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 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
119
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (4th), Virtualization Management Tools (2nd), Cloud Cost Management (2nd), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (6th)
OpenNebula
Ranking in Cloud Management
9th
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 February 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is 3.4%, down from 6.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenNebula is 2.9%, down from 8.3% 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)3.4%
OpenNebula2.9%
Other93.7%
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 Cloud Manager (NCM) is an insightful and extremely good product for hybrid and on-premises environments, making it the best product for SaaS solutions as well."
"The stability and reliability of the Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) platform have been excellent, as we have had zero outages."
"The product is pretty intuitive and easy to learn."
"It has allowed us to easily manage multiple clusters in multiple locations through Prism. We have multiple sites that we use to manage and run VMware at which could be a bit cumbersome with Vsphere. Since we made the migration to Nutanix we now only have active servers at three locations, and we can manage them through Prism Central with ease."
"The tool's management for clusters is amazing and simple. It's quite simple to use it daily. With 1-click centralized upgrades, I can update my entire cluster using the data tech software from a single point in an easy way. It shows me that I have an update, then I just apply it, wait a few minutes, and all of the clusters are updated. It doesn't matter if it's a software update or something like bills. Everything is done from one central point. Also, the dashboard are really good. We have some relevant formations where I can see my cluster's CPU age, memory age, virtual machines, etc. All information can be viewed in an easy way, which provides me a cloud-like experience on an on-prem solution."
"One of the biggest outcomes from using Nutanix Cloud Manager is operational efficiency."
"The most valuable features of this solution are visibility, the single console, capacity planning, the VM efficiencies. We have a recovery plan, security, policies policy security. That's why we implement it with your customers."
"It's easily expandable storage-wise and compute-wise."
"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 lightweight, stable, and easy to customize."
"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."
"With a single click, we could set things up and initiate them."
"The live migration feature has been great and is something we use very often."
"The solution provides templates for configurations that can easily be exchanged to VMs."
"The most valuable feature of OpenNebula is that it scales very well."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"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."
"Earlier versions could be buggy, and new versions improve the experience."
"Recently, I have had quite a few issues with Nutanix Guest Tools (NGT). When you do a full update from LCM, your NGT doesn't automatically install on your VMs. You need to go back to Prism Central and select a list of VMs, then install NGT. You need to go to each of those VMs, then restart them to get the NGT installed. Also, there are some VMs that we have on our system that we used to run on an old environment, which was Hyper-V. Previously, we had VMware, so some of our VMs are Windows 7 32-bit and Windows 7 64-bit. However, the NGT no longer allows for installations on those."
"Even though it's a lot easier, it could be a bit slicker for the end-users. The ability to create their own blueprints could be without their having to understand the details of what they're trying to do. If they could just tick this, this, this, and this — whatever they need — and it would go spinning those up, that would be better. Now, we still guide them quite a bit."
"There are some load-balancing features that are currently missing in the flow network security and could potentially be added in the future."
"The pricing could have some changes; compared to other platforms, pricing enhancement is important, and Nutanix does enhancements quarterly."
"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."
"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 web interface could be better. It's not very difficult to use, but there's room for enhancement."
"Hosting platforms are limited so the deployment process needs improvement."
"The front-facing API can be improved to support lots of requests when the platform is huge with lots of virtual resources."
"It should have a simple REST API like most other tools. It's the industry standard format. An XML-RPC API gives you an XML document that you have to convert and then do something with that. REST API endpoint provides outputs in a JSON document. I would also like to see support for user data or heat templates, which OpenStack offers, but OpenNebula doesn't have this yet."
"There are no payment gateways in OpenNebula."
"The protocol for clusterization is rough and doesn't work well."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is expensive when you are looking at small locations that need low-latency workloads, but for larger locations, as compared to other guys, even using VMware, it is not that expensive because if you add it all up, it is going to be pretty much the same value."
"While the product may seem to be more expensive at first, it ultimately pays for itself within a short time frame due to the hours saved on maintenance."
"The price is probably right where it should be. It's not vastly expensive, and it's not too cheap. We get very good value for the price with what we're being offered with it."
"It is a nightmare to keep up with all the licensing. I would prefer everything to be in one price."
"The five-year term for NCM's license cost and support was around five million."
"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."
"On a scale from one to ten, if one is a low price and ten is a high price, I rate the solution's pricing a six."
"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."
"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."
"OpenNebula gives good value for money."
"The solution is open source so is free."
"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."
"We use the Community Edition, rather than the Enterprise Edition."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Management solutions are best for your needs.
882,961 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Marketing Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
University
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business26
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise71
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 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...
What advice do you have for others considering OpenNebula?
I recommend it, especially if you need a management interface for a small to medium private cloud. I would rate OpenNebula an eight out of ten.
 

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: February 2026.
882,961 professionals have used our research since 2012.