Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Densify vs VMware Aria Automation 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

Densify
Ranking in Cloud Management
33rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (19th), Virtualization Management Tools (11th), Cloud Analytics (5th), Cloud Cost Management (16th)
VMware Aria Automation
Ranking in Cloud Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
171
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (6th), Network Automation (3rd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (16th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Densify is 0.9%, down from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 9.4%, down from 10.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
VMware Aria Automation9.4%
Densify0.9%
Other89.7%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Amit Kantia - PeerSpot reviewer
Its most valuable feature is the ability to capture attributes in the console, but it is not a stable solution
I recommend others to use Densify. They can not only use it for reporting but for automation as well. They can implement the policies on the console easily during the build-out procedure. Stability is the primary concern to us as it is causing lots of problems. We can only make significant decisions if Densify allows us, and it takes lots of time. Thus, I rate the tool as a six out of ten.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The Control Console provides a very easy to read dashboard of "too little/just right/too much" resources both for current data and on a historical or predictive basis."
"The ability to increase server density inside of my environment, which has helped me drive reduction in costs."
"The tool will come back and tell us that we can operate with 1,000 minutes as an example, save 90% on the contractual rate and not run into any issues."
"The Densify Control Console, and Environment Status."
"The solution's tech support is excellent."
"I would say that the initial thing is that it provides us with a technological basis to expand capacity management beyond Excel."
"The Control Console is an incredible way to give a quick view of current capacity utilization allowing technical people to drill down quickly and allowing business/management people to get a quick overview of the environment."
"One would be the automatic rebalancing of the environment. That was one feature which helped. With that, we could improve our efficiency of our VMware infrastructure."
"value; It has provided my development team a pure self-service portal. We deploy thousands of machines and reclaim. So, their time to business, and their time to market has been improved exponentially."
"It's quite user friendly. Everyone can use it, even non-technical people. This is good, since we use it to build a self-service portal which even users with not a lot of technical background can use."
"Having an enterprise service catalog and being able to automate various parts of our infrastructure are among the most important components."
"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."
"It is probably 90 percent quicker to get something out the door than it was before. For developers, depending on who is building VMs for them, sometimes they request anywhere from 20 to 100. Now, we can deploy them in a matter of an hour, where previously it might have taken me three days to deploy out 100 VMs."
"Instead of deploying a VM from a template and going through the process of configuring that VM, with vRA we're able to click once and it does everything: grabs an IP, joins it to the domain, loads whatever configuration agents are needed. It does all of that without manual intervention."
"The automation part is valuable, especially where vRA integrates with vRO, because it reduces the amount of effort we have to make."
"The most valuable feature is the way that it plugs into our monitoring systems, and Infoblox and Puppet."
 

Cons

"In terms of integration, the tool has great data. However, it's not always meaningful because the true business attributes of how most Fortune 500 companies operate are not maintaining in one tool, they're in a school of many tools."
"Unfortunately the tools and mechanisms which really came to maturity in the cloud, and were not mainstream on-premise, are still not implemented."
"Initially we talked about some custom reporting, wherein our customer expected certain reports on a few areas, like how the storage is allocated, how the network performance is doing, and how the network utilization is happening for a virtual machine."
"The solution's stability is the primary concern for me."
"Normalization of CPU utilization is required. At present, the data is available based on entitlement level."
"A closer integration to the service management processes."
"Some parts of the interface are rather complex and require a bit of time to navigate, but this has never stopped us as a Densify advisor is readily available to help with our "how to" queries."
"It seems that the mechanism for integration is, it goes so far but I think there could be some standard integration to normal remedy service now etc. I think that should be out of the box."
"It has some limitations for scalability, especially for remote data center management. For some components, everything need to be centralized."
"It's not a smooth upgrade process. For a DTA environment, which is very simple, it is a smooth process, but for our production environment, which is quite enhanced and has a lot of dependencies, it's not easy at all, and it results in a lot of errors... It takes a lot of retries to upgrade which ends up being costly."
"It would be better if VMware would provide API documentation for developers and customers on the Internet."
"The deployment mechanisms for the initial deployment of the product line lacks the appropriate documentation to give someone who's never used it before... There might be cases where someone wants to go to the website, go to the doc section, and do a step-by-step on how to deploy it. That's really not as brushed-up as other documents I've seen that they have. That would definitely be an improvement on their end."
"The stability is why I rated it a seven and not higher. There were several cases where we had to restart some services because it wasn't working correctly anymore. People cannot extend their machine or replay their machine. There is no alert to say that there is a problem and that we should stop the service. The monitoring system is not very good."
"The stability is okay, but could be improved. We sometimes receive strange errors, which can only be solved with specialists."
"VMware should go the way of vROps, with everything in one machine, the ability to scale out, and a more distributed environment instead of having the usual centralized SQL database."
"Something as simple as formatting the catalog in a different way would be helpful because there is no option for doing so. A lot of the contents for the virtual machine, blueprints that you can request, are hidden from view and there's no way to change the view."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There was some sticker shock, as this is not just another software product to spit out graphs."
"Cost is always involved, but then I feel that this solution is better than other products that we have."
"Setup cost is negligible, as it scales fairly well."
"Densify has licensing setup so you can collect data without licensing. It gives you the ability to collect on everything, then choose later what you would like to license."
"The pricing is very high."
"The cost of the solution is reasonable for us. Although it is relatively high, we prioritize stability and integration over cost."
"It is an expensive product. After VMware's acquisition by Broadcom, there was a rise in the price of VMware Aria Automation."
"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."
"They should provide one license for all the sub-products."
"This is an expensive product and the high price is starting to become an issue for us."
"From a budget point of view, the pricing is a bit on the higher side."
"So much can be done with the Open Source side, and especially for smaller shops. I personally think the pricing for Enterprise is hard to justify."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Management solutions are best for your needs.
869,952 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Retailer
15%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Healthcare Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise9
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business32
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise130
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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 ...
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

AIG, Bank of America, Cigna, Citi
Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
Find out what your peers are saying about Densify vs. VMware Aria Automation and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,952 professionals have used our research since 2012.