BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management vs VMware Cloud Director comparison

BMC Helix and Broadcom are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. BMC Helix is ranked #44, while Broadcom is ranked #4 with an average rating of 7.8. BMC Helix holds a 0.9% mindshare in CM, compared to Broadcom’s 3.8% mindshare. Additionally, 80% of BMC Helix users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management

Read 5 BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management reviews

734 Views
360 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

VMware Cloud Director

Read 69 VMware Cloud Director reviews

2,803 Views
2,298 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management

VMware Cloud Director

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

VMware Cloud Director and BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management are competing products in the cloud management space. VMware Cloud Director holds an advantage with better pricing and support, as indicated by data comparisons, while BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management offers robust features considered worth the premium price.

Features: VMware Cloud Director offers excellent virtualization capabilities, seamless multi-tenancy, and better integration with VMware solutions. BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management excels in service automation, lifecycle management, and dynamic resource allocation, providing comprehensive lifecycle management features. The key difference is VMware’s strong virtualization focus versus BMC’s extensive lifecycle management.

Room for Improvement: VMware Cloud Director could enhance its disaster recovery capabilities, improve container features, and expand its public cloud integrations. BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management may benefit from simplifying its deployment process, reducing initial setup complexity, and improving pricing models to appeal to smaller enterprises.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Cloud Director provides straightforward deployment with comprehensive support resources, ensuring a smooth setup process. BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management is more complex but offers valuable resources that facilitate deployment. While VMware's deployment is efficient, BMC’s customer service offers adaptable solutions, requiring more initial setup time.

Pricing and ROI: VMware Cloud Director's setup cost is competitive, offering good ROI due to its efficient use of existing VMware environments. BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management has a higher initial setup cost, justified by its comprehensive lifecycle management features. VMware is seen as cost-effective, yet BMC provides significant return for larger, more complex environments.

To learn more, read our detailed BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management vs. VMware Cloud Director Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management vs. VMware Cloud Director

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

BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management

Ranking in Cloud Management

44th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

5.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Monitoring Software (48th)

VMware Cloud Director

Ranking in Cloud Management

4th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management is 0.9%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 3.8%, down from 7.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
VMware Cloud Director	3.8%
BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management	0.9%
Other	95.3%

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

Entprssol67

Enterprise Solution Architect at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Helps design blueprints in a cloud environment but the support is a major problem

One of the major problems is that support is not so good. I used to have a support expert in Spain but they left two years ago. BMC doesn't invest a lot in network automation but network automation is a major point in CLM. There aren't any experts here in Europe, maybe they have in America, I don't know. The main problem is the support in Europe. We had a lot of problems with the people who got put on our cases. The agents that we were assigned to were not so capable. They wanted to replicate the problem. If you have an incident, it takes a lot of time to troubleshoot the problem. The incident support is not so good. The technicians don't know the platform well. BMC doesn't want to invest in CLM. Two years ago we had a lot of problems. Maybe BMC realized that CLM is an end of life product.

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KuldeepSingh4

Technical Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Experienced users benefit from resource isolation and valuable self-service portal while seeing potential in enhanced infrastructure visibility

VMware is not going further with VMware Cloud Director. They are integrating the VMware Cloud Director feature with Aria Automation only for the upcoming versions, primarily with the VCF 9, and slowly they are integrating some of the parts they have already integrated, and they might not continue with VMware Cloud Director in the future. They can make it more granular to ensure hardware-level segregation, the underlying infrastructure level of segregation for the end user, and a separate security boundary where users can access the end-to-end layer. End-to-end layer means my software layer along with the hardware layer. If they want to do a certain level of troubleshooting primarily on the ESXi part, that is what I feel is lacking for now because for an end user accessing the SSP, the underlying infrastructure is a kind of black box for them. For VMware Cloud Director, it can be more comprehensive if we enable public cloud integration as well. In today's date, customers are adopting a multi-cloud environment where VMware Cloud Director is much feasible to leverage the underlying VMware backend architecture. If VMware Cloud Director could be made to have more integration with the public cloud and do the day one, day two jobs for public cloud interface as well, that would be beneficial. Additionally, I recommend leveraging the VMware Cloud Director layer if a customer has a multi-cloud environment and is planning some cross-cloud migration capability. Cross-cloud migration refers to if a customer has something on Azure, wanting to bring it up on VMware or maybe from VMware to AWS, vice versa. In that case, VMware Cloud Director should provide some cross-cloud migration capability as well.

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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

"You can tie together your public and private cloud infrastructure into a "single pane of glass"."

