Azure Local vs Sunlight comparison

Microsoft and Sunlight.io are both solutions in the HCI category. Microsoft is ranked #13 with an average rating of 7.6, while Sunlight.io is ranked #31. Microsoft holds a 3.2% mindshare in HCI, compared to Sunlight.io’s 0.5% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Sunlight.io users who would recommend it.

Azure Local

Read 8 Azure Local reviews

1,633 Views
1,633 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Sunlight

Read 2 Sunlight reviews

301 Views
301 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Azure Local

Sunlight

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 21, 2026

Sunlight and Azure Local compete in the field of cloud solutions. Azure Local stands out for its robust features, suggesting that users perceive it as worth the higher cost.

Features: Sunlight provides lightweight cloud management tools, high compatibility with various hardware, and adaptability for efficient use. Azure Local offers an extensive suite of advanced networking capabilities, seamless integration with Microsoft's ecosystem, and a comprehensive toolset giving it an edge in network-centric environments.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Sunlight has a straightforward deployment model, allowing for rapid implementation, supported by responsive customer service. Azure Local has a more complex deployment process, mitigated by integration with Microsoft tools and extensive support channels.

Pricing and ROI: Sunlight is noted for lower setup costs and faster ROI, appealing to budget-conscious organizations. Azure Local requires a higher initial investment, justified by comprehensive features and long-term gains.

To learn more, read our detailed Azure Local vs. Sunlight Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Azure Local vs. Sunlight

December 2025

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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

Azure Local

Ranking in HCI

13th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

5.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Sunlight

Ranking in HCI

31st

Average Rating

8.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the HCI category, the mindshare of Azure Local is 3.2%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Sunlight is 0.5%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

HCI Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Azure Stack HCI	3.2%
Sunlight	0.5%
Other	96.3%

HCI

Featured Reviews

Martin Coloumbe

IT Solution Architect at a educational organization with 11-50 employees

Experience with seamless cost-saving capacity, though integration and support need refinement

An area that could be possibly improved with Azure Stack HCI is the stretched cluster functionality, which was included in version 23H2 for disaster recovery purposes. However, this functionality has been put on hold for the next release, and Microsoft has decided to discontinue stretched cluster technology completely, which is disappointing. They promise to bring back a significant or similar solution in a future release, but currently, there is no such functionality for stretched clusters between two sites in the latest versions of Azure Stack HCI, which poses a problem as we were looking forward to utilizing it. The integration with Azure Arc provides a unified management experience, but I find it to be fairly clunky. The integration exists, but it is not smooth or very easy to use. While they've started to integrate the two, the integration lacks maturity and makes it difficult to manage effectively. There are discrepancies between managing VMs through Azure Arc versus managing them directly, as changes made not using the Azure Arc integration are not easily reflected in Azure Arc. For instance, if I have an Arc-enabled VM and make changes to it outside the Arc interface, those changes may not be registered directly in Azure Arc, leading to issues in fully viewing the status and configuration of VMs depending on the management tool used. You either manage VMs fully through Arc or not at all because mixing the two methods results in incomplete visibility and inconsistencies.

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RajeshKANUMURY

Chief Executive Officer at GniYes Inc.

Performs well, effective, and has responsive remote technical support

Sunlight is a scalable solution. It supports on-premises and distributed deployments, as well as public deployments. It has a single pane of management so I can manage all of my VM installations in a distributed manner. It also has a footprint, that allows me to operate on Edge. If for example, you have a retail shop with 2,000 locations and they use a networked point of sale system, or if you are Chipotle and they have so many locations and they have to use a backend system at each location. At the moment, these are all standalone systems that operate with very little connection to the central. We could, however, connect and create a network using Sunlight. We can virtualize and run with Edge thanks to Sunlight. This allows us to operate and obtain high-end computing on Edge for retail. Sunlight is a startup. I am not sure how many users they have, but we have been using it constantly and using the technology to bring in customers.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"In my hybrid cloud setup, there are three features I've found very efficient. The first is software-defined networking. Similar to Azure where you create virtual networks and software load balancing, Azure Stack HCI lets you configure them with a drag-and-drop experience on the on-premises cluster. That's one of the good feature."

"The solution has the latest processor."

"Azure Local, formerly known as Azure Stack HCI, is gaining attention due to its offering of a cloud experience on-premises."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is its ability to manage VMs."

"The integration with Azure using Azure Arc is excellent."

"The scalability is extremely good."

"Azure Stack HCI has been very beneficial for disaster recovery operations, though the main data center still has a mix of infrastructure between other products."

"Some of the best features of Azure Stack HCI are that, as we are primarily a Microsoft Windows Server organization using Microsoft Windows Server on most of our servers, we already own data center licenses for Microsoft operating systems, and the hypervisor, Azure Stack HCI, actually comes with that license, which allows us to switch from VMware to Azure Stack HCI without any additional cost, significantly reducing our operational costs, especially now that Broadcom has purchased VMware, to $0."

More Azure Local pros

"The performance and small footprint of this solution are its most valuable features. I am able to obtain and use more than 90 percent of the physical hardware capacity."

