No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

BMC Helix Cloud Security vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

Why PeerSpot?
Sponsored
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Qualys TotalCloud
Sponsored
Ranking in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
8th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
46
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (11th), Container Security (11th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (8th), SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) (2nd), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (7th)
BMC Helix Cloud Security
Ranking in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
36th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (26th)
VMware Aria Automation
Ranking in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
28th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
172
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (3rd), Configuration Management (10th), Network Automation (7th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) category, the mindshare of Qualys TotalCloud is 2.0%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of BMC Helix Cloud Security is 1.0%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 1.0%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Qualys TotalCloud2.0%
VMware Aria Automation1.0%
BMC Helix Cloud Security1.0%
Other96.0%
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2859021 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Security Engineer at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees
Risk-based triage has transformed container security and now prioritizes high-impact threats
The best features Qualys TotalCloud offers currently include managing cloud infrastructure and container security while facing major challenges such as alert fatigue. Traditional vulnerability scanners flag hundreds of CVEs on short-lived Kubernetes containers, some of which have no internet exposure or are gone before we can even triage them. I leverage Qualys TotalCloud to move beyond static CVSS. I use it to implement runtime exposure, correlation risk reprioritization, and shift-left integration. This notifies developers to fix a base image upstream rather than patching live ephemeral instances. In my work with cloud and container security, the biggest operational hurdle was alert fatigue. I use Qualys to shift left from static CVSS severity to context-aware risk prioritization. I correlated raw vulnerability data with real-time risk factors such as public network exposure, active runtime execution, or overly permissive IAM roles. This allows us to immediately drop the priority of isolated containers and escalate lower-severity CVEs that sit on an exposed, high-risk path. We can map these findings directly back to our CI/CD pipelines so developers can patch the root base images upstream. We have drastically cut down the signal-to-noise ratio, saved a lot of manual hours doing triage work, and ensured engineering effort goes directly towards high-impact risk reduction.
GregoireSoukiassian - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at Ministry of Research and Education
Effectively addresses security concerns but could use enhancement in terms of integration
BMC Helix Cloud Security has room for improvement in terms of integrating its various features. It currently consists of separate point solutions that don't flow together as seamlessly as they could. This lack of integration, unlike platforms like ServiceNow, may be due to historical factors. Enhancing this integration would make it a more compelling choice from a business perspective and offer a smoother user experience. In the next release of BMC Helix Cloud Security, I would like to see additional features, particularly AI integration, which has already been announced. AI integration could bring more precision to the platform, making it even more interesting and effective.
VasilisGiannitsiotis - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT at ITSolutions
Automation has streamlined complex financial workflows but still needs more intuitive orchestration
