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Densify vs Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 15, 2026

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

Densify
Ranking in Cloud Management
27th
Ranking in Virtualization Management Tools
8th
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
16th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (11th), Cloud Analytics (5th)
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)
Ranking in Cloud Management
2nd
Ranking in Virtualization Management Tools
2nd
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
125
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (4th), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Densify is 2.3%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is 2.6%, down from 6.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)2.6%
Densify2.3%
Other95.1%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

AbhishekGupta2 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr PreSales Cloud Architect at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees
Optimized cloud costs and automated right‑sizing have reduced spend while reporting needs improvement
The best features Densify offers are actionable optimization recommendations, which tell you how to reduce costs while maintaining performance; the ML-powered predictive analytics feature, which considers historical patterns to provide recommendations; multi-cloud coverage for optimization across AWS, Azure, and GCP; and a solid balance between performance and cost. Out of those features, I find myself relying on actionable optimization recommendations and predictive analytics features the most because Densify goes one step beyond by providing recommendations considering historical patterns, especially for workloads that only spike during certain times of the month. Densify has positively impacted my organization by providing significant cost savings through right-sizing and eliminating inefficient resources, allowing faster decisions based on data, and reducing manual intervention for cloud operations, thus providing automation of basic cloud routines. I usually see a twenty-five to thirty percent cost saving in my customer's environment, and from a time-saving perspective, it has almost halved the time of the operations team.
Phani Venkata Sai BKD - PeerSpot reviewer
Technology Lead at Thomson Reuters
Manages hybrid infrastructure seamlessly with flexible cluster scaling and comprehensive oversight
The most important aspect of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is that it helps us manage the infrastructure as a hyperconverged infrastructure in HCI mode. If I have different physical servers, I can map them into a cluster and manage the storage together. It provides flexibility to make use of storage in a clustered format instead of using it in an individual storage endpoint. We have the flexibility to have Nutanix-based licensing based on the core model, instead of having a specific cost on the cluster. The costing on a core model gives customers flexibility to add multiple cores to a single physical host and adjust the infrastructure accordingly, and we can scale up the cluster as needed. While other cloud providers, AWS or Azure, are mostly into cloud-based solutions, and Azure has introduced Azure Stack HCI for managing on-premises infrastructure, Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) provides flexibility from day one. We can manage both on-premises and Azure solutions using a single pane of glass, eliminating the need to navigate different windows or screens. It provides a comprehensive view of the infrastructure and highlights specific areas through alerts, giving us good visibility of infrastructure conditions.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Densify were deemed to be the best for us at the time and they still are, for now."
"The tool will come back and tell us that we can operate with 1,000 minutes as an example, save 90% on the contractual rate and not run into any issues."
"Using the reports from Densify will provide us with the trusted advisor backing for our own purchase and provisioning decisions."
"The ability to increase server density inside of my environment, which has helped me drive reduction in costs."
"The solution's tech support is excellent."
"Densify's ability to aggregate multiple on-premise vCenters and multiple cloud accounts, gives it a level of visibility not found in many places."
"The Control Console is an incredible way to give a quick view of current capacity utilization allowing technical people to drill down quickly and allowing business/management people to get a quick overview of the environment."
"I usually see a twenty-five to thirty percent cost saving in my customer's environment, and from a time-saving perspective, it has almost halved the time of the operations team."
"The most valuable feature for me is being able to find a machine, regardless of which cluster it's located in, as quickly as possible, and being able to work on it. A lot of times we are called upon to troubleshoot an issue. That usually means there's a problem that needs quick attention. Being able to find machines, ascertain their status, and do so in a timely manner, are processes that are very critical to our business needs."
"The solution is very stable...Customer support is very good."
"The capacity planning, forecasting, and Runways are worth their weight in gold and NCM has saved us time in IT, and that's money."
"One of the most valuable features is the hardware and how they have set it up to be pretty redundant. If something goes down, you can just swap it out and you're back online. If a drive or even a whole node goes down, it's pretty easy to get it back up and running."
"Previous inquiries took us almost a full day to prepare the VM to the liking of our users. Now the deployment time is below 15 minutes and users can do it on their own! That leaves us to only update the blueprints if new requirements come in or new Windows Versions are published. As we have now predefined setups the testing team can rely on common ground for their product tests. Development teams can experiment with alpha versions in a secured environment (separate VLANs) without harming production machines."
"First of all, the product is very stable."
"It is interesting to me how Nutanix manages hyperconvergence, the possible failures that can occur in the platform migrating machine machines to nodes without problems while solving the failed node, but without a doubt prism is the feature that I value the most since I can manage and monitor everything in a single tool, giving me simplicity, statistics, states of equipment resources, alerts, updates in a single click, migrate equipment nodes manually or automatically."
"Its resilience and performance are excellent."
 

