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Cloudify vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

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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

IBM Turbonomic
Sponsored
Ranking in Cloud Management
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (5th), Virtualization Management Tools (4th), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (4th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (5th)
Cloudify
Ranking in Cloud Management
31st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Aria Automation
Ranking in Cloud Management
1st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
170
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (7th), Network Automation (3rd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (17th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 5.7%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cloudify is 1.7%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 11.4%, down from 11.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Keldric Emery - PeerSpot reviewer
Saves time and costs while reducing performance degradation
It's been a very good solution. The reporting has been very, very valuable as, with a very large environment, it's very hard to get your hands on the environment. Turbonomic does that work for you and really shows you where some of the cost savings can be done. It also helps you with the reporting side. Me being able to see that this machine hasn't been used for a very long time, or seeing that a machine is overused and that it might need more RAM or CPU, et cetera, helps me understand my infrastructure. The cost savings are drastic in the cloud feature in Azure and in AWS. In some of those other areas, I'm able to see what we're using, what we're not using, and how we can change to better fit what we have. It gives us the ability for applications and teams to see the hardware and how it's being used versus how they've been told it's being used. The reporting really helps with that. It shows which application is really using how many resources or the least amount of resources. Some of the gaps between an infrastructure person like myself and an application are filled. It allows us to come to terms by seeing the raw data. This aspect is very important. In the past, it was me saying "I don't think that this application is using that many resources" or "I think this needs more resources." I now have concrete evidence as well as reporting and some different analytics that I can show. It gives me the evidence that I would need to show my application owners proof of what I'm talking about. In terms of the downtime, meantime, and resolution that Turbonomic has been able to show in reports, it has given me an idea of things before things happen. That is important as I would really like to see a machine that needs resources, and get resources to it before we have a problem where we have contention and aspects of that nature. It's been helpful in that regard. Turbonomic has helped us understand where performance risks exist. Turbonomic looks at my environment and at the servers and even at the different hosts and how they're handling traffic and the number of machines that are on them. I can analyze it and it can show me which server or which host needs resources, CPU, or RAM. Even in Azure, in the cloud, I'm able to see which resources are not being used to full capacity and understand where I could scale down some in order to save cost. It is very, very helpful in assessing performance risk by navigating underlying causes and actions. The reason why it's helpful is because if there's a machine that's overrunning the CPU, I can run reports every week to get an idea of machines that would need CPU, RAM, or additional resources. Those resources could be added by Turbonomic - not so much by me - on a scheduled basis. I personally don't have to do it. It actually gives me a little bit of my life back. It helps me to get resources added without me physically having to touch each and every resource myself. Turbonomic has helped to reduce performance degradation in the same way as it's able to see the resources and see what it needs and add them before a problem occurs. It follows the trends. It sees the trends of what's happening and it's able to add or take away those resources. For example, we discuss when we need to do certain disaster recovery tests. Over the years, Turbo will be able to see, for example, around this time of year that certain people ramp up certain resources in an environment, and then it will add the resources as required. Another time of year, it will realize these resources are not being used as much, and it takes those resources away. In this way, it saves money and time while letting us know where we are. We've saved a great deal of time using this product when I consider how I'd have to multiply myself and people like me who would have to add resources to devices or take resources away. We've saved hundreds of hours. Most of the time those hours would have to be after hours as well, which are more valuable to me as that's my personal time. Those saved hours are across months, not years. I would consider the number of resources that Turbonomic is adding and taking away and the placement (if I had to do it all myself) would end up being hundreds of hours monthly that would be added without the help of Turbonomic. It helps us to meet SLAs mainly due to the fact that we're able to keep the servers going and to keep the servers in an environment, to keep them to where (if we need to add resources) we can add them at any given time. It will keep our SLAs where they need to be. If we were to have downtime due to the fact that we had to add resources or take resources away and it was an emergency, then that would prevent us from meeting our SLAs. We also use it to monitor