Something to improve in VMware Aria Automation would be related to VCF 9, as I do not know what it is trying to bring because they exposed it as the solution of everything. So VCF 9 will bring VCF Automation and VCF Operations, the new product line of VMware. I have not seen what this brings or what else it includes. Maybe in the area of vRealize Orchestrator, this would be beneficial because VRO can do everything. Perhaps a more user-friendly way to use that tool would be helpful because the possibilities there are endless. I am looking for more user-friendly navigation in VMware Aria Automation.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Once it is set up, Qualys has proved to be one of our greatest assets."
"The platform's unified view of the organization proves particularly valuable for leadership team meetings."
"The best part I like is the on-demand scans."
"I appreciate TotalCloud's real-time protection and remediation features. The remediation options include automated one-click remedies and custom changes that help manage vulnerabilities efficiently."
"Qualys TotalCloud is an excellent platform, and the beauty of the platform is that we can get all the vulnerabilities, see all the reports in a single dashboard, view them segregated, and easily learn about critical, high, and medium findings with appropriately provided remediation steps."
"Qualys TotalCloud has saved our time by giving us better asset visibility and risk-based prioritization, as it has reduced the time spent manually reviewing CVEs and deciding what to address first."
"While automatic inventory detection upon connection is a helpful feature, a truly valuable capability would be assessing an environment's security posture against Azure and CIS best practices."
"I would definitely recommend it because it is easy to handle any cloud resources."
"It is a good tool to make sure that your containers are safe and sound."
"Role-based security is a valuable feature."
"With very minimal effort, you are able to have a cohesive view into your security posture on one or multiple cloud accounts, particularly if you are dealing with multicloud."
"The features that I've found most valuable are its container security aspect. I also like its vulnerability management tools."
"It's also multi-cloud. You can look at several cloud providers: AWS, Azure, or GCP."
"Using this solution is an eye-opener; having that holistic view is the biggest eye-opener because you understand, from any of your connected cloud accounts, what your vulnerabilities are with it."
"The cool feature of Helix Cloud Security is that you can do all that — understand and remediate issues — in one dashboard, based on the different policies that are available for security, out-of-the-box."
"The best feature is time to value. With very minimal effort, you are able to have a cohesive view into your security posture on one or multiple cloud accounts, particularly if you are dealing with multicloud. If you have Azure and AWS deployments, you might have multiple subscriptions in Azure and usually multiple accounts in AWS. You may even be doing some GCP work (around Google Cloud Platform). It's very difficult to manage a common set of policies, even less reporting, across multiple subscriptions, accounts, and cloud environments. What BMC Helix Cloud Security does is provide a unified view or single pane of glass as to your baseline. Then, it also facilitates the ability for Level 1 or 2 operations support to take action and report on security vulnerabilities."
"The benefits are that it gives you a heads-up display and dashboard of the way everything's running. The ability to automate around those tasks is really where we get the value."
"The product’s most valuable feature is its ability to provide environmental security."
"Our speed of provisioning has also improved; we used to build systems manually, which would take four hours or a day, but nowadays we're able to spin something up off a template that we update every so often and it takes about 20 minutes."
"The new version is user-friendly and intuitive."
"The infrastructure has helped us to greatly increase our agility."
"Having an enterprise service catalog and being able to automate various parts of our infrastructure are among the most important components."
"The self-service portal, as well as the Orchestrator, are very helpful because the orchestration piece is really handy for day-to-day operations and added features in version 7.03 have improved it a lot so you can deploy Azure VMs directly, do config management, or run scripts, and it's really better than it used to be."
"I can build machines quickly and deploy them from a central location to whichever worldwide datacenter we need."
 

