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VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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

VMware Aria Automation
Ranking in Cloud Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
171
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (7th), Network Automation (6th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (20th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (5th)
VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth
Ranking in Cloud Management
24th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Cost Management (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 6.2%, down from 11.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth is 1.8%, down from 2.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
VMware Aria Automation6.2%
VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth1.8%
Other92.0%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2597814 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Infrastructure Manager at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees
Compliance is maintained effectively and automation boosts productivity but further improvements in full-time reduction are desired
I am still using VMware tools. In fact, I have to migrate to a new alternative. I do not deal with vCenter or vSphere as or other VMware products yet. I do not deal with vSphere either. I do not use the Horizon Cloud yet or Horizon Desktop. We use VMware Workstation and vRealize. I use vRealize. VMware Aria Automation is compliant. It is not difficult for them. The regulations request us to perform or to have some security managed ways, and the regulations are clear about that, including authentication and everything related to security. Based on my experience, I rate VMware Aria Automation an eight out of ten.
Cláudio Braga - PeerSpot reviewer
AI Software Developer Engineer at IBM
Improves cloud cost control and accountability but could explore further enhancements
The most valuable features of this solution include the drive for accountability because we can allocate cloud costs back to specific business units or teams through showback and chargeback. Additionally, reduced waste is achieved because we can identify unused or underutilized resources and receive recommendations for resizing instances. VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth's unified dashboard helps streamline cloud management practices by unifying everything needed in one dashboard, such as metrics, instance workings, machines, and servers. All of this in just one dashboard is very helpful to improve agility and resolve issues, especially for the workloads. VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth helps manage compliance risks by preventing threats, stopping attacks, detecting threats, and securing workloads or endpoints where customers will be using the endpoints. The positive impact on my organization is substantial because we can reduce waste, optimize expenses, drive accountability, and secure the budget from unnecessary cloud costs.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The setup is getting better with each version."
"I like its capacity, the self-service portal, and operational automation. The most beneficial feature is that it saves time when creating new virtual machines, deploying security measures, and writing infrastructure code, making things easier and faster. We have a standard we follow, reducing the time spent repeatedly rewriting everything."
"We needed vRA to easily integrate with our hypervisor, orchestration, security (tenant segmentation, PCI), workflows, custom code, and internal monitoring/management tools. Since we didn’t have time to develop our own web front-end during the development sprints, vRA saved considerable time and resource cycles. Its ability to easily integrate with all of the VMware cloud products as well as public cloud providers, like AWS and Azure, out-of-the-box, makes it an even more powerful tool."
"Being able to give provisioning of environments over to our developers and the different teams has enabled them to put up environments faster and also freed up time for the IT team. This is really one of our bread and butter solutions for our developers."
"The setup was straightforward. We upgraded to a newer version seamlessly. It worked really well."
"The most valuable features are the Catalog View and the access control business group. Access provisioning is probably the main use case for us, so we can separate access to different Catalog items among the different business groups and have that tied back to our AD LDAP systems."
"SaltStack has given us the ability to deal with systems at scale and rectify issues at scale."
"vRA provides that single pane of glass for our cloud tenants to deploy, monitor, access, and manage their VMs/guest operating systems."
"We are able to create an internal price of the product that we can then sell to clients. We get the cost plan at a good discount and then resell it with a mark up to our enterprise-level clients. This flexibility in pricing is one of the solution's best features."
"The most valuable thing I have found is the cost saving recommendations"
"The pricing is rather competitive right now."
"The solution is useful for cloud transparency and visibility in reports and dashboards that I have generated, especially the pre-populated dashboards."
"The product is easy to use in terms of monitoring all the environments. It works for multiple clouds."
"We use dashboards quite heavily, but one of the features that have really stood out is some of the policies we've created to alert us of particular situations."
"This solution is fast and very easy to understand, even if you are not a technician."
"The solution is good for cloud cost management."
 

