BlueCat Gateway vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

BlueCat and Broadcom are both solutions in the Network Automation category. BlueCat is ranked #18, while Broadcom is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.0. BlueCat holds a 2.0% mindshare in NA, compared to Broadcom’s 6.7% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of BlueCat users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

BlueCat Gateway

Read 2 BlueCat Gateway reviews

289 Views
289 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Automation

Read 171 VMware Aria Automation reviews

7,806 Views
1,249 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

BlueCat Gateway

VMware Aria Automation

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 6, 2025

VMware Aria Automation and BlueCat Gateway are competing in the IT automation and DNS management space. VMware Aria Automation leads in dynamic infrastructure automation, while BlueCat Gateway stands out in network visibility and security.

Features: VMware Aria Automation includes extensive automation workflows, hybrid cloud integrations, and advanced policy management. BlueCat Gateway provides robust DNS security, customized workflow functions, and centralized network configuration control.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Aria Automation offers flexible deployment options and comprehensive support, ensuring a streamlined setup. BlueCat Gateway focuses on straightforward deployment and network-specific training, facilitating smooth implementation.

Pricing and ROI: VMware Aria Automation may require a higher initial investment with significant ROI via optimized automation and reduced operational costs. BlueCat Gateway provides a competitive pricing model focused on cost-effective DNS management, offering value through enhanced network control.

To learn more, read our detailed BlueCat Gateway vs. VMware Aria Automation Report (Updated: January 2026).

Buyer's Guide

BlueCat Gateway vs. VMware Aria Automation

January 2026

Download the complete report

Helped 881,082 peers since 2012

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

BlueCat Gateway

Ranking in Network Automation

18th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

8.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VMware Aria Automation

Ranking in Network Automation

6th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

171

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Management (3rd), Configuration Management (7th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (19th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (5th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Network Automation category, the mindshare of BlueCat Gateway is 2.0%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 6.7%, down from 11.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
VMware Aria Automation	6.7%
BlueCat Gateway	2.0%
Other	91.3%

Network Automation

Featured Reviews

Frederic Girard

Developer for DDI Team at Cgi Deutschland KG

Simple to use, straightforward to deploy, and provides good support and documentation

One area for improvement in BlueCat Gateway is the time it takes to fill in the dropdown in the UI of the solution because the speed with which the data loads isn't that fast. It would be better if you didn't have to wait for old items to load before seeing the first data. Another area for improvement in BlueCat Gateway is the discovery probe, as it doesn't allow you to see all the setup parameters after you've set it up. This may not be a big issue, but it's something my team noticed that may not be good in the solution.

Read full review

Le Quang Long

Cloud Engineer at BIDV - Ngân hàng TMCP Đầu tư & Phát triển Việt Nam

Significantly streamlined operations with good automation that helps with simplifying workflows

It helps me build a big catalog and provide it to my end users. It helps us automate the workflow of creating many VMs and the TensorFlow key method. I do not meet many people to operate it live beforehand. It operates for both of my products, but as a product, it is complicated to integrate and automate with other products.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We found IP and Network Discovery the most valuable features of BlueCat Gateway. Our team found it very easy to build, verify, and validate APIs in BlueCat Gateway, mainly if the users have a background in development and APIs. Our team found that BlueCat Gateway answers our needs well."

"The ability to develop a kiosk-like solution for in-person assistance is crucial."

"Today, if I want to provision one VM, it takes me five minutes. Earlier, it would take a minimum of 30 minutes to go and choose everything. Now, I can just do one click and it can provision my whole VM. We also integrated with our Alexa, so even through voice functionality, I can create a VM. One of the guys at VMware, along with our partner, deployed that in our environment. If I say, "Hey, Alexa, I need a VM with four gigs of RAM," it will go and start creating it."

"It helps us automate the workflow of creating many VMs and the TensorFlow key method."

"vRA helps automate deployment for developers. We do a lot of orchestration or customization within our environment so it will suit each of our customers. So, we have different business units who have their own templates."

"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."

"The customer can set up multiple machine blueprints. Therefore, we are able to customize the template of three machines, then the customer can deploy without knowing anything about the IT business."

"We automated many tool deployments with the help of the product, cutting short manual deployments and eliminating the need for human interaction. Its most valuable features include integrating various tools and working with different products using plugins."

"I used the technical support during upgrades. They came onsite and are very technical. They are very good"

"I personally spend a lot of time in vRealize Orchestrator, so being able to directly tie into the back end on the APIs, I find that to be what really is the most advantageous thing for me."

More VMware Aria Automation pros

Cons

"One area for improvement in BlueCat Gateway is the time it takes to fill in the dropdown in the UI of the solution because the speed with which the data loads isn't that fast. It would be better if you didn't have to wait for old items to load before seeing the first data."

"My most significant concern is that the documentation has problems."

"It does go down from time to time. We have some issues with the appliances sometimes and we have to do reboots in the middle of the day. That affects the ability for them to deploy."

"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."

"I would like to see support for Google Cloud and Azure. Because they don't support Google and Azure today, we need something that's cohesive with our entire landscape. There is a gap right now with VMware. If you want support for these environments, you have to go elsewhere right now."

"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."

"vCenter and vRA, I believe they share two different databases so sometimes you have to somehow sync them up. I wish there was only one database between the two or, somehow, one database would rule over the other one, so if you have both products, the vCenter might use the vRA database. Otherwise, when you do stuff in vCenter, you have to write a command on vRA to update the databases."

"My impression of its stability is "middle of the road." We've had some issues where it seems to be a little bit sensitive, where deployments fail and we don't really know a specific reason why. We'll dig through logs and try and figure out what's going on, but it's not always apparent as to why it failed. And you can kick it off again and it'll succeed. So stability could be better."

