No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

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 tool is really at the center of our whole digital transformation."
"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 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."
"You can scale it easily."
"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."
"However, for the rest of the solution, the product is doing a great job for what we require."
"The initial setup process is straightforward."
"CloudStack supports every operating system that supports hypervisors, which makes the product more attractive, compared to vCloud Director or Azure."
"CloudStack is our private IaaS cloud which helps us manage resource usage in our company and it is also a great PoC environment."
"All our development is done on this environment because we deploy around 3,000 instances every day."
"The back-end database design is simple and straight forward. The user interface is designed with external users in mind. Billing is relatively straightforward with this product. Not being restricted to just one hypervisor was nice."
"It was easy to deploy, both for PoC and production (with HA)."
"CloudStack provides an environment that is very simple to use, with built-in APIs and a web interface that supports almost all features of AWS and Azure."
"You can manage infrastructure with a few people, since product is monolithic."
"If you are looking for a stable product that is easy to install with a lot of documentation, a portal that is very easy to understand and manage and that can be modified, you should use CloudStack."
 

Cons

"Improvements are needed in UI and multi-tenancy for this solution."
"The solution needs to be more simple."
"Cisco can improve their product by being agnostic, not just specific to Cisco components but also supportive of other vendors."
"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."
"They should provide an entire cloud offering, from architecture to network security features."
"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."
"The product is very expensive."
"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 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."
"It is not widely used so Google does not help very much when you are troubleshooting, and the CloudStack forum is not very active."
"My teammates have complained about the upgrade. The source code had massive files that had to be merged with our own development to upgrade to the latest version of CloudStack. It was quite painful for them. CloudStack could add some cost management tools to give me some control over the costs associated with the number of users of my services."
"A technology upgrade is one item which could be improved upon a lot."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"More integration with third-party products (we know that OpenStack has a better level of integration)."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's pricing is expensive."
"The solution is extremely expensive and has additional fees for things like monitoring."
"The tool's pricing is balanced with the market."
"There is no license, so the product is free unless you are buying professional technical support services."
"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."
"CloudStack is an open-source product."
"The Apache CloudStack is open source, so you do not have licenses to purchase."
"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.​​"
"It is a 100% open-source solution needing just an Apache license. Also, there are no hidden fees to be paid."
"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."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Management solutions are best for your needs.
893,915 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Construction Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Educational Organization
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Computer Software 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
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: May 2026.
893,915 professionals have used our research since 2012.