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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
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
10
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
121
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 Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)3.1%
Densify2.0%
Other94.9%
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

"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 Densify Control Console, and Environment Status."
"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."
"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."
"The ability to increase server density inside of my environment, which has helped me drive reduction in costs."
"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."
"Simplicity is most valuable because, with a single click, we have visibility of the entire infrastructure."
"The ability to do Layer 2 stretching across data centers is valuable. The migration of VMs from one location to the other is also valuable."
"The self-service capabilities allow us to orchestrate our deployments without writing code, and they also use artificial intelligence to improve our security posture."
"Nutanix Cloud Manager's runway features are a big help in predicting strategy for optimization."
"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."
"In NCM, we get operational automation along with cloud visibility, a part of a single VM, blueprints, playbooks, cost governance, network security planning, and all, which are the most things we are blessed to be a part of NCM."
"It is a scalable solution."
"The 1-Click Centralized Upgrades are really nice. When you go in and want to upgrade your Cluster, you just click a button and everything will upgrade. You don't have to go to each individual server to do the upgrades."
 

Cons

"Normalization of CPU utilization is required. At present, the data is available based on entitlement level."
"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."
"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 filter options for more detailed custom reports; and improvements in UI performance since some users feel that the UI is a bit slow or outdated, especially with certain interfaces such as the Kubex Console or the Cloud Decks."
"A closer integration to the service management processes."
"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."
"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."
"Unfortunately the tools and mechanisms which really came to maturity in the cloud, and were not mainstream on-premise, are still not implemented."
"I would like to see a P2V feature like Move or Xtract. The interface for migrating from one VM infrastructure to another is one of the best but going from a physical machine to a Nutanix VM is a bit too challenging."
"I would like to see integrated analytics in the dashboard that accurately displays graphics, such as CPU usage, the overall health of the infrastructure, and specific virtual machines that we refer to frequently."
"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."
"We have had our fair share of issues while upgrading early on, but the process now is working flawlessly."
"While using Nutanix, we need to switch off the VM in case we are doing an update. We have to turn off the VM if we are updating the memory or hard disk space. In a normal scenario, we switch off the VM, update it and then update the RAM. Once updated, we need to switch on the machine and wait for the RAM to initialize. The same goes for hard drives as well."
"The impact of the Runbooks feature on automating our IT processes with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) hasn't been significant yet."
"It will be better if they can extend this to non-AHV hypervisors and also non-Nutanix clusters so that people who need this feature but can not goto HCI currently can make use of this product."
"We are still learning about cloud usage and the integrations we are targeting right now at the event. I believe there is room for improvement, especially with the prices, which are not very friendly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cost is always involved, but then I feel that this solution is better than other products that we have."
"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."
"Its cost is reasonable. The features are very good."
"For Ecuador, this is a sensitive issue. It is a small economy, so the issue of budget is very sensitive. You find many small businesses and government clients who do not renew, for example, support or guarantees, which raises the risk level for them. We are always advising them that it is necessary to renew the services or infrastructure."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The pricing was very good. We were very pleased with what we were offered by our account manager. Because of that, we expanded Nutanix Cloud Manager, and we hope to expand even more. Right now, we are in Azure, and as we build up more and more within the NCM platform, we hope to expand into AWS as well."
"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 five-year term for NCM's license cost and support was around five million."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Retailer
14%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Government
9%
Financial Services Firm
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 Business27
Midsize Enterprise25
Large Enterprise74
 

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.
884,012 professionals have used our research since 2012.