Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs OpenNebula comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 10, 2025

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

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)
Ranking in Cloud Management
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
111
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (3rd), Virtualization Management Tools (2nd), Cloud Cost Management (2nd), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (6th)
OpenNebula
Ranking in Cloud Management
8th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is 3.9%, down from 6.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenNebula is 3.7%, down from 8.1% 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)3.9%
OpenNebula3.7%
Other92.4%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

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.
FOURES Jean-Philippe - PeerSpot reviewer
Products Manager at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
Reliable, simple to manage, and offers great technical support
The support of VXLAN fits with our network management. Thanks to this we can propose mixed solutions using virtual resources on OpenNebula and bare metal servers hosted in our facilities linked to each other on the sale network. This use case is very useful when some applications need bare metal power (Kubernetes workers, huge databases, AI models computations, et cetera). The cluster management is very useful for splitting our different clusters (mutual vs dedicated). We can manage deployments and capacity planning without pain. The API is also really simple and it helped us to develop the Terraform provider to manage OpenNebula like any other cloud infrastructure.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Prism Pro has given us a central administration of our entire virtual environment. Everything can be managed and updated through Prism. Being able to turn features on and off with one slide of the mouse is such a great feature. It allows us to manage storage and containers as well as the actual machines through one pane of glass. No need for any additional software. Pulse is in my opinion is one of the best features. Having the cluster monitor itself and notify support of any issues is a plus plus."
"The capacity planning, forecasting, and Runways are worth their weight in gold. NCM has saved us time in IT, and that's money."
"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."
"The most valuable features of Nutanix Prism Pro are the user interface is quite easy to understand and it provides easy management for administrators."
"The Nutanix stack is hyper-converged. I don't need to buy expensive SAN storage because it's integrated into the hardware appliance. That's the best part. We get excellent latency by leveraging local storage."
"The most valuable feature is less or no implementation time. It should be up and running at any point in time so I don't spend time in transformation."
"The solution’s ease of use is mind-blowing."
"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."
"It's easy to integrate OpenNebula with our IT systems."
"For the entire data center, as a private cloud, I believe that user management, expert management, and the virtual data center is completely magic for the users."
"What's best about OpenNebula that people like is that it's easy to deploy. It's also easy to manage. It's interesting because people choose OpenNebula over other solutions because of the ease of management."
"OpenNebula is easy to deploy and manage compared to other solutions like OpenStack."
"I also like the ability to build custom functions. I can define a function where I have two types of views and configure the dependencies. The virtual data centers concept allows me to define users. If a user wants to join certain kinds of machines, the host and the other user won't see them. It gives me the flexibility to define multiple views and data centers in one place."
"OpenNebula is lightweight, stable, and easy to customize."
"The live migration feature has been great and is something we use very often."
"The service feature appeals most to us, thus it is the most valuable."
 

Cons

"We are probably the customer who has the least number of problems. However, costs are always a concern."
"There have been bugs. We've seen what looked like some storage inefficiencies in reports and, when we went in to look, we found they were false alarms. That was something they corrected on the fly."
"If they integrated more with GPT, that would be ideal."
"Scaling with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is not as straightforward as they claim, largely due to the assumption that you have IPv6 enabled on your switches, which we did not."
"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."
"In some ways, Nutanix Cloud Manager abstracts out certain items in a simplified manner, which makes it good for training. At other times, to get to the next technical level, we want to actually dive in, and Nutanix Cloud Manager sometimes restricts us from actually diving into the deeper technical pieces. There's no advance button that lets us do more advanced things without having to drop out to the CLI to do the command line piece."
"Our current challenge with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is the overwhelming amount of VMs being shown as over-provisioned. For example, out of approximately 1,000 VMs on the platform, 800 of them are indicating over-provisioning."
"We use Nutanix only for our dev and test environments. Our production environment is VMware, and that is totally separate. But we do transfer data between them. That's a challenge because we need to frequently bring the production data into our test environment and that's a big transfer. If we could do a cross-storage transfer, like a transfer from NetApp or Nimble Storage into Nutanix with automation, that would greatly help us."
"The UI, monitoring, and alerting could benefit from further improvements."
"They should add more features like object storage."
"The front-facing API can be improved to support lots of requests when the platform is huge with lots of virtual resources."
"An area for improvement in OpenNebula is the number of features it has. The solution doesn't have that many cloud features compared to other solutions. You'd say, "Okay, simplicity over a rich feature list?" Some say, "No, I need a big machine or a cloud interface for my customers to manage resources. I don't have to go and do it for them." Some people do it that way, and it works, but I'd like to improve the limited features in OpenNebula."
"The storage feature that they have is a bit confusing."
"As with all enterprise software licensing, the pricing is not intuitive and must be negotiated; grandfathered contracts are better than anything offered today."
"They have been saying for the past two and a half years that they would develop a feature to hot-add RAM and CPU, but it does not work."
"There are no payment gateways in OpenNebula."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's price is reasonable."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Nutanix Cloud Manager is an expensive solution."
"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."
"Nutanix changes its licensing models frequently, and it is difficult to figure out how and what is included in which package."
"I think it can be more cost-effective."
"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."
"OpenNebuoa has recently come up with a new subscription model that is economical and a lot of new customers are choosing this as it is an easy subscription model."
"We use the Community Edition, rather than the Enterprise Edition."
"The licensing for OpenNebula used to be free, but now it's no longer free. A customer contacted me asking to move to another provider because of the changes in the licensing terms for OpenNebula. I have no information on how much the OpenNebula license is because the customer pays for it, and I only do the integration."
"The solution is open source so is free."
"OpenNebula gives good value for money."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Management solutions are best for your needs.
880,511 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
19%
Marketing Services Firm
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
14%
University
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business25
Midsize Enterprise23
Large Enterprise65
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What do you like most about OpenNebula?
The live migration feature has been great and is something we use very often.
What needs improvement with OpenNebula?
The web interface could be better. It's not very difficult to use, but there's room for enhancement. Another area for improvement is the integration with hardware to manage the lower layer of the n...
What is your primary use case for OpenNebula?
Previously, we were using VMware, but recently, we've started using OpenNebula for cloud management. As a big cloud provider, it helps give customers increased control over their clusters. We use L...
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

JetBlue, International Speedway Corporation, Volkswagen SAIC, Brighton and Hove City Council, Foresters Financial, Janus International Group, Cloud Comrade, Serco
Akamai, BBC, Fermilab, Terradue, Surf Sara, Produban, Netways, ESA, China Mobile, BlackBerry, Deloitte, Fuze, Telefonica, Trivago, Nokia, Encore Tech, Beeks.
Find out what your peers are saying about Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs. OpenNebula and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
880,511 professionals have used our research since 2012.