025

Both VMware Aria Operations and VMware Tanzu Platform excel in cloud management and infrastructure, with Aria Operations having an advantage in infrastructure management and Tanzu leading in Kubernetes and microservices support.

Features: VMware Aria Operations offers features like virtual machine monitoring, predictive analytics, and capacity planning, with excellent integration into VMware’s suite, enhancing operational efficiency. VMware Tanzu Platform provides exceptional Kubernetes management, integration, and application lifecycle management across multi-cloud environments.

Room for Improvement: VMware Aria Operations users suggest enhancements in reporting, third-party integration, dashboard streamlining, and user-friendliness. VMware Tanzu Platform could improve its user interface, provide more detailed application tracing, and offer better customization options to increase usability for cloud-native workloads.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Aria Operations supports versatile deployment across on-premises, hybrid, private, and public clouds, demonstrating flexibility. Tanzu Platform also supports varied deployment models, especially for hybrid and public clouds. Both offer robust customer service backed by VMware, though recent changes may impact experiences.

Pricing and ROI: VMware Aria Operations involves a straightforward licensing model, often bundled with other VMware services, offering good ROI through efficiency, though potentially costly for smaller enterprises. VMware Tanzu Platform, considered more expensive, is suited for medium to large enterprises, providing value for containerized application deployment and management.

To learn more, read our detailed VMware Aria Operations vs. VMware Tanzu Platform Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Operations vs. VMware Tanzu Platform

September 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 Operations

Ranking in Cloud Management

3rd

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

375

Ranking in other categories

Virtualization Management Tools (1st)

VMware Tanzu Platform

Ranking in Cloud Management

24th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Build Automation (13th), PaaS Clouds (13th), Development Platforms (3rd), Container Management (3rd), Service Mesh (8th), Agile and DevOps Services (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of VMware Aria Operations is 6.8%, down from 9.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Tanzu Platform is 1.1%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
VMware Aria Operations	6.8%
VMware Tanzu Platform	1.1%
Other	92.1%

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

Amar Sorro

Team Lead Virtualization at Hybrid Tech

Manage and monitor crucial banking operations with deep logging and efficient alerting

The most valuable features of VMware Aria Operations include its excellent monitoring capabilities. It allows me to perform deep monitoring and logging of the entire environment, providing a quick alarm and warning system through email. These features help me in efficiently managing virtual machines. The solution also offers easy access to VMware KB articles for problem resolution, ensuring quick access to troubleshooting information.

Read full review

DarshanChaudhari

Solutions Architect Hybrid Cloud Practice US/Europe at Tech Mahindra Limited

Empowers seamless connectivity and integration through APIs while offering robust auto-scaling

I am involved in IT services and we provide a solution to customers. We work with VMware, Nutanix, OpenShift, and Microsoft Hyper-V The Tanzu platform is highly available, scalable, and flexible. It offers native services for autoscaling and integrations through APIs, allowing seamless…

Read full review

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 single pane of glass so we can see all our vCenters, all our machines, all our storage arrays. We can see if there are alerts in any of these systems, and follow up on that alert and see if it's impacting just that area or if there is a bigger problem behind it."

"The most valuable features of VMware Aria Operations include monitoring CPU, memory, and storage."

"You take all of vCenter's built-in items and you've got one pane of glass for the policies: DRS policies, SRM policies, all of those things work well with VROps."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to check the right-sizing of a machine because that way I can assign the real resources that are needed."

"It has helped us reduce the time it takes to troubleshoot issues."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to right-size a workload, based on historical data for that workload. It also allows us to "sanity-check" the entire infrastructure by getting monthly reports on how everything is performing and where we can make improvements. That's all done automatically, without any administrator involvement."

"The most valuable features are the Heat Maps, and the various graphs and reporting features it has."

"The most valuable feature would be the capacity planning. I can see where we're at as far as usage on our data stores, our CPU and memory. It lets us know where we need to grow."

More VMware Aria Operations pros

"I have multiple Kubernetes environments within my environment. TMC gives me a single pane view, which is good for managing everything."

"The most popular feature of VMware Tanzu Mission Control is its graphical user interface for describing network policies on the Service Mesh, which is highly integrable with other tools commonly used in supply chains such as security."

"The observability platform and end-to-end service portal provided by Tanzu are the most valuable features."