Cons

"The solution's stability is the primary concern for me."
"Service management level integration is probably the biggest area for improvement."
"Normalization of CPU utilization is required. At present, the data is available based on entitlement level."
"Some parts of the interface are rather complex and require a bit of time to navigate, but this has never stopped us as a Densify advisor is readily available to help with our "how to" queries."
"There are times when results are very slow when we search for servers."
"Unfortunately the tools and mechanisms which really came to maturity in the cloud, and were not mainstream on-premise, are still not implemented."
"Some parts of the interface are rather complex and require a bit of time to navigate, but this has never stopped us as a Densify advisor is readily available to help with our "how to" queries."
"Initially we talked about some custom reporting, wherein our customer expected certain reports on a few areas, like how the storage is allocated, how the network performance is doing, and how the network utilization is happening for a virtual machine."
"Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) can be improved as the NKP product needs to mature a little more."
"You can set up DHCP but it's a little bit clunky. I wish they would streamline and centralize the management of DHCP."
"Even though it's a lot easier, it could be a bit slicker for the end-users. The ability to create their own blueprints could be without their having to understand the details of what they're trying to do. If they could just tick this, this, this, and this — whatever they need — and it would go spinning those up, that would be better. Now, we still guide them quite a bit."
"I rate this area a seven because this technology is new to the vendor as well, so for them, it takes time to reach out to developers and check everything in their test environment before providing a solution."
"I think one of the points to improve is having the platform with multiple languages, for example Spanish, seriously, one point to consider is a valid point for me, my native language is Spanish, being in Venezuela."
"We have clusters not only with HPE. We have some with VMware to use Cisco Call Manager for VoIP. That only runs on VMware. They upgrade the ESXi host but not vCenter, which manages the ESXi host. It would be great if there is a way to include vCenter on the VM because you run the updates, but you do not update vCenter."
"I would like to see a P2V feature like Move or Xtract."
"NCM's analytics could be better because we're not getting an accurate analysis of our virtual machines, and we're over-provisioning some of them."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There was some sticker shock, as this is not just another software product to spit out graphs."
"Densify has licensing setup so you can collect data without licensing. It gives you the ability to collect on everything, then choose later what you would like to license."
"Cost is always involved, but then I feel that this solution is better than other products that we have."
"Setup cost is negligible, as it scales fairly well."
"At the end of the day, the product justifies the cost, and it leads to a conversation with management over whether we actually need this feature and if there are any use cases for why we would want to keep it."
"Don't unlicense your Prism licensing. Pro is the strict minimum for real infrastructure. Go with at least Pro and not with the starter. Ultimate was the best choice for me."
"We primarily work with mid-level customers in India rather than enterprise clients. These mid-level customers are interested in services that are priced more moderately. In comparison, Nutanix's pricing is significantly higher than that of other setups. As a result, we have approximately 3,000 customers using VMware, while Nutanix has around 1,800 customers."
"I think it can be more cost-effective."
"Some people say that Nutanix is a bit more expensive. However, when we were looking at Nutanix versus Cisco and NetApp before deploying this solution, the prices were very similar. Being a government entity, we got a bit more of a discount on Nutanix so it was a bit cheaper. The time savings after the fact has been really worth it."
"The tool is expensive."
"Its licensing is cheaper than VMware. However, the price for certain licenses or use cases is not clearly indicated. For example, replication of the cluster to switch from one VM to another when one is down is not included in the standard price. It requires an additional license, but it is not clearly indicated."
"It's always difficult to discuss Nutanix pricing because the cost varies wildly depending on the customer and the region. Desktop virtualization is simpler because there is a defined scope. You can tell the Nutanix salesperson how many users you have. In a more traditional environment, it's always best to have NCM for monitoring because you'd be crazy not to."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Marketing Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise10
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business28
Midsize Enterprise26
Large Enterprise75
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Densify?
Densify can be improved in a couple of areas: the learning curve for new users, where it feels like an advanced optimization tool that needs time for full leverage; enhancements in reporting and fi...
What is your primary use case for Densify?
My main use cases for Densify include cloud cost optimization, predictive resource sizing, assistance in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments, and reducing the manual analysis of the environme...
What advice do you have for others considering Densify?
My advice for others looking into using Densify is to focus on setting up governance policy early, integrate optimization results into your usual sprints, and train FinOps and engineering teams tog...
Which set of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) features do you find to be the most useful?
For me, the features related to cost savings are the best part of NCM. Of course, the whole product is worth using and when it comes to cloud management, there is a reason why it is favored by so m...
Are the setup process and further maintenance of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) difficult?
When I came into my current organization, NCM was already set up. According to the team that dealt with it, the product was fairly easy to set up. Compared to other products, our IT rates are set u...
Is Nutanix Cloud Manager’s Intelligent Operations feature effective?
Yes, this is a highly effective feature and the rebranding only made things better as they introduced more improvements. You can benefit from Zero coding task automation Automated optimization Tic...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Nutanix Cloud Manager Intelligent Operations, Nutanix Cloud Manager Self-Service, Nutanix Cloud Management Cost Governance, Nutanix Cloud Manager Security Central, Nutanix Software Subscription
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

AIG, Bank of America, Cigna, Citi
JetBlue, International Speedway Corporation, Volkswagen SAIC, Brighton and Hove City Council, Foresters Financial, Janus International Group, Cloud Comrade, Serco
Find out what your peers are saying about Densify vs. Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
894,998 professionals have used our research since 2012.