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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) (8th)
OpenNebula
Ranking in Cloud Management
21st
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 August 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is 2.4%, down from 5.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenNebula is 1.6%, down from 6.6% 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%
OpenNebula1.6%
Other96.0%
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

"Using the built-in playbooks in Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) has freed up a lot of time for my IT team and me, allowing us to focus on other tasks."
"Using NCM's built-in playbooks has helped free up time for my IT team to focus on other projects, saving approximately 20% of time."
"Nutanix Prism Pro has improved the quality and efficiency of our organization's infrastructure team operations throughout our entire datacenter."
"Moreover, the deployment process was so easy and smooth that post rack and stack and management IP configuration, it just took less than 2 days to configure the cluster of 40 nodes, upgrade the firmware, create file service and VM space and integrate with our infrastructure."
"It has cut down our maintenance time significantly and simplified our processes for backups."
"The solution's support for scripts... has reduced the man-hours it takes to deploy and support applications because we don't have to rewrite all the scripts."
"Nutanix Cloud Manager has increased our productivity higher than what it used to be. We used to spend four hours on server checking. Nutanix gave us three and a half hours back from those four hours to do normal work."
"It is a very easy and stable solution, we have not had any issues."
"For our use case, we found the solution to be the best fit when dealing with infrastructure services."
"It is quite easy to deploy."
"It's easy to integrate OpenNebula with our IT systems."
"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."
"It makes maintenance very easy and stress-free for our teams."
"OpenNebula is easy to deploy and manage compared to other solutions like OpenStack."
 

Cons

"For now, my biggest problem in our corporation is the Nutanix hypervisor (AOS) is not fully operational for some things."
"I still remember it was a struggle when we configured the initial network setup, that part was a little bit confusing about how exactly it works, we have two different Nutanix technicians who were on-site to help on the configuration. But both of them could not get right the first time, and we had to reset and start over again on both systems."
"There is room for improvement in the initial setup. It is quite complex to setup and requires professional services."
"Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) could continue to improve its network with micro-segmentation, as their current solution for East-West traffic is not as mature as VMware's NSX, and they need to develop this area to better support the infrastructure."
"We are probably the customer who has the least number of problems. However, costs are always a concern."
"I would appreciate improvements in handling pre-check failures for beginners, particularly compatibility mismatches and issues with unsupported driver versions during upgrades or patches."
"In this solution, it is difficult to organize the VM folders and subfolders."
"We would like to be able to provision virtual machines at the computing level, as that would give us an added value against the competition."
"The front-facing API can be improved to support lots of requests when the platform is huge with lots of virtual resources."
"The storage feature that they have is a bit confusing."
"The protocol for clusterization is rough and doesn't work well."
"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."
"The UI, monitoring, and alerting could benefit from further improvements."
"Template management also needs improvement in OpenNebula because it's inferior right now."
"They should add more features like object storage."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"The product is very cheap."
"In Brazil, Nutanix Cloud Manager is not cheap. However, Nutanix offers different options such as long-term contracts."
"The pricing model offered by Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is better than the ones offered by the other solutions in the market."
"The five-year term for NCM's license cost and support was around five million."
"Nutanix changes its licensing models frequently, and it is difficult to figure out how and what is included in which package."
"In my opinion, Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is expensive."
"In my opinion, the pricing is reasonable."
"We use the Community Edition, rather than the Enterprise Edition."
"The solution is open source so is free."
"OpenNebula gives good value for money."
"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."
"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Marketing Services Firm
14%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Construction Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
11%
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...
Ask a question
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.
910,005 professionals have used our research since 2012.