"The most important feature of Tanzu Mission Control is its integration with the other products, especially with ESX and vSAN. This is a strong part of Tanzu Mission Control. In other solutions, such as OpenShift or Kubernetes, you can find similar features, but they don't have similar integration. With Tanzu Mission Control, you get a total solution with only one provider. You have the integration with the infrastructure, virtualization of networking, and virtualization of storage. You have a natural integration, and you don't have the problem of integrating it with different products or providers. Sometimes, different companies have good integration, but it is not always guaranteed. For example, many years ago, Cisco and VMware were good partners in networking, but when VMware started to sell ESX, the relationship was broken. This is the problem that you can face when you are using solutions from two different companies."

"The initial setup is easy."

"The solution is integrated very well with a lot of other systems. Also, its GUI is very good."

"Tanzu is easy to upgrade and scale, whether we're talking about horizontal or vertical scaling. It is as smooth as possible without any downtime. The platform maintenance, upgrading, and operations part is very smooth."

"Defining security metrics has proven beneficial for customers in maintaining a safe environment."

More VMware Tanzu Platform pros

Cons

"The tool should have an easy workflow with some guided steps to make it simpler from the customer's perspective."

"A lot of feedback that we're getting from some of our engineers who are actually using Operations today is that the graphics are very low-key. When it comes to red, yellow, green, yes, "Skittles Theory," but when it actually comes down to what's optimized and what's not optimized, it's very rudimentary. If they could actually make nicer pie charts or graphics involved in it, it would make it a lot easier to read the data on a higher level, rather than actually having to dive down and know specifically what you're looking at."

"There is a learning curve because it's a complex program. There is a lot to consume in terms of the metrics inside of it. That's the biggest hurdle: trying to understand all the places to go look."

"Having the capability to manage the enterprise display would be highly beneficial."

"The database services in the tool as backup services are friendly and can be deployed in the release to production. However, in the new features, I would like to include more online documentation that can help service generate early alerts."

"It would be nice if it could tell me more about my hardware, if there were any updates on the network that should be deployed, if some firmware needs to be deployed on the server, etc."

"It would break, and you would have to go fix it. Then it would break, and they would have some other guys that knew a bit more about it, and they fixed it."

"I'd like to see more out-of-the-box dashboards and less customizing of the environment. The interface could be more streamlined. There are still a lot of old dashboards versus the new UI dashboards."

More VMware Aria Operations cons

"LYNX is a managed cluster solution that takes care of specific details within a cluster, such as sequences or services. I haven't seen this feature in Tanzu Mission Control."

"The solution is currently focused on VMware infrastructure and I would like to see more options made available."

"VMware Tanzu Service Mesh could add better integration with other cloud platforms, such as vRealize Automation or VMware vCloud Director for cloud providers."

"The disaster recovery feature could be improved to provide better tracking of issues. I would also like to see the introduction of a dashboard view, for even further integration of all the areas that Mission Control looks at."

"Customers have noticed a considerable price increase after VMware's acquisition by Broadcom."

"The network control and security policies must be improved."

"Tanzu provides better manageability as compared to OCP, but when it comes to tagging it with other products, it's a bit rigid. If I have to bring in any new product or something out of the box from a different vendor, working with Tanzu becomes a little difficult. For example, if I want to use the F5 services, I have to add one more layer of Avi, but I don't want to do that. If I have a list of the products that I want to use, such as for firewall services, with Tanzu, I will have to go through another layer, which creates complexity."

"Cost is always a concern. Smaller companies might find the price a bigger issue."

More VMware Tanzu Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten."

"It is an affordable solution that doesn't require any additional costs."

"There has been a bit of cost savings in that we could decide to move workloads around a bit better."

"Get the right licensing and increase your licensing as you upgrade and grow. If you get the wrong licensing, it will be expensive, especially if you plan improperly."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"Five or six years ago, when we took it, it was a very good option. Now, I think I have to reevaluate, to be honest."

"If you compare the prices of VMware and the cloud solutions along with the components that you may use, I feel that it may be costly."

"vRealize Operations has proved to be a cost effective solution for our big environment."

More VMware Aria Operations pricing and cost advice

"I would recommend that businesses look into the full price for their requirements. The price is high, but there are some open-source add-ons that can be used for customization while keeping costs down, although these might not be suitable for everyone."