"Integrates role-based access control with pre-configured policies for CIS, DISA, HIPAA, PCI, SOX, NIST, and SCAP documentation and remediation."

"By allowing end users to request their own services, the request process for systems is much quicker and more accurate."

"CLM has a multi-cloud portal because they have the resources to implement in various environments in various ports."

"Assesses change impact or completes an audit using multiple dashboard views."

"Automates Java EE Application Deployment from an SCM system."

"Supports unattended installs and image-based, script-based, or template-based provisioning."

"Their technical support is great. We had some difficult cases and they were able to solve them in a timely manner."

"We consider it intuitive and user-friendly. It offers a variety of functions for the customer to control the networking, virtual workloads, disk snapshots, and all of vSphere's core features."

"The most valuable feature of vCloud Director is virtualization."

"The initial setup was complex. There's a lot of things you have to factor in, like security, backup, disaster recovery, monitoring, and how to maintain the platform. It's something we still struggle with, but it's getting better."

"Key enhancements include better synchronization with vCenter and increased reliability, ensuring stability during extensive usage and various actions."

"It is a very stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."

"It optimizes the process for cloud structure."

"I like the functionality that's available with Orchestrator. The platform stability stuff that I would be involved in worries me from the automation side because you have a lot less hands-on control of things. Price point, it kind of puts us off."

More VMware Cloud Director pros

Cons

"The installation and configuration can be tricky due to it being built on Remedy."

"One of the major problems is that support is not so good."

"Needs integrations with other providers to provide a custom public cloud environment."

"VMware should simplify the whole solution as it comprises many different components, making management hard."

"VMware is not going further with VMware Cloud Director. They are integrating the VMware Cloud Director feature with Aria Automation only for the upcoming versions, primarily with the VCF 9, and slowly they are integrating some of the parts they have already integrated, and they might not continue with VMware Cloud Director in the future."

"We use vCloud Director along with Terraform, and it's difficult to make them work together. It takes a long time to deploy virtual machines with Terraform in vCloud Director. For example, it can take about one or two hours to create 10 machines. It takes up a lot of our DevOps' and engineers' time in comparison to that with other solutions. This is an area that they should work on and improve."

"There are occasional problems when trying to increase the parameters of a virtual machine, which sometimes results in pending tasks that fail due to errors, requiring support intervention."

"What could be improved in vCloud Director, particularly from the networking side, is its integration with other network devices. It also needs a more simplified installation because the process is a little bit complicated."

"The reason we moved to Microsoft Intune was because of the license cost of VMware. It's very expensive."

"The product could use a billing feature so we can automate billing for clients."

More VMware Cloud Director cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"vCloud Director is a very expensive solution."

"The solution is costly, efficient, and robust versus alternative solutions."

"We pay monthly for all of the licenses."

"We are able to provision new clients faster. Every month, we take on more customers."

"The solution's price is the market standard and depends on usage."

"This is an expensive solution."

"I believe the pricing is reasonable."

"The licensing costs are pretty high, but it might depend on the size of the company."

More VMware Cloud Director pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Computer Software Company

13%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	24
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	36

Questions from the Community

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Earn 20 points

Would you change anything about VMware vCloud Director if you could?

VMware vCloud Director works very well and there are not many things that I would like to see changed. However, a single thing comes to mind when I think of improvements and that is integration. In...

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What is the biggest improvement you saw at your company after you started using VMware vCloud Director?

For my company, VMware vCloud Director noticeably increased operational efficiency. When I started working here a few years ago, my organization was using another cloud management tool. We switched...

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Is vCloud Director convenient for building applications?

When it comes to building applications, vCloud Director offers you various methods to create cloud-ready ones. For example: Your DevOps team is supported through Infrastructure as Code services w...

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Comparisons

BMC Helix Cloud Security vs BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management

Compared 19% of the time

CloudBolt vs BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management

Compared 15% of the time

Pandora FMS vs BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management

Compared 15% of the time

CloudSphere vs BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management

Compared 12% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management

Compared 10% of the time

More BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management Competitors

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 17% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 12% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 8% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 7% of the time

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs VMware Cloud Director

Compared 6% of the time

More VMware Cloud Director Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Management

January 2026

Download BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Cloud Director

January 2026

Download VMware Cloud Director product report

Also Known As

BMC CLM

vCloud Director

Overview

BMC's cloud management platform drives digital innovation with agile, full-stack service provisioning across cloud and traditional platforms. BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management scales easily while integrating with essential compliance and governance policies to reduce risk.