Cons

"In TotalCloud, I would suggest improvements in policy checks to cater to various inventory types like VPCs, subnets, S3 buckets, or IAMs. There is a lack of data segregation according to criticality or inventory."
"Areas that need improvement in every solution include the remediation part. The remediation steps should be simple enough for everyone to understand."
"From a downside perspective, the UI is not user-friendly and feels dated compared to other tools like Prisma Cloud."
"I would like the ability to disable certain default built-in policies as they can be misleading when creating dashboards. That is the top one."
"To improve the user experience, reporting could be simplified for better comprehension by end users and project managers, facilitating issue resolution."
"The price is very expensive, actually."
"Although TotalCloud is a helpful tool, some of its advanced features are still under development."
"We encountered challenges identifying the correct resource category for certain items, such as those in containers or storage."
"The UI could be more user-friendly."
"Every organization out there doesn't rely on just one control body. They use FISMA control. They may use HIPAA, CIS, PCI, or SOX, then blend them. One of the things that is now in big demand for BMC Helix Cloud Security is content. That's the next journey in its lifespan, making it easier for the community to share and collaborate on content for security controls that can be measured and remediated."
"BMC Helix Cloud Security has room for improvement in terms of integrating its various features."
"We've had some issues with connectors; the connectors have seemed to cause a little bit of trouble, perhaps with the APIs trying to scan the environment."
"I think its TOA interfaces are still not that comfortable. The UI could be more user-friendly, easier to use."
"We've had some with issues connectors. The connectors have seemed to have caused a little bit of trouble, perhaps with the APIs trying to scan the environment. The only time I've had to reach out to tech support was for that. It seems it may not have been scanning correctly or I wasn't seeing data within a specific time. But we've set up a couple of connectors in the past couple of weeks and they actually scanned the AWS environment and we had data within about 10 minutes. It's working a lot faster and I think they're making improvements as they go."
"The biggest challenge now, which is a good problem to have, with BMC Helix is content."
"I want the role-based security feature to be improved."
"It is bleeding edge technology, but at times, it is buggy."
"Our customers feel it's very costly."
"I have not found this solution to be user-friendly. It's really complicated. The demo shows that you can automate anything but they only show basic scenarios. If you want to do anything more complicated than that, it becomes very complicated to set up."
"Automation: We want to be able to have a lot more preconfigured solutions."
"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."
"It has a learning curve."
"I have encountered stability issues; they are always resolved by new releases of the software."
"They need to help in managing the change of corporate culture involved in establishing the solution."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its price seems higher compared to other tools, but it is worth it. If they could adjust the pricing and make it comparable with other tools, that would be great."
"Qualys TotalCloud is expensive."
"I am not sure about the pricing. From what I understand, it is a bit on the higher side, but I do not have the exact numbers."
"While Qualys TotalCloud's pricing is currently acceptable, it is becoming increasingly expensive and may soon be considered overpriced."
"As a middle management member, I do not have direct pricing knowledge, but based on the knowledge from our meetings, its pricing is competitive."
"It isn't cheap, but it's reasonable. It helps us to manage things with very few resources."
"Qualys TotalCloud offers good pricing that is affordable and competitive with the market. Our partnership also provides us with additional benefits."
"Qualys TotalCloud offers competitive pricing given its comprehensive suite of features, including integration, assessment, remediation, and detection capabilities, all within a single platform."
"It is a subscription model with term licensing that is usually yearly. This includes, not only the product, but support and maintenance. It is based on cloud assets. Therefore, if you have 100 cloud assets, those cloud assets are measured based on evaluation or transactions. For example, if I'm evaluating that cloud asset for CIS compliance, PCI compliance, and AWS best practices, that asset gets evaluated three times, as those are three transactions. However, the license model is based on peak asset usage. So, over a year, if you deploy 100, 1000, 500, and then 2000 assets, you will be charged for the 2000 peak of assets managed by Helix Cloud Security."
"The pricing is based on an annual subscription, upfront, and it's based on cloud assets. Whether your assets are in Azure and AWS combined, the tool tells you how many assets are being scanned and that's the number used for pricing."
"It made the provisioning of the virtual machines easier and faster. We can react more quickly to customers' demands."
"The pricing for this solution is roughly 20% lower than the competitive products in the market."
"The tool is expensive since it is an enterprise product."
"The solution is pretty expensive but provides good workload management."
"The solution has helped to increase infrastructure, agility, speed, and provisioning in the time to market."
"The cost of the solution is reasonable for us. Although it is relatively high, we prioritize stability and integration over cost."
"Customers say this solution is costlier compared to its competitors."
"I would rate the pricing a ten out of ten, with ten being very expensive."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) solutions are best for your needs.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
16%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Construction Company
19%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Performing Arts
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Outsourcing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business14
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise34
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise131
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Qualys TotalCloud?
In terms of improvement, remediation still belongs to the cloud team, which is one of the issues we faced with Qualys...
What is your primary use case for Qualys TotalCloud?
My main use case for Qualys TotalCloud is regarding the cloud visibility that we were not having previously. Previous...
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 y...
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 fre...
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 compa...
 

Also Known As

Qualys TotalCloud with FlexScan
TrueSight Cloud Security, SecOps Policy Service
VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
NHS, Vodafone, Kansas City Life, SKY Italia, Cybera
Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC Helix Cloud Security vs. VMware Aria Automation and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.