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Cisco ACI vs VMware NSX comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 10, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.5
Cisco ACI offers varied results, with some users seeing cost savings and efficiency, while others face challenges and mixed ROI.
Sentiment score
7.4
VMware NSX saves costs by reducing network needs, enhancing security, and achieving ROI within a year when deployed effectively.
Efficient utilization leads to cost savings and efficiency gains.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.3
Cisco ACI's support is praised for responsiveness, though regional differences and training consistency impact overall satisfaction.
Sentiment score
6.7
VMware NSX support is generally reliable but varies in responsiveness and expertise, with improvement needed in certain regions.
The technical support from Cisco is satisfactory.
Our technicians have a good support experience from the company.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
Cisco ACI offers scalable, efficient networking with easy deployment and high performance, ideal for large enterprises despite occasional bugs.
Sentiment score
7.7
VMware NSX is scalable across large infrastructures, praised for adaptability, hardware independence, and seamless integration in various environments.
The solution offers high performance and scalability with connectivity options up to 100 GS.
The scalability of Cisco ACI supports our organization's growth effectively.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.8
Cisco ACI has become highly stable with minimal issues, praised for reliability and regular performance-enhancing updates.
Sentiment score
8.0
VMware NSX is stable and mature, praised for robust performance and dependability, despite occasional minor upgrade issues.
 

Room For Improvement

Cisco ACI users seek simplified interfaces, better documentation, enhanced integration, and improved support to overcome complexity and challenges.
VMware NSX needs enhancements in integration, automation, deployment, and support to address complexity, pricing, and user-friendliness challenges.
Their lack of on-ground offices can result in business losses.
 

Setup Cost

Cisco ACI pricing is high but valued for features and support, though smart licensing remains a challenge.
VMware NSX pricing is higher than competitors, complex, and may discourage smaller organizations due to potentially unused features.
Cisco's pricing tends to be on the higher end compared to other vendors.
VMware NSX is a little higher in price compared to the competition.
 

Valuable Features

Cisco ACI provides integration, programmability, scalability, and unified management for efficient and automated data center network solutions.
VMware NSX offers micro-segmentation, automation, scalability, and integration, enhancing security and flexibility across virtual environments and clouds.
It is essential for growing our data center connectivity and enablement for our customers.
Its features, like easy application deployment, short deployment time for new applications or software, and eliminating the hassle of STP, are appreciated.
The most powerful feature of VMware NSX is the micro-segmentation that allows us to separate the different protocols our application works with.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco ACI
Ranking in Network Virtualization
1st
Ranking in Cloud and Data Center Security
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
101
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Networking (SDN) (2nd)
VMware NSX
Ranking in Network Virtualization
2nd
Ranking in Cloud and Data Center Security
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
101
Ranking in other categories
Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) (6th), Network Detection and Response (NDR) (8th), Network Automation (5th), Microsegmentation Software (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Network Virtualization category, the mindshare of Cisco ACI is 46.4%, down from 46.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware NSX is 46.6%, up from 45.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Virtualization
 

Featured Reviews

Raj Metkar - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides scalability, ease of migration for future DC moves, multi-tenancy and programmability
Cisco's MSO (Multi-Site Orchestrator) or NDO has room for improvement. Cisco monitors ACI through a product called NDI. I find it very frustrating that Cisco has multiple monitoring platforms. It has DNAC for monitoring Cisco NX-OS, campus switches, and any other routers and switches you would have in the environment. That same thing does not work for Cisco ACI monitoring. MEraki cloudbasd platform for Meraki which will get extended to Campus monitoring, to be honest Cisco never got Monitoring 100% right from days of CiscoWorks to Prime to current platforms. To monitor and manage Cisco ACI, you need to have another platform called NDI and Cisco Dashboard Insights. What frustrates me about Cisco is that it never has a central, single pane of glass platform for all its solutions. It has one thing for Cisco ACI and another thing for campus switches. I would really appreciate it if Cisco came up with something centralized to monitor everything. I haven't thought about anything since the Cisco NDO is quite advanced, and you can deploy your cloud networking through it. I don't know how many people use it. I might explore it as my cloud orchestration tool in the future. We do a lot of cloud automation using our scripts like TerraForm, but I would like to see people using NDO more. We could have more case studies on how many people use NDO for their cloud orchestration. That might be a much easier journey for people when they move from an on-premises data center into a cloud and move from one cloud to another cloud. That is where I personally see an orchestrator being effectively used for multiple deployments.
Tarek Nader - PeerSpot reviewer
It extends Layer-2 scalability on Layer 3
NSX extends Layer-2 scalability on Layer 3, covering the vRO and extending the capability on Layer 3 by decapsulating using a new mechanism. NSX-V was designed to use with VMware products and Success 360, providing more flexibility toward different levels of cloud, containers, and components. NSX-T gives you the ability to stretch your network across different view locations. If you have multiple sites, you can connect them using NSX-T.
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Answers from the Community