Azure and to monitor our machines in terms of the resources that are out there and the cost involved. In a lot of cases, it does a better job of giving us cost information than Azure itself does. We're able to see the cost per machine. We're able to see the unattached volume and storage that we are paying for. It gives us a great level of insight. Turbonomic gives us the time to be able to focus on innovation and ongoing modernization. Some of the tasks that it does are tasks that I would not necessarily have to do. It's very helpful in that I know that the resources are there where they need to be and it gives me an idea of what changes need to be made or what suggestions it's making. Even if I don't take them, I'm able to get a good idea of some best practices through Turbonomic. One of the ways that Turbonomic does to help bring new resources to market is that we are now able to see the resources (or at least monitor the resources) before they get out to the general public within our environment. We saw immediate value from the product in the test environment. We set it up in a small test environment and we started with just placement and we could tell that the placement was being handled more efficiently than what VMware was doing. There was value for us in placement alone. Then, after we left the placement, we began to look at the resources and there were resources. We immediately began to see a change in the environment. It has made the application and performance better, mainly due to the fact that we are able to give resources and take resources away based on what the need is. Our expenses, definitely, have been in a better place based on the savings that we've been able to make in the cloud and on-prem. Turbonomic has been very helpful in that regard. We've been able to see the savings easily based on the reports in Turbonomic. That, and just seeing the machines that are not being used to capacity allows us to set everything up so it runs a bit more efficiently.
Mark Wittling - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Le Quang Long - PeerSpot reviewer
Significantly streamlined operations with good automation that helps with simplifying workflows
It helps me build a big catalog and provide it to my end users. It helps us automate the workflow of creating many VMs and the TensorFlow key method. I do not meet many people to operate it live beforehand. It operates for both of my products, but as a product, it is complicated to integrate and automate with other products.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Turbonomic has helped optimize cloud operations and reduced our cloud costs significantly. Overall, we are at about 40 percent savings, and we spend about three million a year just in Azure. It reduces the size of the VMs, putting them into the right template for usage. People don't realize that you don't have to future-proof a virtual machine in Azure. You just need to build it for today. As the business or service grows, you can scale up or out. About 90 percent of all the costs that we've reduced has been from sizing machines appropriately."
"With Turbonomic, we were able to reduce our ESX cluster size and save money on our maintenance and license renewals. It saved us around $75,000 per year but it's a one-time reduction in VMware licensing. We don't renew the support. The ongoing savings is probably $50,000 to $75,000 a year, but there was a one-time of $200,000 plus."
"I like Turbonomic's automation and AI machine learning features. It shows you what it can do, but it can also act on recommendations automatically. Integration with an APM system makes the AI/ML features truly effective. Understanding what the application is doing and the trends of application behavior can help you make real-world decisions and act on that information."
"The recommendation of the family types is a huge help because it has saved us a lot of money. We use it primarily for that. Another thing that Turbonomic provides us with is a single platform that manages the full application stack and that's something I really like."
"The automation and orchestration components are definitely the best part, as you can tell it what it can do and when, and just let it be."
"I like Turbonomic's built-in reporting. It provides a ton of information out of the box, so I don't have to build panels for the monthly summaries and other reports I need to present to management. We get better performance and bottleneck reporting from this than we do from our older EMC software."
"The tool provides the ability to look at the consumption utilization over a period of time and determine if we need to change that resource allocation based on the actual workload consumption, as opposed to how IT has configured it. Therefore, we have come to realize that a lot of our workloads are overprovisioned, and we are spending more money in the public cloud than we need to."
"The automated memory balancing, where it looks at whether it's being used in the most efficient way and adds or takes away memory, is the best part. If it didn't do that, it would be something that I would have to do. We have too many machines for one person to do that. The automation helps me in that it is done in a really efficient way and a balanced way because of the policies. It really helps."
"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)."
"Cloudify provides the infrastructure-as-code, as well as operational action capabilities (orchestrated startups or upgrades, and more)."
"Valuable features are auto-scaling and load balancing."
"The solution includes the option to run background scripts and processes from a connected API."
"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."
"Has great extendability which means you can build your own custom logic."
"Product has given us the ability to catch early scaling issues that many companies hit on with private clouds."
