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Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs OpenNebula 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

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)
Ranking in Cloud Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
125
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (4th), Virtualization Management Tools (2nd), Cloud Cost Management (1st), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (5th)
OpenNebula
Ranking in Cloud Management
19th
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 July 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is 2.4%, down from 5.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenNebula is 1.7%, down from 6.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)2.4%
OpenNebula1.7%
Other95.9%
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

"Nutanix is good when compared to its competitors."
"The fact that these are non-technical people — they're experts in their fields but they're definitely not technical — and they can just log in to the portal and select the resource that they believe they need, and manage it themselves, speaks to the ease of use. It shows them their live costs, etc., as they're spending. The fact that they can do that without any problems, or having to engage the IT teams, is a true testament to it. There's no need for any user training at all."
"Nutanix is a company that cares about your experience and your thoughts and improving things."
"Nutanix Prism Pro has improved the quality and efficiency of our organization's infrastructure team operations throughout our entire datacenter."
"Stability is not going to be matched by anything else on the market."
"I would describe my experience with deploying Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) as very simple."
"The capacity planning, forecasting, and Runways are worth their weight in gold and NCM has saved us time in IT, and that's money."
"The executive dashboard is valuable and provides a complete sense of the whole infrastructure."
"It makes maintenance very easy and stress-free for our teams."
"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."
"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."
"It's easy to integrate OpenNebula with our IT systems."
"I'll definitely recommend OpenNebula because it's an open-source solution that's effortless to set up, and the total cost of ownership is low."
"OpenNebula freed my customer from doing the maintenance operations of the servers because now that can be done by his clients."
"It is quite easy to deploy."
"The service feature appeals most to us, thus it is the most valuable."
 

Cons

"I would rate the technical support from NCM at a five."
"I think the Prism Center needs to include more functions."
"Some downsides of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) are that it has very high cost and licensing complexity, particularly for smaller environments, making it more suited for larger environments."
"The time between the solution's production and delivery is too short. We see several bugs. Many tests are not done before delivery. They need to test it more and for a longer time."
"In our company, even though not directly in Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), we saw that tool has many layers in it. An integration between Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) and Nutanix Kubernetes Platform would be a great deal."
"We have faced some issues during operations, but when we log a case with Nutanix support, they help us to resolve them."
"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.""
"Integration with the Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Unified Storage or Nutanix cloud platform should be improved for better containerization."
"The front-facing API can be improved to support lots of requests when the platform is huge with lots of virtual resources."
"The protocol for clusterization is rough and doesn't work well."
"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."
"There are small things that are hard. For example, making sure that it is going to be installable on public clouds."
"The storage feature that they have is a bit confusing."
"Most of the competitors are offering some sort of billing software to transform their installation to work as a small-sized public cloud, but those offerings from OpenNebula are still missing."
"Template management also needs improvement in OpenNebula because it's inferior right now."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is very cheap."
"It is an expensive solution, but one has to make the trade-off between what you want to achieve and what you are willing to pay."
"Compared to UCS and the NetApp storage, Nutanix is actually cheaper."
"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."
"The tool is expensive."
"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."
"In Brazil, Nutanix Cloud Manager is not cheap. However, Nutanix offers different options such as long-term contracts."
"We use the Community Edition, rather than the Enterprise Edition."
"The solution is open source so 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."
"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."
"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."
"OpenNebula gives good value for money."
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Top Industries

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

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business29
Midsize Enterprise26
Large Enterprise75
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...
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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: June 2026.
904,836 professionals have used our research since 2012.