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Cloudify vs OpenNebula comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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

Cloudify
Ranking in Cloud Management
41st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
OpenNebula
Ranking in Cloud Management
21st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Cloudify is 1.4%, down from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenNebula is 1.6%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
OpenNebula1.6%
Cloudify1.4%
Other97.0%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Mark Wittling - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Architect at Cox communications
Works very well for advanced service chaining requirements and has extremely advanced engineers for support
We had a manager who thought that Cloudify could be used as a replacement for Horizon in OpenStack, but we found that Cloudify lacked the user interface or GUI for doing multitenancy and basic platform management tasks. Cloudify was really good at launching, for example, firewalls and configuring them and doing service chaining and rather advanced things like that, but it didn't meet the requirements for a basic platform management solution. It is something that seems to work better as a bolt-on or an augmented solution. It is a bit mis-marketed as a Cloud Management solution. It is not that. It is more of a service orchestration and automation tool. It is very good at doing that, but it fails to meet basic platform management requirements. Once you have it running, you can't really do anything with it without writing code and scripts. It requires a full-time DevOps person to use it. We deployed a Palo Alto firewall with it. That's basically what the project was for us, and it worked flawlessly once we got it finished, but it took another 12 weeks to get all of the automation and everything else coded, tested, and working. There is certainly a place for this technology, but when we got rid of OpenStack and moved to VMware, we either had to go with the vRealize Automation Suite to do this kind of automation, or we had to find an alternative solution to manage the private cloud. So, we put Cloudify in, but we really couldn't find it useful for basic platform administration tasks.
FOURES Jean-Philippe - PeerSpot reviewer
Products Manager at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
Reliable, simple to manage, and offers great technical support
The support of VXLAN fits with our network management. Thanks to this we can propose mixed solutions using virtual resources on OpenNebula and bare metal servers hosted in our facilities linked to each other on the sale network. This use case is very useful when some applications need bare metal power (Kubernetes workers, huge databases, AI models computations, et cetera). The cluster management is very useful for splitting our different clusters (mutual vs dedicated). We can manage deployments and capacity planning without pain. The API is also really simple and it helped us to develop the Terraform provider to manage OpenNebula like any other cloud infrastructure.

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 the option to run background scripts and processes from a connected API."
"We have been able to realize ROI for our customers in the form of reduced cost, higher top line and increased valuation through improved profitability."
"This is a somewhat complex solution for very complex use cases where there are multiple cloud vendors, multiple infrastructures, and multiple configurations."
"Cloudify works in cases where you have very advanced service chaining requirements; it really works well there, and it fits the best."
"TOSCA model allows modeling the application rather than the automation. It is a machine-readable representation of the application and its infrastructure, which can be used for other things too, not just for the orchestration (e.g. enterprise architecture big picture, who connects to whom)."
"Valuable features are auto-scaling and load balancing."
"Even with the learning curve, the solution is an interesting concept and reminds me of Vagrant Terraform with its own difficulties and easiness."
"Extensible internal functions and plugins. Can implement custom plugins to fit your scenario. Python based plugins."
"The live migration feature has been great and is something we use very often."
"OpenNebula is lightweight, stable, and easy to customize."
"I'll definitely recommend OpenNebula because it's an open-source solution that's effortless to set up, and the total cost of ownership is low."
"OpenNebula has given us tremendous knowledge about cloud computing and about Cloud Management platforms, commonly known as CMP."
"The solution provides templates for configurations that can easily be exchanged to VMs."
"The service feature appeals most to us, thus it is the most valuable."
"I also like the ability to build custom functions. I can define a function where I have two types of views and configure the dependencies. The virtual data centers concept allows me to define users. If a user wants to join certain kinds of machines, the host and the other user won't see them. It gives me the flexibility to define multiple views and data centers in one place."
"It has enabled us to decrease the optics by around 55 to 60%."
 

Cons

"The solution could be improved with respect to error handling. If we want to troubleshoot further and deep dive, we don't have access to admin privileges to extract those errors."
"The upgrading process could be simplified."
"The solution is a bit of a headache because mistakes happen in the blueprint every time we deploy and they require modifications."
"Error handling could be improved; GUI is lacking with respect to user privileges and connectivity."
"Cloudify is not a turn-key solution, nor designed as such."
"Certainly the UI could use some intensive work, but nevertheless, overall, it’s a complete product with its 3.4 version and much better features are available with 4.0."
"I did encounter any issues with scalability."
"It lacked the user interface for multitenancy and basic platform management tasks."
"Hosting platforms are limited so the deployment process needs improvement."
"The UI, monitoring, and alerting could benefit from further improvements."
"Backup features are only available in the enterprise edition. The community version lacks a good solution for making backups."
"The front-facing API can be improved to support lots of requests when the platform is huge with lots of virtual resources."
"They should add more features like object storage."
"The web interface could be better. It's not very difficult to use, but there's room for enhancement."
"The protocol for clusterization is rough and doesn't work well."
"An area for improvement in OpenNebula is the number of features it has. The solution doesn't have that many cloud features compared to other solutions. You'd say, "Okay, simplicity over a rich feature list?" Some say, "No, I need a big machine or a cloud interface for my customers to manage resources. I don't have to go and do it for them." Some people do it that way, and it works, but I'd like to improve the limited features in OpenNebula."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I wasn't involved in the pricing of it because we were just doing prototype work with it, but I was told by the upper management team that it was quite expensive. That was another reason we switched to Morpheus."
"The licensing for OpenNebula used to be free, but now it's no longer free. A customer contacted me asking to move to another provider because of the changes in the licensing terms for OpenNebula. I have no information on how much the OpenNebula license is because the customer pays for it, and I only do the integration."
"OpenNebuoa has recently come up with a new subscription model that is economical and a lot of new customers are choosing this as it is an easy subscription model."
"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."
"The solution is open source so is free."
"We use the Community Edition, rather than the Enterprise Edition."
"OpenNebula gives good value for money."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
15%
Construction Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
University
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise3
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Proximus Partner Communications (Israel) VMware NTT Data Metaswitch Spirent Communications Lumina Networks Atos Fortinet
Akamai, BBC, Fermilab, Terradue, Surf Sara, Produban, Netways, ESA, China Mobile, BlackBerry, Deloitte, Fuze, Telefonica, Trivago, Nokia, Encore Tech, Beeks.
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudify vs. OpenNebula and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,877 professionals have used our research since 2012.