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VMware Cloud Director 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 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
Zesty
Ranking in Cloud Management
27th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.1
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Cost Management (14th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 3.8%, down from 7.4% 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
ProductMarket Share (%)
VMware Cloud Director3.8%
Zesty0.7%
Other95.5%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

KuldeepSingh4 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
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.
Srinivas Rayudu  - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The reliability and flexibility of networking are valuable."
"We can run it on self-hosted systems, and we are happy with the stability of vCloud Director."
"The stability of the product is better than just 'good.'"
"Good features of extensibility, which allows integration of other services."
"The most valuable feature of vCloud Director is virtualization."
"Technical support is great. They help us 24/7."
"It is a very stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The most valuable features are the UI, the interface, and accessibility."
"One of the reasons we decided to onboard Zesty was that it started supporting Windows instances."
"Zesty has positively impacted our organization by providing a good return on investment, with a total reported percentage of savings around 40 to 50%."
"The turnkey aspect of Zesty is very valuable."
 

Cons

"The integration between components could be improved."
"The solution should add other hypervisors so things like hover wizards can be automated."
"Technical support is something that we've had problems with in the past. Across all the VMware solutions we have not always had the best response from support. To be fair a lot of the issues that came up for us have been quite niche but it seems that in terms of release cycles they introduced a lot of bugs and it's a lot of stuff that support generally has to work quite hard on. There have been cases when we've logged critical priority issues and not had responses in time. I think support is something that can be worked on."
"Improvements could be made in the building feature since there isn't a real building feature associated with the product. We require a building feature to integrate with other solutions."
"It would be beneficial if some features were built into the platform rather than requiring integration with multiple products, reducing complexity and licensing concerns."
"Database services need to go beyond what they are currently doing."
"The product could use a billing feature so we can automate billing for clients."
"The initial setup of the vCloud Director was not complex and not easy, it was in the middle range of difficulty. It could be made easier."
"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."
"I would like to get RDS-reserved instances that I could buy and sell, but that's a limitation on AWS."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing eight and a half to nine out of ten."
"We pay monthly for all of the licenses."
"If ten is very expensive, I rate the tool's price as a four out of ten."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"In certain cases, the price of Cloud Director is quite high, especially with the load balancing and other features they've introduced. That seems quite costly. Overall, for VSPP programming, I think it's okay. However, features like enterprise load balancing and all these other things are very costly."
"It's a costly product. The licenses may not be costly, but with every new development in their product, we need to purchase deployment services, and the deployment services are quite costly."
"The solution is costly, efficient, and robust versus alternative solutions."
"The license could be less expensive and we are on a perpetual license."
"The solution’s pricing is reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Insurance Company
13%
Computer Software Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise36
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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...
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?
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 ...
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. ...
 

Also Known As

vCloud Director
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.
Walkme, Wiz, Gong, Grubhub, Singular
Find out what your peers are saying about VMware Cloud Director vs. Zesty and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,114 professionals have used our research since 2012.