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CloudStack pros and cons

Vendor: Apache

4.0 out of 5

34 reviews
94% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

CloudStack offers versatile hypervisor support, centralized management for scalability, and seamless API integration, making it suitable for enterprises needing reliable, customizable solutions. Its secure private networking enhances data center confidentiality. Despite these strengths, CloudStack lacks instance deployment from snapshots, has issues with HA and backup dependencies, and demands advanced user expertise. The platform's complex installation and limited third-party software support, such as Veeam and Zerto, complicate comprehensive disaster recovery strategies.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

CloudStack offers robust support for various hypervisors, enhancing interoperability and flexibility.

Its centralized design simplifies scalability, management, and troubleshooting, making it ideal for large virtual environments.

APIs in CloudStack facilitate seamless integration with external applications and allow customized cloud solutions.

CloudStack provides a multi-tenant interface with advanced networking features, which ensure security and privacy for users.

The platform continuously evolves with new features and improvements, maintaining stability and efficiency over time.

CONS

CloudStack lacks specific error messages in administration processes like creating new instances.

The VPN P2S disconnects all connections except the CloudStack environment, unlike Cisco's AnyConnect.

Accounts, domains, and user accounts are set up for public cloud, not private.

A lack of easily implementable payment gateway and billing solutions limits CloudStack's 360-degree capabilities.

Removal of high-capacity virtual machines takes a long time, often failing to update VM status properly in the database.

CloudStack Pros review quotes

IT Manager / Gerente de TI at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Feb 28, 2018

The platform is very simple to scale-out.

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OR

Oleksandr Rybchenko

Project Manager at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Mar 14, 2018

Killer features for me were: support for many hypervisors, ability to match business logic, "everything in one box," available APIs.

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Cloud Architect at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

Mar 19, 2018

It works, and pretty much always has. Reliability and support for enterprise features, with a multi-tenant interface, makes CloudStack a very compelling solution.

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Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Mar 19, 2018

The product gives us the ability to orchestrate large virtual environments and is flexible enough to allow us to configure it for what we need. We value the flexibility of the networking feature set as well as the ability to build virtual private clouds.

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Works at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Mar 19, 2018

It was easy to deploy, both for PoC and production (with HA).

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PT

Paresh Tripathi

Cloud Solutions Engineer at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees

Mar 20, 2018

It has become easy to deploy new devices with no or minimal hardware changes. Now, a user can be ready to use a firewall within a few minutes, as compared to the traditional physical model which involved purchase, shipping, hardware configuration, cabling, power, etc.

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Site Reliability and DevOps Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Mar 20, 2018

Multiple types of hypervisor support, multi-zone support, and VPC are great valuable features.

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Junior QA Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Mar 20, 2018

The most valuable feature from my point of view is access to environment via console through separate browser window.

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OK

Oleksii Kyianytsia

System Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Mar 20, 2018

Valuable features include that it is a user-friendly portal, VPN P2S and S2S possibilities, and it's easy to manage accounts and limits.

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Lead Linux Systems Administrator

Mar 22, 2018

The API with CloudStack made integration into various external facing web applications simple enough.

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CloudStack Cons review quotes

IT Manager / Gerente de TI at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Feb 28, 2018

The absence of the feature, deploy an instance from a snapshot, is the weak point of the platform. It is a feature that everyone needs nowadays.

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Oleksandr Rybchenko

Project Manager at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Mar 14, 2018

The main reason why we started looking for another solution: backups, replication, HA, and dependency on secondary storage. CS is quite sensitive for infrastructure, and any kind of network disruption between CS and secondary storage leads to VM hanging.

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Cloud Architect at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

Mar 19, 2018

Lack of support for third-party software vendors such as Veeam and Zerto creates limitations on comprehensive offerings which would include backup and disaster recovery.

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Free Report: CloudStack Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about CloudStack. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2026.

879,927 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Mar 19, 2018

The area of Apache CloudStack that could stand the most improvement is the functionality/features around the virtual routers. They can be somewhat cumbersome to deal with at times and are the least stable piece of the product.

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Works at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Mar 19, 2018

The user can't upload SSH keys from the UI. We have to use the API for this, and it is not always convenient.

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PT

Paresh Tripathi

Cloud Solutions Engineer at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees

Mar 20, 2018

This product needs a lot improvement on the development side. Every new version introduces new bugs. It lacks many features needed for NFV like DPDK, SR-IOV support, etc.

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Site Reliability and DevOps Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Mar 20, 2018

For time consuming operations like storage migrations, volume Snapshot restore and the like, we faced issues like MySQL operations timing out and status update failures. Those areas needs improvement.

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Junior QA Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Mar 20, 2018

It would be a good to have more specific error messages within administration processes (e.g. problem with creating new instance).

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OK

Oleksii Kyianytsia

System Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Mar 20, 2018

VPN P2S is cutting all connections except the CloudStack environment for the user when he is connected. I would like to have VPN like Cisco's AnyConnect.

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Lead Linux Systems Administrator

Mar 22, 2018

Accounts, domains, and user accounts are set up with public cloud in mind, not private.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 24)

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Cloud Management

Popular Comparisons

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VMware Aria Automation vs CloudStack

VMware Aria Operations vs CloudStack

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs CloudStack

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs CloudStack

Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) vs CloudStack

VMware Cloud Director vs CloudStack

OpenNebula vs CloudStack

Rapid7 InsightCloudSec vs CloudStack

Turbo360 (Formerly Serverless360) vs CloudStack

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CloudCheckr vs CloudStack

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