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Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs OpenNebula comparison

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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
1st
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 (2nd), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (8th)
OpenNebula
Ranking in Cloud Management
24th
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 September 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is 2.4%, down from 5.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenNebula is 1.5%, down from 6.1% 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%
OpenNebula1.5%
Other96.1%
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

"The customer service and technical support of the platform has been great."
"On the cost management side, we realized it has a stronger ROI, being very cost-effective, with pricing models beneficial for multi-cloud environments, quantifying to a 425% three-year return on investment, a 21% higher developer productivity, and 88% less planned downtime."
"Overall, the solution has dramatically improved the way our organization functions."
"Administration of our virtual environment has been streamlined; we can go to Prism Pro and look at anything from VM performance down to our DR, customize dashboards to get what we want to look at on a daily basis, all in one place, making it like a one-stop shop to manage our entire infrastructure and cutting down on management efforts significantly, saving us about eight hours per week."
"The most valuable aspect of NCM is its ease of deployment."
"The best feature of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is Life Cycle Manager."
"Nutanix Cloud Manager's interface offers valuable insight, providing me with the comfort of knowing everything is functioning optimally and can be upgraded with a single click."
"Since we switched to Nutanix, we have had fewer bottlenecks and issues during the big game nights."
"OpenNebula is easy to deploy and manage compared to other solutions like OpenStack."
"The live migration feature has been great and is something we use very often."
"With a single click, we could set things up and initiate them."
"It makes maintenance very easy and stress-free for our teams."
"The most valuable feature of OpenNebula is that it scales very well."
"It has enabled us to decrease the optics by around 55 to 60%."
"The ability to use it almost like a public cloud for an organization is a big asset, as it will create a value proposition and can control costs in a great way."
"For our use case, we found the solution to be the best fit when dealing with infrastructure services."
 

Cons

"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."
"Nutanix, as of today, they do not have many of the features that VMware hypervisor provides, such as the memory layer."
"I would rate the technical support from NCM at a five."
"The stability of the Prism solution is another thing that we have found to be a bit of work. For example, the Prism Central and the appliances use 97 percent of the CPU and RAM of the virtual machine."
"I would appreciate more advanced networking features in the dashboard."
"Recently, I have found some issues with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM). If there are production issues, we sometimes have to wait for 45 minutes to one hour for support."
"Our sister company currently uses an outdated database technology, Sybase, which presents challenges in migrating to a newer database. Despite our efforts to encourage them to move to a different database, the company's 25 years of code and data basic make it difficult to do so. We are open to any level of support or guidance that can help us manage the Sybase database, even if it's not a fully managed solution. Direction on how to scale, improve, and optimize tables and queries within Sybase would be greatly appreciated."
"When we tried to migrate an application from the old cluster, we couldn't run it on Nutanix’s native hypervisor."
"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."
"Template management also needs improvement in OpenNebula because it's inferior right now."
"They should add more features like object storage."
"There are small things that are hard. For example, making sure that it is going to be installable on public clouds."
"There are no payment gateways in OpenNebula."
"As with all enterprise software licensing, the pricing is not intuitive and must be negotiated; grandfathered contracts are better than anything offered today."
"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."
"I would like to see OpenNebula add more integration with REST API. XML-RPC API is good, but it becomes a pain to form a resting output."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's price is reasonable."
"I was not involved in purchasing Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), so I have no information on its pricing or cost. I do feel that it's fair that Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is a product sold as one but with multiple tiers, though you need to make sure it isn't oversold in terms of client needs."
"The pricing has been reasonable."
"The tool is expensive."
"Nutanix changes its licensing models frequently, and it is difficult to figure out how and what is included in which package."
"You will see great value from it if you utilize the self-service part of Calm. The price you pay for it will only give you equal value if you use the self-service part to enable other teams. If you only use it as a deployment mechanism, I think it's rather expensive."
"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."
"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."
"The solution is open source so is free."
"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."
"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."
"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%
Construction Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
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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Earn 20 points
 

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: August 2026.
911,602 professionals have used our research since 2012.