"It enables a single platform to communicate with the entire infrastructure."
"The solution is user-friendly and intuitive."
"For repeated installations and provisioning of VMs, we now have a clear definition of what has been installed, and we can monitor all that stuff."
"We use it to deploy databases and testing environments. It spins up quickly and also break down fast."
"In terms of scalability, vRA has connections to a lot of different systems. It's very flexible and an impressive product."
"We have integrated our CICD pipeline into an automatic catalog request through some API calls. It can request and provision new virtual machines behind the NSX load balancer, straight out of the CIDC pipeline and add those nodes to the load balancer, request SSL certs, do SSL termination at the load balancer so that it's not encrypted behind the scenes, all of which has really been helpful."
"Upgrades have been extremely simple with their Lifecycle Manager product."
"It helps me build a big catalog and provide it to my end users."
"The setup was straightforward. We upgraded to a newer version seamlessly. It worked really well."
 

Cons

"I do not like Turbonomic's new licensing model. The previous model was pretty straightforward, whereas the new model incorporates what most of the vendors are doing now with cores and utilization. Our pricing under the new model will go up quite a bit. Before, it was pretty straightforward, easy to understand, and reasonable."
"We don't use Turbonomic for FinOps and part of the reason is its cost reporting. The reporting could be much more robust and, if that were the case, I could pitch it for FinOps."
"I would love to see Turbonomic analyze backup data. We have had people in the past put servers into daily full backups with seven-year retention and where the disk size is two terabytes. So, every single day, there is a two terabyte snapshot put into a Blob somewhere. I would love to see Turbonomic say, "Here are all your backups along with the age of them," to help us manage the savings by not having us spend so much on the storage in Azure. That would be huge."
"The planning and costing areas could be a little bit more detailed. When you have more than 2,000 machines, the reports don't work properly. They need to fix it so that the reports work when you use that many virtual machines."
"If they would educate their customers to understand the latest updates, that would help customers... Also, there are a lot of features that are not available in Turbonomic. For example, PaaS component optimization and automation are still in the development phase."
"There are a few things that we did notice. It does kind of seem to run away from itself a little bit. It does seem to have a mind of its own sometimes. It goes out there and just kind of goes crazy. There needs to be something that kind of throttles things back a little bit. I have personally seen where we've been working on things, then pulled servers out of the VMware cluster and found that Turbonomic was still trying to ship resources to and from that node. So, there has to be some kind of throttling or ability for it to not be so buggy in that area. Because we've pulled nodes out of a cluster into maintenance mode, then brought it back up, and it tried to put workloads on that outside of a cluster. There may be something that is available for this, but it seems very kludgy to me."
"The deployment process is a little tricky. It wasn't hard for me because I have pretty in-depth knowledge of Kubernetes, and their software runs on Kubernetes. To deploy it or upgrade it, you have to be able to follow steps and use the Kubernetes command line, or you'll need someone to come in and do it for you."
"The automation area could be improved, and the generic reports are poor. We want more details in the analysis report from the application layer. The reports from the infrastructure layer are satisfactory, but Turbonomic won't provide much information if we dig down further than the application layer."
"The upgrading process could be simplified."
"Unlike the Docker environment, Cloudify takes time for configuration and its learning curve."
"The solution is a bit of a headache because mistakes happen in the blueprint every time we deploy and they require modifications."
"Install of the product itself could be improved and I would like to see better event monitoring."
"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."
"Error handling could be improved; GUI is lacking with respect to user privileges and connectivity."
"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."
"The most important thing that we missed in vRanger was the possibility to mount several images instantaneously and present it so we can run it immediately."
"Something as simple as formatting the catalog in a different way would be helpful because there is no option for doing so. A lot of the contents for the virtual machine, blueprints that you can request, are hidden from view and there's no way to change the view."
"Stability has gotten a lot better. However, the vRO aspect, when you have a multi vRA head, is a little bit finicky still. vRO still needs to stay on one appliance and be one application, because, when you have two, you can't see runs on the other one that are happening when you're not logged into that one."