Cons

"We upgraded twice. The last upgrade was a bit problematic."
"It's not a smooth upgrade process. For a DTA environment, which is very simple, it is a smooth process, but for our production environment, which is quite enhanced and has a lot of dependencies, it's not easy at all, and it results in a lot of errors... It takes a lot of retries to upgrade which ends up being costly."
"The most important thing that we missed in vRanger was the possibility to mount several images instantaneously and present it so we can run it immediately."
"SaltStack's features are minimal."
"It is not super-intuitive. It does require some skills to understand how to use it. I had no problem, but I had spent a lot of time already learning this product ahead of moving it to an operational status. But as we did so, we had a hard time bringing some people from other groups into the fold, to script and work against this environment. So, the ability to build workflows within that automation needs to be streamlined."
"In terms of usability, It has had its challenges. It requires a lot of custom code to integrate into our environment. It can take a little while to get it to do what we want, takes some code instead of having built-in functionality. Part it is how we use it. It would be a lot easier to use in a greenfield scenario versus brownfield, which is the way we using it."
"I know you can spin up virtual desktops in vRA, but they're not thin-provisioned. I don't know if that's because the other product, Horizon View, is there, but it would be nice to see more integration."
"Maintaining the product requires effort and a good understanding of the environment, including how to set up the codes and other configurations. Pricing needs to be improved to improve the customer penetration."
"The solution doesn't offer the best functionality, unfortunately. Some features just simply aren't on offer. The solution needs to offer more product milestones."
"I would like to see better integration from CloudHealth to create easier setup and implementation."
"The performance and accuracy of Cloud Health need to be improved."
"The Perspectives feature could be better."
"It would be helpful to have a mobile version or a tablet version, especially for people who are outside of the office."
"Some companies may not be capable of affording this product."
"The export features regarding CSV files and specifically around identifying savings plans have room for improvement, as well as the drill-down features for reservation utilization."
"They should provide information or tools to tune the cloud resources according to the environment size."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Customers say this solution is costlier compared to its competitors."
"The tool is expensive since it is an enterprise product."
"I would rate the pricing a ten out of ten, with ten being very expensive."
"It is an expensive product. After VMware's acquisition by Broadcom, there was a rise in the price of VMware Aria Automation."
"We have seen significant ROI. We used to have physical servers, it took 90 days to get a server, order it, buy it, and get it in. We have it down to 10 minutes, building a server with virtualization, and now that's too slow. So, we let the customer do it at their speed. Therefore, it is pretty much up in a couple of minutes and they have a server."
"This is an expensive product and the high price is starting to become an issue for us."
"The solution has helped to increase infrastructure, agility, speed, and provisioning in the time to market."
"I'm very interested in the integration with Puppet. However, my organization doesn't have the funding for something like Puppet right now. If VMware would integrate that feature set (Puppet) into vRA. That would be very awesome."
"CloudHealth has a subscription-based model."
"There could be flexibility in pricing for the product."
"I give the cost of the solution an eight out of ten."
"The licensing fees depend on how big the company is. If you are a larger company then you have a better contract with a better price. The price is different for a small company."
"The pricing is competitive and while other products are good they are considerably more expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Performing Arts
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business32
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise130
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

What's the difference between VMware vRA (automation) and vROps (operations)?
vROP is a virtualization management solution from VMWare. It is efficient and easy to manage. You can find anything you need from the software interface. It provides complete visibility over applic...
Is there any way to try VMware Aria Automation for free?
When it comes to VMware Aria Automation, you have three choices for free runs: Hands-on Lab (HOL) Advanced lab A free trial I cannot describe in detail the second and third options as my company ...
Which sectors can benefit the most from VMware Aria Automation?
I was looking at VMware Aria Automation case studies recently and I got the impression that three main kinds of companies were using it most often: Social organizations Financial institutions and ...
What needs improvement with CloudHealth?
I do not see any flaws in VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth. Everything is fine for me. The performance is acceptable, and the layout is acceptable. It is very user-friendly, and there is nothing that needs...
What is your primary use case for CloudHealth?
This product was used for financial management in my company because I was working for a FinTech. VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth's use case is related to financial control and resource governance across ...
What advice do you have for others considering CloudHealth?
VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth's analytics in understanding cloud usage trends and expense forecasts is normally more for marketing staff and analyzing production servers in my case, so I am not very exp...
 

Also Known As

VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack
Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth, CloudHealth
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
Pinterest, Dow Jones, RhythmOne, Ziff Davis, Acquia, Mentor Graphics, Lookout, Veracode, SwiftKey, Amtrak, Shi, Imgur, SumoLogic, NewsUK, Cloudera, Canvas
Find out what your peers are saying about VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth vs. VMware Aria Automation and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
881,565 professionals have used our research since 2012.