"As a product, it is complicated to integrate and automate with other products."

"The basic support is not there for Google Cloud and Azure. They are unable to provision nor do cost controls. Google is still left out. It is great that they have done AWS, but we are a retailer which means nothing to us because it is a competitor. Azure is good, but Google is where a lot of our development environments are."

More VMware Aria Automation cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost is actually quite favorable based on our negotiations."

"The solution is free of cost."

"From a budget point of view, the pricing is a bit on the higher side."

"It is an open-source product."

"SaltStack is an open-source product."

"I would rate it high because, compared to other solutions, VMware’s pricing is quite expensive. VMware products have become significantly more costly in recent years, leading to higher costs."

"This is an expensive product and the high price is starting to become an issue for us."

"A simplified version for small businesses would be good."

"VMware Aria Automation is expensive."

More VMware Aria Automation pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Network Automation solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	32
Midsize Enterprise	24
Large Enterprise	130

Questions from the Community

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

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...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs BlueCat Gateway

Compared 100% of the time

More BlueCat Gateway Competitors

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 15% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 9% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 8% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 5% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 4% of the time

More VMware Aria Automation Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Network Automation

January 2026

Download BlueCat Gateway product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Automation

January 2026

Download VMware Aria Automation product report

Also Known As

BlueCat Network Automation

VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack

Overview

BlueCat Gateway allows you to automate and transform mission-critical business requirements into DNS, DDI, DHCP, and IPAM workflows, plugins, and applications and enables the rapid development of turn-key integrations with existing technology investments. Using zero-touch automation frees IT teams from time-consuming, error-prone, and repetitive network configuration and provisioning tasks so they can focus on the innovation business needs. BlueCat’s automation platform automates the DNS services necessary to provision and deallocates cloud and on-premises resources, enabling IT to respond faster to user requests.

BlueCat

VMware Aria Automation is a cloud management tool that allows companies to simplify their cloud experience through a modern automation platform. The solution is designed to deliver self-service clouds, multi-cloud automation with governance, and DevOps-based security and infrastructure management. It helps organizations improve IT agility, efficiency, and productivity through its various features.

VMware Aria Automation has multiple use cases that include the following:

Self-service multi-cloud: VMware Aria Automation can be used to deliver consistent self-service consumption. Another use case in this area is for delivering infrastructure across VMware Clouds as well as public clouds.
Multi-cloud governance: The solution can be used to manage cost, performance, networking, configuration, and security at scale for multi-cloud environments. VMware Aria Automation offers all this with an everything-as-code approach.
DevOps for infrastructure: Through VMware Aria Automation, companies can enable a powerful infrastructure as code platform with support for iterative development and infrastructure pipelining.
Kubernetes automation: Users can utilize VMware Aria Automation to automate the management of Kubernetes clusters and namespaces with support for vSphere with Tanzu.
Security operations: VMware Aria Automation facilitates event-driven automation to deliver full-service IT system compliance enforcement and vulnerability remediation.

VMware Aria Automation Features

VMware Aria Automation has various features that allow users to easily perform operations. Some of the solution's capacities include:

VMware Cloud agnostic template: This feature allows organizations to use a single cloud template to deploy with Infrastructure as a Code. Deployment options include VMware Cloud as well as major public cloud platforms such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and more.
Extensibility and customization: This VMware Aria Automation feature allows users to get full extensibility and customization. This can be achieved through Aria Automation Orchestrator, Action-Based Extensibility (ABX), and built-in integrations with common third-party tools.
Self-service multi-cloud: This feature enables users to request and provision infrastructure resources. It can be done across clouds using a unified and consistent Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) consumption layer, idempotent REST API, and self-service catalog.
Centralized policies and governance: VMware Aria Automation offers a feature for users to manage multiple clouds with templatized cloud and policy definition, automated remediation, and cloud environment visibility.
Configuration management: Through this feature of the product, day 1 and 2 control can be achieved for virtualized and cloud environments. This can be done with intuitive configuration automation, compliance enforcement, and vulnerability remediation.
Infrastructure pipelining: Through this feature, organizations can access user-friendly release automation pipelines. They can be specifically tailored for CI/CD in infrastructure use cases.

VMware Aria Automation Benefits

VMware Aria Automation offers its users various benefits. Some of the biggest advantages that the solution brings to companies that utilize it include:

VMware Aria Automation provides faster time to market for companies through offloading manual tasks with advanced workflows and agile templating.
The solution offers high levels of security and control.
This product is suitable for beginners, as it offers a self-service consumption experience for users.
VMware Aria Automation accelerates innovation through Infrastructure as Code and DevOps principles.
The product provides users with flexibility, as it is compatible with the most popular public cloud solutions.
The solution offers fast deployment because of all natively integrated functions.

Reviews from Real Users

Awais J., CTO/CEO at a tech services company, likes VMware Aria Automation because it saves a lot of time, provides more visibility, and has extensive automation capabilities.

An IT consultant at a government rates VMware Aria Automation highly because the product gives you flexibility to analyze and consume resources.

Broadcom

Sample Customers

US Department of Energy, Swisslos, DXC, Edeka SouthWest

Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual

Buyer's Guide

BlueCat Gateway vs. VMware Aria Automation

January 2026

Free Report: BlueCat Gateway vs. VMware Aria Automation

Find out what your peers are saying about BlueCat Gateway vs. VMware Aria Automation and other solutions. Updated: January 2026.

DOWNLOAD NOW

881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our BlueCat Gateway vs. VMware Aria Automation report.

See our list of best Network Automation vendors.

We monitor all Network Automation reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.