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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
38th
Ranking in Virtualization Management Tools
11th
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
24th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (13th), Cloud Analytics (6th)
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)
Ranking in Cloud Management
1st
Ranking in Virtualization Management Tools
2nd
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
119
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (4th), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Densify is 2.0%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is 3.1%, down from 6.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)3.1%
Densify2.0%
Other94.9%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Amit Kantia - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure capacity & demand manager at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Its most valuable feature is the ability to capture attributes in the console, but it is not a stable solution
I recommend others to use Densify. They can not only use it for reporting but for automation as well. They can implement the policies on the console easily during the build-out procedure. Stability is the primary concern to us as it is causing lots of problems. We can only make significant decisions if Densify allows us, and it takes lots of time. Thus, I rate the tool as a six out of ten.
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

"I would say that the initial thing is that it provides us with a technological basis to expand capacity management beyond Excel."
"The Densify Control Console, and Environment Status."
"The ability to increase server density inside of my environment, which has helped me drive reduction in costs."
"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."
"Densify's ability to aggregate multiple on-premise vCenters and multiple cloud accounts, gives it a level of visibility not found in many places."
"One would be the automatic rebalancing of the environment. That was one feature which helped. With that, we could improve our efficiency of our VMware infrastructure."
"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."
"The solution's tech support is excellent."
"What I like the most about it is how intuitive it is to use."
"The solution's support for scripts... has reduced the man-hours it takes to deploy and support applications because we don't have to rewrite all the scripts."
"I do a lot of tasks via automation which I previously would have to hire people to do. The solution has helped me to eliminate a lot of low-skilled labor. I can put the money required for this job into other things."
"The best features of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) start with the combination of cost and what is really under the hood, and it basically does the same thing that VMware does."
"Its resilience and performance are excellent."
"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."
"The convergence between the network and the storage is valuable."
"Using these features in Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) reduces time in my daily operations."
 

Cons

"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."
"The solution's stability is the primary concern for me."
"A closer integration to the service management processes."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Normalization of CPU utilization is required. At present, the data is available based on entitlement level."
"Unfortunately the tools and mechanisms which really came to maturity in the cloud, and were not mainstream on-premise, are still not implemented."
"The licensing procedures are not smooth and easy."
"There are some load-balancing features that are currently missing in the flow network security and could potentially be added in the future."
"One thing that comes directly to mind is how they manage version control. I would love to see Calm create a built-in source control feature, one that we could tie into a repository and it would self-manage changes in versions. All the version control is built within Calm right now. I would love to see that integrated with an external repository and make it easy to tie it into GitHub or Git repositories."
"The interoperability with different clouds can be better so that one can even integrate the infrastructure of different clouds. They can interoperate better with other clouds because currently, you have to buy Nutanix resources in the cloud."
"The stability of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The design could be more user-friendly. There is always room for improvement when it comes to a site being more user-friendly."
"When we tried to migrate an application from the old cluster, we couldn't run it on Nutanix’s native hypervisor."
"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."
 

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."
"Setup cost is negligible, as it scales fairly well."
"Cost is always involved, but then I feel that this solution is better than other products that we have."
"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."
"The product is expensive...When I have to sell the tool to a customer, I would say that it is not very expensive and can be termed priceless."
"The solution is a bit high in price for what we are receiving as features. I feel they are overcharging us at approximately 25 percent. That is something that they should change."
"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."
"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."
"In my opinion, the pricing is reasonable."
"Nutanix is really smart to understand that the most important fact is the value to the customer, not the price tag. While you do get some sticker shock sometimes, as soon as you show this and you prove the value, all of a sudden, it looks exceptionally affordable."
"The pricing model offered by Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is better than the ones offered by the other solutions in the market."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Retailer
15%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Government
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Marketing Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

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 Business26
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise72
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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: February 2026.
883,448 professionals have used our research since 2012.