"Its pricing is very competitive. We get around 70% or 75%, sometimes even 80%, discount on the product. I would rate it a four out of five in terms of pricing."

"One of our Spanish customers told us that VMware Tanzu Service Mesh is a very expensive product for their data center."

"Since we were at a large data center, the price might not have been a concern for us."

"The least expensive licensing cost for VMware is around $350 per core."

"The price of VMware Tanzu Mission Control is greater than that of Red Hat's competitor solution"

"The license for VMware Tanzu Application Service is expensive. The license should be cheaper."

"The licensing cost is expensive."

More VMware Tanzu Platform pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	62
Midsize Enterprise	62
Large Enterprise	278

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	10
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	9

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 VMware Aria Operations a user friendly solution?

In terms of user-friendliness, VMware Aria Operations is one of the best solutions out there. It is not overly complex to set up and you can rely on the technical support to provide you with assis...

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What is the most useful new feature of VMware Aria Operations?

For me, the alerts features are the most unique part of this product, no matter the current name it uses. When they introduced the new version of VMware Aria Operations, they also introduced more a...

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Which is better - OpenShift Container Platform or VMware Tanzu Mission Control?

Red Hat Openshift is ideal for organizations using microservices and cloud environments. I like that the platform is auto-scalable, which saves overhead time for developers. I think Openshift can b...

See all answers

What do you like most about VMware Tanzu Mission Control?

It definitely gives the end customer a good overview and perspective of running applications in terms of overall workload footprint. TMC provides a very detailed description of your cloud-native ap...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware Tanzu Mission Control?

The price of VMware Tanzu Mission Control is greater than that of Red Hat's competitor solution. I would rate the pricing of VMware Tanzu Mission Control as four out of ten.

See all answers

Comparisons

VMware Aria Automation vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 20% of the time

IBM Turbonomic vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 9% of the time

VMware vSphere vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 8% of the time

Nutanix Prism vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 8% of the time

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 8% of the time

More VMware Aria Operations Competitors

Rancher Labs vs VMware Tanzu Platform

Compared 17% of the time

Kubernetes vs VMware Tanzu Platform

Compared 13% of the time

Red Hat OpenShift vs VMware Tanzu Platform

Compared 10% of the time

Docker vs VMware Tanzu Platform

Compared 6% of the time

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform vs VMware Tanzu Platform

Compared 5% of the time

More VMware Tanzu Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Operations

August 2025

Download VMware Aria Operations product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Tanzu Platform

August 2025

Download VMware Tanzu Platform product report

Also Known As

VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), vCenter Operations Manager (VCOPS)

Tanzu Application Catalog, Application Platform, Application Service, Hub, Mission Control, Service Mesh, Build Service, Concourse for VMware Tanzu

Overview

VMware Aria Operations is a high-ranking virtualization management and cloud management tool that automates and simplifies IT management to the applications it supports. It achieves this through full-stack visibility from physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure. The product allows users to enable self-driving IT operations management across private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. This is conducted with the unified operations platform that delivers continuous performance, capacity and cost optimization, and integrated compliance through artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and predictive analytics.

VMware Aria Operations Use Cases

VMware Aria Operations has several use cases, some of which include:

Continuous performance optimization: VMware Aria Operations allows users to assure application performance at a minimal cost, facilitated by real-time predictive analytics and artificial intelligence. The product can be used to automatically balance workloads, improve consolidation rations, optimize and rightsize workloads, and avoid contention.
Capacity and cost management: VMware Aria Operations can be utilized to reduce cost and improve efficiency with real-time ML-based capacity and cost analytics. The solution uses these tools to visualize cost savings opportunities and accelerate decision-making.
Intelligent remediation: This product can also be used to predict, prevent, and troubleshoot issues with actionable insights. Through other VMware integrations, users can streamline and centralize IT operations.
Integrated compliance: The solution can be utilized to reduce risk and enforce IT regulatory standards for VMware Cloud through integrated compliance and automated drift remediation.

