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Cisco CloudCenter [EOL] vs CloudStack comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Cisco CloudCenter [EOL]
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
CloudStack
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
34
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (8th)
 

Featured Reviews

ZT
Director Of Technology at a non-profit with 11-50 employees
Useful features for configuring down to ports but extremely expensive
Our company uses the solution's GUI interface to configure and monitor ports. We look at usage and determine if there are any issues.  Cisco is a very qualified company and has been in business for many, many years.  The solution is useful because you can configure all the way down to ports.  You…
Tharun Kumar Reddy Thamatam - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Infrastructure Consultant at Infosys
Achieving seamless infrastructure management with optimized network and user access controls
I believe enhancements could be made in CloudStack, particularly in the management servers. I had the opportunity to collaborate with one of the Apache CloudStack developers, leading to the installation of additional agents for better information retrieval from hypervisors. We implemented configurations, ensuring consistency across hosts and VMs. We also utilized Ansible or YAML files to automate password upgrades during patching activities and database management, showcasing our customization efforts for improvement. For future releases, it would be beneficial if Apache enhanced CloudStack by integrating alerting systems directly. We've had instances where hypervisors experienced overloads without prior alerts, so proactive alerts within the tool would better prepare us for addressing issues swiftly, preventing disruption in business operations. A portal summarizing system metrics alongside alert capabilities would greatly enhance our operational efficiency.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The initial setup process is straightforward."
"Cisco CloudCenter's scalability is good."
"The initial setup is fairly straightforward if you have a basic setup."
"There are workflows, automated workflows, of different tasks between different infrastructure divisions, like your VMware, your firewall, and your network."
"Upgrades are very simple as well because they've allowed us to get updates directly in the CloudCenter Suite manager. If you need to do an upgrade to your setup afterward, you just push a button and it rolls out the parts and retires the old ones. It's seamless and very simple compared to what we've done before."
"I can define all components and create a blueprint for consumption across all services."
"Cisco has a lot of published information and documentation that helps users understand the product and its offering very well."
"You can scale it easily."
"You can manage infrastructure with a few people, since product is monolithic."
"We chose CloudStack because we saw it with a better TCO ratio, balancing innovation, and starting the DevOps culture with a low operational overhead."
"I can recommend CloudStack because there are a lot of large companies using it in production for critical mission systems, and everything else."
"CloudStack is simple to stand up and get off the ground in a hurry. Its centralized design allows for easier troubleshooting when compared to OpenStack. Out of the box, it’s very well suited for white labeling and IaaS."
"The structuring of the components and isolated environments helped us when using parts of the framework at different levels of product development."
"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."
"It gives us the ability to manage and segregate a guest network with openvSwitch and VLAN IDs."
"The most valuable feature from my point of view is access to environment via console through separate browser window."
 

Cons

"You don't get all the solution's benefits if you have older switches."
"They can add some of those features to make the platform more usable for different backgrounds and developer skills."
"Improvements are needed in UI and multi-tenancy for this solution."
"Cisco can improve their product by being agnostic, not just specific to Cisco components but also supportive of other vendors."
"The improvement I would like to see is not one thing particular to CloudCenter. I'd say it's more of a message that the system is still using a lot of the different products and if they would all just fit better together, they all could be faster together."
"The solution needs to be more simple."
"The product is very expensive."
"The tool should improve its security on the XDR part."
"I would like to see support for native VLAN, and fault-tolerance."
"​The user can't upload SSH keys from the UI. We have to use the API for this, and it is not always convenient."
"The web UI can be improved. It is too complex, and not trivial for the average user."
"It would be a good to have more specific error messages within administration processes (e.g. problem with creating new instance)."
"The area of improvement could be the regionalization aspect. For example, managing multiple regions or HubStack deployments together was not thought out thoroughly in the versions I used. We faced issues around managing the global infrastructure and had to develop around it."
"The numerous, multi-layered drill-down menus make it difficult to find one simple knob to turn."
"CS has very descriptive logging, and every time I faced issues and asked for help, I didn’t get any reply from the community. Reason? Its quite obvious. CS runs on specific environments, unique to each case. So, unless it is a functional issue of CS, nobody can help you. All issues were resolved by myself going through logs. This is another reason why you need smart enough people to manage it. Engineers must have knowledge of hypervisors and understand how CS interacts with them."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is extremely expensive and has additional fees for things like monitoring."
"The tool's pricing is expensive."
"The tool's pricing is balanced with the market."
"CloudStack is an open source solution, so you don't need to pay anything for it. When our company develops something specially for CloudStack, it is donated to the Apache Software Foundation and provided to anyone that wants to use it."
"CloudStack is an open-source product."
"As far as I know, CS is still free of charge. If you want to pay some money, Citrix Cloud Platform is based on CS, I think. As for hypervisors – everything as usual, you need to pay for VMware and vCenter. As for XenServer, recently they changed the free feature list, so you may need to pay some money to get useful features like XenMotion."
"The Apache CloudStack is open source, so you do not have licenses to purchase."
"There is no license, so the product is free unless you are buying professional technical support services."
"It is a 100% open-source solution needing just an Apache license. Also, there are no hidden fees to be paid."
"The solution is open-source and free."
"​Give an effort to planning. If possible, contract a specialized consultant company for the initial setup and knowledge transfer.​​"
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Construction Company
14%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
7%
Educational Organization
9%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise12
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CloudStack?
CloudStack is open-source, so there is no cost apart from learning. Billing solutions, if outsourced, come at a moderate cost.
What needs improvement with CloudStack?
Enhancements for CloudStack can focus on integrating more hypervisors, as mentioned regarding current features. We're working on a new feature that will allow for certain limited functions, but ove...
What is your primary use case for CloudStack?
My usual use cases for CloudStack involve an AWS style private cloud or public cloud. I can deploy an AWS style cloud using the open source tool that is CloudStack. The use case depends on the cust...
 

Also Known As

CliQr, CliQr CloudCenter
Vmops, Cloud.com
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

NTT, Baylor College of Medicine (BCM), CollabNet, Pratt & Miller, PZFlex
GreenQloud, Exoscale, TomTom, ASG, PC Extreme, ISWest, Grid'5000
Find out what your peers are saying about Broadcom, Nutanix, IBM and others in Cloud Management. Updated: June 2026.
903,257 professionals have used our research since 2012.