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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

"From my perspective, this product is really good, and we are not even using each and every feature."
"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 ability to increase server density inside of my environment, which has helped me drive reduction in costs."
"The Control Console provides a very easy to read dashboard of "too little/just right/too much" resources both for current data and on a historical or predictive basis."
"I would say that the initial thing is that it provides us with a technological basis to expand capacity management beyond Excel."
"This product has provided us with a more comprehensive solution that is now replacing nearly all other tools which were previously used in the different platforms and environments within the account."
"We switched to Densify because it gave us a more complete end-to-end picture of the environment and really became the system of truth across all of our environments versus having to aggregate information from many dissimilar systems."
"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."
"Using X-Play is simple. In three steps you can define things and there is also a wizard to guide you... The wizard is the simplest way to automate and the resulting automation saves us time."
"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."
"Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) serves as a single pane of glass to manage the entire infrastructure, letting you manage everything from there without needing to depend on multiple consoles, which effectively eliminates many silos."
"The product is pretty intuitive and easy to learn."
"The use case for Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is that we can share data to the cloud and there is no need to sync manually; it automatically runs the job for the data sync from the on-premises to the cloud."
"Using NCM's built-in playbooks has helped free up time for my IT team to focus on other projects, saving approximately 20% of time."
"As I see in this current scenario and today, Nutanix cost and pricing is lower than the different OEM or vendor options."
"Among the most valuable features are the one-click upgrade, that Nutanix is very easy to understand, and that it's very user-friendly."
 

Cons

"It seems that the mechanism for integration is, it goes so far but I think there could be some standard integration to normal remedy service now etc. I think that should be out of the box."
"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."
"Normalization of CPU utilization is required. At present, the data is available based on entitlement level."
"In terms of integration, the tool has great data. However, it's not always meaningful because the true business attributes of how most Fortune 500 companies operate are not maintaining in one tool, they're in a school of many tools."
"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."
"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."
"Unfortunately the tools and mechanisms which really came to maturity in the cloud, and were not mainstream on-premise, are still not implemented."
"Pricing could be worked on a bit. I feel that when I talk to people about it who have looked into Nutanix, they say, "Well, it's pretty expensive compared to the other thing I was looking at.""
"There are some cases when there are multiple alerts for the same issue. For example, if I forget to put it in hosting maintenance mode, then I start getting multiple, duplicate alerts for the same host, which we don't want."
"You can set up DHCP but it's a little bit clunky. I wish they would streamline and centralize the management of DHCP."
"The one thing I wish it had was that it worked more closely and more cleanly with custom data inputs, which I know is a lot to ask."
"The integration with Splunk is a little lacking, and this is something that we've worked on with Nutanix quite extensively in the last year or two."
"There is room for improvement in making the solution easier still. If you don't know Calm, it's not so easy to use... It is a really good solution for doing simple tasks, but it's not a good solution for complex tasks."
"In the gambling industry, you have a lot of regulation from different countries. One of those regulations states that you have to be able to send all the logs of your Prism to a separate server, what we call the syslog server. On Prism Central, this doesn't work. We have opened a case for it, since this is a basic feature nowadays. We spoke to Nutanix, and they said that it will be in future updates. We did an update, following their support, but once we did the update, it wasn't fixed."
"However, I feel that simpler onboarding and learning curves are needed as some users find the initial setup and configuration planning requires expertise."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"There was some sticker shock, as this is not just another software product to spit out graphs."
"The company frequently changes its prices, and it is not clear how the subscription-based model works."
"It's cost-effective. It's not necessarily cheap, but it's also not inordinately expensive. It comes down to how much you use it to offset some of the costs."
"In my opinion, the pricing is reasonable."
"Licensing is always a hot topic. We haven't had any challenges around licensing and costs. Everything was within budget and our expectations. It's a hot topic because renewals and licensing costs are high. Managing costs is always a concern, as we're always being asked to do more with less."
"The pricing was quite competitive and a lot lower compared to other solutions. It wasn't cheap, but it was not as expensive."
"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."
"Nutanix has good central management tools where one guy can manage the entire system. Looking at other systems, I need a guy to manage the servers and another guy to manage the cell network and storage. I need a bigger team for other solutions compared to Nutanix where I can use a small team and reduce my operations to manage the cluster. Sometimes what you hear with this solution is, "It is so expensive," but the cost and benefits that Nutanix has inside are really good."
"The five-year term for NCM's license cost and support was around five million."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Retailer
10%
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.
895,891 professionals have used our research since 2012.