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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
23rd
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Cost Management (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 5.4%, down from 7.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zesty is 0.5%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
VMware Cloud Director5.4%
Zesty0.5%
Other94.1%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

KuldeepSingh4 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
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

"The reliability and flexibility of networking are valuable."
"The self-service portal is the most valuable. We are acting as a service provider, so our customers can take care of their virtual data centers with the self-service portal. Therefore, we don't need staff for it."
"VMware Cloud Director is quite scalable; I would rate it nine out of ten."
"The initial installation and setup are very quick."
"The most valuable feature of vCloud Director is virtualization."
"The deployment is easy."
"The most valuable feature of VMware Cloud Director is segregating the underlying infrastructure for the end user."
"They can do any provisioning for the virtual machines. For instance, they will only see those resources if we allocate 10 Ghz database storage. The limitation is due to our setup: we need to ensure customer isolation, as vCloud Director supports multi-tenancy."
"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

"It could be more stable. We have had issues with multiple different versions."
"Cloud Director has room for improvement in many areas. One critical thing that comes to mind is the hyperscalers. They could be more seamlessly integrated into the hybrid cloud."
"Lacking additional services reduces the level of cloud integration companies just love with Amazon and Azure."
"There are occasional problems when trying to increase the parameters of a virtual machine, which sometimes results in pending tasks that fail due to errors, requiring support intervention."
"There are too many errors, it could be more stable."
"Sometimes, there is a disconnection that happens between vCloud Director and its underlying VMware vCenter, where the actions are supposed to be taking place, making it an area where improvements are required."
"If you have a deployed environment and lose it, you can't easily deploy it back with vCloud Director. Because of this reason, we don't have the data protection, disaster recovery, and container features."
"I would like to see mode accessory recovery and integration with SD-WAN."
"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

"The product is inexpensive compared to other vendors."
"It runs our company in the millions of rand every month."
"The solution's price is the market standard and depends on usage."
"It is better than other solutions out there when it comes to cost."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"We pay monthly for all of the licenses."
"My company has no problems with the pricing of the product as we got good discounts from VMware."
"The solution is costly, efficient, and robust versus alternative solutions."
"The solution’s pricing is reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Insurance Company
7%
Retailer
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?
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

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: September 2025.
869,566 professionals have used our research since 2012.