"It supports the latest technology of NVMe SSD, which is PCIe-based SSD. It has a very good IOPS performance as compared to vSAN. For the same system, I get 1,000 IOPS with vSAN, and with Sunlight, I am able to get almost 10,000 IOPS. In terms of features, it has almost all the features, such as HA and centralized dashboards. It can be managed centrally, and the visibility of the system is very good. They also have very good technical support and customer or partner training."

Cons

"The implementation was very difficult for the operation team at that time, as the necessary skills to implement and integrate this product were not available."

"There are a lot of areas for improvement. Since I've been working very closely with this product, there are many areas, especially in software-defined networking. We had to improve multiple areas because we depended on the service fabric cluster to manage the software-defined network. That means we're already running a hypervisor inside a VM, and we're managing the control plane of the software-defined network. That's another cluster. So, multiple layers make the complexity more. So, from an operational perspective, it's very difficult to manage."

"The biggest challenge with the tool is not being able to manage everything from Microsoft Azure Portal."

"We faced multiple problems with the product’s stability."

"A little bit of the storage architecture could be improved."

"The product's initial setup phase can be a bit complex, making it an area where improvements are required."

"Hyper V seems to lag behind compared to VMware."

"My recommendation would be to add this technology to Azure, Microsoft Azure so that we can bring it to the market, or deploy it on public clouds such as Microsoft Azure and Google. It is currently only available on Amazon's public cloud."

"Its reporting and dashboards need to be improved. It currently has very basic reporting options. It should also be made easier to deploy on Unix operating systems. It is easy to deploy on Windows and Linux, but it is currently not easy to deploy on Unix."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is high compared to other tools."

"The main licenses are the OS licenses, the OEM licenses, and so on. They are very much aligned with the cost of expectations. We never had any challenges with the licensing at all."

"There is an operating cost for the VDIs, which is an additional cost. However, the licensing fee is half that of VMware or Nutanix."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Government

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	3

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Azure Stack HCI?

The solution has the latest processor.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Stack HCI?

This solution costs €10 per core per month. The whole stack is free if you are renting Windows Server Datacenter.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Azure Stack HCI?

There could be improvements with Azure Stack HCI regarding the license and price, as they have significantly higher prices compared to other competitors. The end-to-end encryption provided by Azure...

See all answers

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Comparisons

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Azure Local

Compared 23% of the time

VMware vSAN vs Azure Local

Compared 22% of the time

VxRail vs Azure Local

Compared 8% of the time

Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series vs Azure Local

Compared 6% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs Azure Local

Compared 5% of the time

More Azure Local Competitors

Dell vSAN Ready Nodes vs Sunlight

Compared 27% of the time

VMware vSAN vs Sunlight

Compared 24% of the time

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs Sunlight

Compared 24% of the time

More Sunlight Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Azure Local

January 2026

Download Azure Local product report

Buyer's Guide

HCI

December 2025

Download Sunlight product report

Overview

Azure Local integrates on-premises infrastructure with cloud services, offering tools for software-defined networking, Kubernetes deployment, and VM management. It ensures cost efficiency through existing Microsoft licenses and robust disaster recovery, despite some complexities in deployment.

Azure Local is designed for businesses needing a blend of local and cloud services while remaining compliant with data privacy regulations. It excels in environments demanding high computing power, software-defined networking, and seamless scaling through Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure DevOps. Although it offers excellent VM management and analytics capabilities with Microsoft Fabric, deployment complexity and operational challenges remain. Businesses looking for a robust edge computing solution find significant benefits, especially with efficient local Azure storage and advanced hardware such as the latest processors and SSDs. There are areas needing improvements like multi-cluster management, stability, and Initial setup, which can be cumbersome. Pricing can be a concern against competitors, and enhanced support and training are needed for smoother user experience.

What are the key features of Azure Local?

Software-Defined Networking: Facilitates management with drag-and-drop setup.
Kubernetes Deployment: Provides Azure Kubernetes Service for managing microservices.
VM Management: Reduces server count and enhances efficiency.
Integration with Azure Arc: Seamless collaboration with Azure Arc for hybrid deployments.
Infrastructure as Code: Utilizes Azure DevOps for deployment.
Analytics Capabilities: Microsoft Fabric enhances insights and decision-making.

What benefits should businesses expect from Azure Local?

Cost Efficiency: Leverages existing Microsoft licenses for financial savings.
Improved Disaster Recovery: Advanced edge computing features bolster resiliency.
High Performance: Enhanced by the latest processors and SSDs for demanding applications.
Seamless Cloud Integration: Smooth transition capabilities between local and cloud environments.

Azure Local finds application in sectors like manufacturing and maritime operations where robust edge computing helps in seamless data management and analytics. Factories benefit from compliance with data privacy rules while blended local and cloud services improve efficiency on ships, providing an alternative to VMware with support for virtual desktops and SQL Managed Instances.

Microsoft

Sunlight is a complete HCI stack that can be deployed on-premise on standard data center hardware, in AWS and on resource-constrained far-edge devices.

Sunlight.io

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Lavazza, Infraspace

Buyer's Guide

Azure Local vs. Sunlight

December 2025

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