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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 (7th)
 

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 solution includes a lot of features and is useful because you can configure all the way down to ports."
"I can define all components and create a blueprint for consumption across all services."
"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."
"The solution is agile and it has APIs for integration."
"The solution has a blueprint pattern where you can club multiple machines, define middleware components, define dependencies of components, and create an application pattern for a Java stack that can be consumed across all services using the same TOSCA patterns for CloudCenter, vRealize Automation, and ServiceNow."
"The initial setup process is straightforward."
"Cisco CloudCenter's scalability is good."
"Cisco has a lot of published information and documentation that helps users understand the product and its offering very well."
"CloudStack is simple to stand up and get off the ground in a hurry."
"We acquired some good clients for our billing and control portal solutions with CloudStack and it improved our business greatly."
"We like the virtualization capabilities."
"I can recommend CloudStack because there are a lot of large companies using it in production for critical mission systems, and everything else."
"We chose CloudStack because we saw it with a better TCO ratio, balancing innovation, and starting the DevOps culture with a low operational overhead."
"When compared to OpenStack, CloudStack is also an open-source platform that is continuously improving its features and capabilities with each new version release. Having worked with CloudStack 4.7, 4.14, and most recently, 4.17, I have noticed significant enhancements in the platform's features and customer experience, such as the introduction of a new user interface in the latest release. Notably, the latest versions have made major improvements to VM live migrations, making them more efficient and effective."
"CloudStack is our private IaaS cloud which helps us manage resource usage in our company and it is also a great PoC environment."
"I liked the separation of the isolated network versus the shared network."
 

Cons

"We're moving away from it due to the fact that they discontinued the product and introduced something new that does not fit our purpose."
"You don't get all the solution's benefits if you have older switches."
"For many clients, the main problem with the solution is the price. Cisco is very expensive. If they could somehow make the pricing more competitive, that would be a big draw."
"I'm not a big fan of CloudCenter. I don't have anything against it, however, the on-premise version has been so hard to upgrade and maintain."
"The tool should improve its security on the XDR part."
"They should provide an entire cloud offering, from architecture to network security features."
"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 product does not have an easily implementable payment gateway."
"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."
"I encountered some stability issues. When I tried to remove high-capacity virtual machines it took a long time to update, and sometimes the VM status failed to update properly in the cloud database. This occurred multiple times, even though I had sufficient resources."
"A technology upgrade is one item which could be improved upon a lot."
"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 number of contributors to this solution is relatively small compared to other solutions. However, if more frequent users of CloudStack contribute to the open-source community, it will significantly enhance the overall community experience and make it more useful for everyone involved."
"​The user can't upload SSH keys from the UI. We have to use the API for this, and it is not always convenient."
"There are some minor things that can be improved even more such as, perhaps, a bit more polishing on the GUI side to catch up with the API possibilities (which are really extensive) but otherwise nothing critical."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is extremely expensive and has additional fees for things like monitoring."
"The tool's pricing is balanced with the market."
"The tool's pricing is expensive."
"CloudStack is an open-source product."
"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."
"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."
"It is a 100% open-source solution needing just an Apache license. Also, there are no hidden fees to be paid."
"There is no license, so the product is free unless you are buying professional technical support services."
"The solution is open-source and free."
"The Apache CloudStack is open source, so you do not have licenses to purchase."
"​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
Construction Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Media Company
7%
Construction Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

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
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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: August 2026.
909,679 professionals have used our research since 2012.