VMware Aria Operations Features

The product has various features which users can utilize. Several of the features that the 2022 version of VMware Aria Operations introduced include:

Management pack builder: This feature is a no-code solution that allows users to expand their operations visibility to anywhere they wish. The builder allows users to connect to a data source using an HTTP or Amazon AWS data source, as well as to make API calls, create objects, and build out relationships with other objects in the product.
Public cloud basic actions: This is a set of features that allows VMware Aria Operations users to initiate actions automatically via the product's UI for AWS, Microsoft Azure, or GCP CE instances.
Rule-based application discovery: Through this new feature of the product, users can easily discover multiple applications running in all or specific areas of infrastructure and view associated resources. This can be achieved through simple user-defined rules, including discovering applications based on tags, object names, and properties.
Aria Operations capacity management: This feature allows organizations to view the results of what-if analysis based on their allocation model and specify business hours for capacity calculations.
Alerts: This is a set of features that include components called Conditions and Symptoms, which are used to alert different types of issues on the platform.
User access management: Through this feature, users can benefit from improved ways to configure in VMware Aria Operations with the introduction of scopes.
Support for raw device mapping storage: This feature allows users to get configuration details about their raw device mapping (RDM), such as disk sharing, compatibility mode, and SCSI Bus Sharing.

VMware Aria Operations Benefits

VMware Aria Operations brings various benefits to the organizations using it. Among them are the following:

The product helps organizations reduce unplanned downtime and maximize return on investment (ROI) in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
VMware Aria Operations simplifies management for hybrid clouds from migration assessments.
Users can benefit from an accelerated journey to VMware Cloud on AWS through this solution.
The product can be delivered on premises or as a service, providing flexibility for its users.
VMware Aria Operations can increase operational efficiency through monitoring and management features.
The solution accelerates decision-making through detailed cost analytics, which is visualized for users' convenience.
VMware Aria Operations allows users to both utilize standard compliance templates and create their own custom ones.

Reviews from Real Users

Mohamed N., a tech lead VMware support engineer at a tech services company, appreciates VMware Aria Operations because it is easy to use, stable, and support is always available.

Mojtaba K., a senior system administrator at a comms service provider, values VMware Aria Operations due to the fact that its dashboards give you a glimpse of what is really going on in your virtualized environment.

VMware

VMware Tanzu Platform is designed for cloud-native development and management of Kubernetes, CI/CD processes, microservices, and containerized workloads. It supports deployments both on cloud and on-premises, providing centralized management via Mission Control.

VMware Tanzu Platform offers seamless integration with vSphere, ESX, and vSAN, supporting centralized cluster management and lifecycle management. The platform provides a GUI for monitoring CI/CD pipelines and network policies, enhancing multi-tenancy and Day 2 operations. Users can easily manage Kubernetes clusters, monitor applications, and integrate with tools such as GitHub, GitLab, Cloud Foundry, and Azure. It ensures compliance and security for service providers, financial institutions, and businesses.

What are the key features of VMware Tanzu Platform?

Integration with vSphere, ESX, and vSAN: Enhances compatibility and flexibility.
Seamless Cluster Management: Centralized control over Kubernetes clusters.
CI/CD Pipelines and Network Policies: Simplifies monitoring and management.
Multi-tenancy Support: Facilitates resource sharing among multiple users.
Comprehensive Lifecycle Management: Streamlines deployment and scalability.
Observability Platform: Provides enhanced visibility and control.

What benefits and ROI should users look for in VMware Tanzu Platform reviews?

Centralized Management: Simplifies operations and reduces manual effort.
Enhanced Compliance and Security: Meets regulatory requirements.
Flexibility in Deployment: Supports both cloud and on-premises options.
Seamless Integration: Works with multiple vendors and tools.
Developer-Friendly Environment: Improves productivity and innovation.

Industries such as financial institutions, service providers, and businesses requiring rigorous compliance and security deploy VMware Tanzu Platform. These entities benefit from centralized management, streamlined DevOps processes, and integrated tools, enhancing their capabilities in cloud-native developments and containerized workloads.

VMware

Sample Customers

Science Applications International Corporation, Tribune Media, Heartland Payment Systems, Telkom Indonesia, Columbia Sportswear, iGATE, CSS Corp, Angel Broking, Adira Finance, Hipskind, Beiersdorf Shared Services, Innovate Mas Indonesia, Adobe, Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi , Join Experience S.A, Borusan Holdings, Department of Transport - Abu Dhabi

Verizon, Cerner, Zipcar, Avarteq

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Operations vs. VMware Tanzu Platform

September 2025

Free Report: VMware Aria Operations vs. VMware Tanzu Platform

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