"Deploying and configuring the solution takes a lot of time."
"It would be better if VMware would provide API documentation for developers and customers on the Internet."
"7.5 is not user-friendly, in fact, it's a nightmare. They changed everything on the graphic user interface, the mode where the user interacts with the product."
"I would also like to see them streamline the install. It's split between Windows and Linux appliances, and it would be easier if it was all appliances. I think they're going that way."
"It would be nice if, at the director level, the manager level, there was a pretty graphic. They don't like to see numbers and line items, they want to see graphs and scales and real world pictures. That would support better reporting."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I don't know the current prices, but I like how the licensing is based on the number of instances instead of sockets, clusters, or cores. We have some VMs that are so heavy I can only fit four on one server. It's not cost-effective if we have to pay more for those. When I move around a VM SQL box with 30 cores and a half-terabyte of RAM, I'm not paying for an entire socket and cores where people assume you have at least 10 or 20 VMs on that socket for that pricing."
"Everybody tells me the pricing is high. But the ROIs are great."
"I know there have been some issues with the billing, when the numbers were first proposed, as to how much we would save. There was a huge miscommunication on our part. Turbonomic was led to believe that we could optimize our AWS footprint, because we didn't know we couldn't. So, we were promised savings of $750,000. Then, when we came to implement Turbonomic, the developers in AWS said, "Absolutely not. You're not putting that in our environment. We can't scale down anything because they coded it." Our AWS environment is a legacy environment. It has all these old applications, where all the developers who have made it are no longer with the company. Those applications generate a ton of money for us. So, if one breaks, we are really in trouble and they didn't want to have to deal with an environment that was changing and couldn't be supported. That number went from $750,000 to about $450,000. However, that wasn't Turbonomic's fault."
"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."
"In the last year, Turbonomic has reduced our cloud costs by $94,000."
"We see ROI in extended support agreements (ESA) for old software. Migration activities seem to be where Turbonomic has really benefited us the most. It's one click and done. We have new machines ready to go with Turbonomic, which are properly sized instead of somebody sitting there with a spreadsheet and guessing. So, my return on investment would certainly be on currency, from a software and hardware perspective."
"I'm not involved in any of the billing, but my understanding is that is fairly expensive."
"The product is fairly priced right now. Given its capabilities, it is excellently priced. We think that the product will become self-funding because we will be able to maximize our resources, which will help us from a capacity perspective. That should save us money in the long run."
"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 solution is pretty expensive but provides good workload management."
"The pricing for this solution is roughly 20% lower than the competitive products in the market."
"The cost of the solution is reasonable for us. Although it is relatively high, we prioritize stability and integration over cost."
"From the customer perspective, the value was worth it."
"This is an expensive product and the high price is starting to become an issue for us."
"I would rate it high because, compared to other solutions, VMware’s pricing is quite expensive. VMware products have become significantly more costly in recent years, leading to higher costs."
"They should provide one license for all the sub-products."
"The tool is expensive since it is an enterprise product."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
7%
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Retailer
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Turbonomic?
It offers different scenarios. It provides more capabilities than many other tools available. Typically, its price is...
What needs improvement with Turbonomic?
The implementation could be enhanced.
What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?
We use IBM Turbonomic to automate our cloud operations, including monitoring, consolidating dashboards, and reporting...
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What's the difference between VMware vRA (automation) and vROps (operations)?
vROP is a virtualization management solution from VMWare. It is efficient and easy to manage. You can find anything y...
Is there any way to try VMware Aria Automation for free?
When it comes to VMware Aria Automation, you have three choices for free runs: Hands-on Lab (HOL) Advanced lab A fre...
Which sectors can benefit the most from VMware Aria Automation?
I was looking at VMware Aria Automation case studies recently and I got the impression that three main kinds of compa...
 

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
No data available
VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
Proximus Partner Communications (Israel) VMware NTT Data Metaswitch Spirent Communications Lumina Networks Atos Fortinet
Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudify vs. VMware Aria Automation and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
847,625 professionals have used our research since 2012.