BMC Helix

VMware Cloud Director, also known as vCloud Director, is a cloud management tool that offers secure, flexible, and efficient cloud resources to thousands of enterprises and IT teams across the world. The solution serves as one of the leading cloud service-delivery platforms for businesses that want to manage and operate their services effectively. By deploying this solution, companies can benefit from virtualized networking, computing, security, and storage. These benefits can be received in a timely manner, as the infrastructure of the product is operationally ready within minutes and clients do not need to install and configure physical infrastructure.

One of the biggest advantages of vCloud Director is that it allows users to build cloud-ready applications. In several ways, it facilitates the process for developers, including:

Open to DevOps: The product addresses the needs of DevOps teams by providing Infrastructure as Code services with vCD Terraform Provider. This allows developers to deliver infrastructure directly from code. Additionally, it provides capabilities from Python and vCD API as well as Object Storage API and App Launchpad APIs.
Customization: This solution is very customizable and extensible for cloud providers to deliver their own branding, themes, and services to their clients.
Dev-ready cloud: vCloud Director offers support for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid for vSphere and multicloud with a plugin for container service extension. Through these, native K8s Clusters or Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Clusters can be delivered and managed through a user interface (UI) and application programming interface (API).

vCloud Director Features

This VMware product has various features through which users can virtualize their data and benefit from quality management solutions. Among the popular capabilities of vCloud Director are:

Elastic secure virtual data centers: This vCloud Director feature provides tenants with securely isolated virtual resources, fine-grained control of their public cloud services, and independent role-based authentication.
Multi-site management: This feature allows companies to stretch data centers across sites and geographies as well as connect to existing dedicated vCenters for access and management or on-broad into VMware vCloud Director.
ISV ecosystem: This feature integrates leading cloud service vendors into the product using an open extensibility framework. Some of the partners of vCloud Director include Dell Data Protection, Veeam, Cloudian, AWS S3, and Dell ECS.
DRaaS workload protection: This feature allows users to deliver self-service tiered disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) on-premises to cloud and cloud to cloud.
Cloud migration: Part of this feature is the plugin VMware Cloud Director Availability, which enables simple migration to cloud, offering self-service cold or warm migration to users' vCloud Director clouds.
Operational visibility and insights: The product includes an accessible dashboard and a single pane of glass to provide centralized multi-tenant cloud management views.
Cloud-native applications and development: This feature makes the platform suitable for developers to sandbox or deploy apps as it natively supports Tanzu Basic, native K8s, and PKS.
Automation: Through various tools and deep integration, the solution allows users to automate complex infrastructure-as-code and tile UI-driven workflows. This allows them to deploy X-as-a-Service and maintain full access control and visibility at the same time.
Application Platform as a Service: This feature enables users to deliver their own catalog-based applications or VMware Cloud Marketplace-certified third-party cloud applications through the plugin App Launchpad VMware Cloud Director.
GPU as a Service: Utilizing Nvidia AI Enterprise, this feature provides support for GPU as a Service and delivers multi-tenant GPU services for customers who require high-performance compute for GPU-specific applications.
Secure cloud: The solution supports multiple security-centric features to deliver an enterprise-class cloud service, including NSX-T distributed firewalling, workload encryption, and integrated disaster recovery replication.

vCloud Director Benefits

VMware vCloud Director offers various benefits to its users. Some of these include:

The solution provides a highly efficient self-service model which consists of a virtual data center compute, network, storage, and security.
VMware vCloud Director offers its users multi-tenancy infrastructure with deep automation which facilitates their daily tasks.
The product is cost-efficient, as it is service-ready on its very first day and offers a high revenue from services.
Businesses can deliver services to their clients in a timely manner through this product, benefitting from its natively integrated solutions.
VMware vCloud Director provides users with high flexibility, as it allows businesses to stretch networks across virtual data centers globally.
The solution provides load-balancing capabilities, which facilitate the creation of new hybrid applications and digital transformation initiatives.

Reviews from Real Users

Ajit Y., a cloud architect at a computer software company, likes VMware vCloud Director because it is a stable, truly multitenant software and the go-to tool for infrastructure as a service.

Kashif F., a divisional engineer at National Telecom Corporatio, rates vCloud Director highly because the product can be used for infrastructure provisioning without using a platform service.

Broadcom

Sample Customers

JDA Software, Morningstar, Orange Business Services, Wipro

MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.

Buyer's Guide

BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management vs. VMware Cloud Director

December 2025

Free Report: BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management vs. VMware Cloud Director

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