MB
Nov 8, 2021
Nov 8, 2021
Once you know your way around the Cisco ecosystem, using Cisco ACI is not so difficult. It is a global product, so when you change one interface, changes are automatically reflected on every switch. Cisco ACI can connect with both virtualized networks and physical networks. As with many Cisco solutions, Cisco ACI has a steep learning curve. It is not user-friendly and most of our team would lik...
See 2 answers
SB
Jun 9, 2021
There are some very major differences between both the Products and to name a few. -Cisco ACI have physical network gear (9K Switches) where the Code runs in ACI Policy Mode & the UCS server where APIC software runs. -VMware NSX doesn't have any physical network gear of its own, VMware NSX software runs on ESXi hosts(Any Vendor) & even NSX Bare Metal Edge runs on any Vendor hardware(check compatibility) -Cisco ACI offers both Underlay & Overlay functionality -VMware NSX is a software and it builds an Overlay tunnel for (VM/Container) communication on top of an already established IP network which can be build on hardware network gear (Cisco Legacy/ACI/Juniper etc.) -Cisco ACI: To use micro-segmentation on a VM or Container level you will need some other Cisco products -VMware NSX: Micro-segmentation can be done Out of the Box because DFW Distributed Firewall are applied on the vnic of a VM i.e. on the ESXi kernel. Being different in many manners but they still define the SDN realm with L2-L7 Network services and what you choose over the other may depend on many other factors like what network gear you already have or if its Green or Brownfield deployment. For example if your infra already have something other than Cisco 9K switches and is well configured then it will make more sense to use NSX to make use of all the SDN functionalities. This is just an example not a recommendation.
Nov 8, 2021
Once you know your way around the Cisco ecosystem, using Cisco ACI is not so difficult. It is a global product, so when you change one interface, changes are automatically reflected on every switch. Cisco ACI can connect with both virtualized networks and physical networks. As with many Cisco solutions, Cisco ACI has a steep learning curve. It is not user-friendly and most of our team would like to see a better GUI. It would be great if we could test upgrades in a simulation before implementing; this could save a lot of rework and downtime. The key component for us with VMware NSX is the distributed firewall. VMware NSX can segment every application and server based on the ports with which they need to communicate. We can activate the ports we need and disable the ones we don’t. This really helps to keep things very secure and makes VMware NSX very flexible. We would like to see VMware NSX integrate better with other open-source solutions; integration can be very complex leading many to simply choose not to use VMware NSX at all. We found some maximums can be very limiting, especially with very large environments. VMware can only be used with virtualized networks. Conclusion: Cisco ACI and VMware have many similar qualities and features. The fundamental difference is that Vmware NSX’s primary focus is on virtualized networks, while Cisco ACI can connect to both virtual and physical networks. Vmware NSX can provide better levels of granularity and visibility into how your workload performs and functions. Cisco ACI does not provide this. Because Cisco ACI is more robust and can handle both physical and virtual networks, Cisco ACI might be a more appropriate solution. At the end of the day, it really depends on your organization’s ecosystem and applications, features and utilities needed, and, of course, cost of implementation. You may need one of these solutions or both.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
23%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What are the biggest differences between Cisco ACI and VMware NSX?
There are some very major differences between both the Products and to name a few. -Cisco ACI have physical network gear (9K Switches) where the Code runs in ACI Policy Mode & the UCS server wh...
What are the biggest differences between Cisco ACI and VMware NSX?
Once you know your way around the Cisco ecosystem, using Cisco ACI is not so difficult. It is a global product, so when you change one interface, changes are automatically reflected on every switch...
What do you like most about Cisco ACI?
The flexibility of adding new components with minimal impact on existing services running in the data center is a key benefit of this ACI-based solution.
What do you like most about VMware NSX?
The product has valuable features for security and network extension.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware NSX?
VMware NSX is a little higher in price compared to the competition. I haven't gone through the internal analysis.
What needs improvement with VMware NSX?
A basic load balancer feature was present in a previous version, but the latest version only has an advanced load balancer. The vendor should integrate a basic load balancer in future versions. The...
 

Also Known As

No data available
VMware Nicira, Lastline Defender
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Bowling Green State University, du, Qatar University
City of Avondale, Lumeta, Kroll Ontrack, Heartland Payment Systems, Baystate Heallth, Exostar, Tribune Media, iGATE, NTT Communications, Synergent, California Natural Resources Agency, Bloomington Public Schools, Columbia Sportswear, Join Experience S.A, Schuberg Philis
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco ACI vs. VMware NSX and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,020 professionals have used our research since 2012.