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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
40th
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
19th
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 July 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Cloudify is 1.5%, down from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenNebula is 1.7%, down from 6.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
OpenNebula1.7%
Cloudify1.5%
Other96.8%
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

"Cloudify works in cases where you have very advanced service chaining requirements; it really works well there, and it fits the best."
"It has enabled us to create the DICE Deployment Service and simplified deployment of any other services (monitoring, continuous integration, etc.)."
"No need to change the existing application code base."
"You can use only what you need. You can remove certain Cloudify functions from the framework to create a "minified" version of what you need. This might only consist of the messaging delivery system, and the orchestration functions."
"Cloudify provides a good framework that you can build on to provide custom solutions for an organization."
"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. They have a standardized markup that's based on TOSCA, which is a standard. I like the fact that they're standards-based. Their solution works extremely well if you have the talent and the manpower to write TOSCA descriptors to deploy and interchange services or to automate the configuration and turn up of services."
"It's easy to create a cloud server, such as Linux with JBoss or WebSphere, which is good for continuous deployment."
"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."
"It has enabled us to decrease the optics by around 55 to 60%."
"For the entire data center, as a private cloud, I believe that user management, expert management, and the virtual data center is completely magic for the users."
"OpenNebula freed my customer from doing the maintenance operations of the servers because now that can be done by his clients."
"The service feature appeals most to us, thus it is the most valuable."
"It makes maintenance very easy and stress-free for our teams."
"For our use case, we found the solution to be the best fit when dealing with infrastructure services."
"What's best about OpenNebula that people like is that it's easy to deploy. It's also easy to manage. It's interesting because people choose OpenNebula over other solutions because of the ease of management."
 

Cons

"Install of the product itself could be improved and I would like to see better event monitoring."
"Error handling could be improved; GUI is lacking with respect to user privileges and connectivity."
"Unlike the Docker environment, Cloudify takes time for configuration and its learning curve."
"Cloudify is not a turn-key solution, nor designed as such."
"I'd like to see a more simplified upgrade process so it can be completed in one step rather than multiple steps (snapshot backup + snapshot restore)."
"We'd like to see the maturity of the plugins continue, including Amazon EMR and others."
"It lacked the user interface for multitenancy and basic platform management tasks. It is a leader in the niche area that they like to perform in, but it only does about 30% of top-tier advanced functions of platform management. It doesn't meet about 70% of what you need to manage a private cloud platform."
"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 protocol for clusterization is rough and doesn't work well."
"As with all enterprise software licensing, the pricing is not intuitive and must be negotiated; grandfathered contracts are better than anything offered today."
"It should have a simple REST API like most other tools. It's the industry standard format. An XML-RPC API gives you an XML document that you have to convert and then do something with that. REST API endpoint provides outputs in a JSON document. I would also like to see support for user data or heat templates, which OpenStack offers, but OpenNebula doesn't have this yet."
"The web interface could be better. It's not very difficult to use, but there's room for enhancement."
"There are small things that are hard. For example, making sure that it is going to be installable on public clouds."
"The front-facing API can be improved to support lots of requests when the platform is huge with lots of virtual resources."
"Template management also needs improvement in OpenNebula because it's inferior right now."
"Most of the competitors are offering some sort of billing software to transform their installation to work as a small-sized public cloud, but those offerings from OpenNebula are still missing."
 

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."
"We use the Community Edition, rather than the Enterprise Edition."
"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."
"The solution is open source so is free."
"OpenNebula gives good value for money."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
13%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Comms Service Provider
10%
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
 

Comparisons

 

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: June 2026.
904,146 professionals have used our research since 2012.