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Cisco CloudCenter [EOL] vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

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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

Cisco CloudCenter [EOL]
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Aria Automation
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
172
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (2nd), Configuration Management (11th), Network Automation (7th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (29th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (7th)
 

Featured Reviews

ZT
Director Of Technology at a non-profit with 11-50 employees
Useful features for configuring down to ports but extremely expensive
Our company uses the solution's GUI interface to configure and monitor ports. We look at usage and determine if there are any issues.  Cisco is a very qualified company and has been in business for many, many years.  The solution is useful because you can configure all the way down to ports.  You…
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

"The tool is really at the center of our whole digital transformation."
"Upgrades are very simple as well because they've allowed us to get updates directly in the CloudCenter Suite manager. If you need to do an upgrade to your setup afterward, you just push a button and it rolls out the parts and retires the old ones. It's seamless and very simple compared to what we've done before."
"Cisco has a lot of published information and documentation that helps users understand the product and its offering very well."
"Cisco CloudCenter's scalability is good."
"The initial setup is fairly straightforward if you have a basic setup."
"The solution is very, very stable, it doesn't crash or freeze, and it's very reliable."
"However, for the rest of the solution, the product is doing a great job for what we require."
"The solution has a blueprint pattern where you can club multiple machines, define middleware components, define dependencies of components, and create an application pattern for a Java stack that can be consumed across all services using the same TOSCA patterns for CloudCenter, vRealize Automation, and ServiceNow."
"We have been able to integrate with AWS to deploy continuous delivery services with an extremely quick turnaround time."
"Lifecycle management has improved substantially, with fewer customers holding on to resources because they're no longer difficult to create or destroy, substantial amounts of both builds and retirements, much less human error, and a lot more cleanliness in our infrastructure, along with increased agility, speed of provisioning, and time to market by allowing our IT admins to deploy dozens of systems simultaneously instead of one at a time."
"If you do a deployment for a proof of concept, it is simple."
"The most valuable feature is the way that it plugs into our monitoring systems, and Infoblox and Puppet."
"The DevOps for infrastructure capabilities has saved time for our developers by automating processes and reducing provisioning time, and task time has been reduced by 40 percent."
"Earlier we used to spend a whole day to collect all the information regarding upgrades or patches; when we introduced vRealize, it reduced the time to between 30 minutes and one hour to finish the whole job."
"This product has saved us time in standing up new servers, as well as allowed us to automate the deployment of these servers and the applications that run on them."
"The product is stable."
 

Cons

"You don't get all the solution's benefits if you have older switches."
"The product is very expensive."
"They should provide an entire cloud offering, from architecture to network security features."
"For many clients, the main problem with the solution is the price. Cisco is very expensive. If they could somehow make the pricing more competitive, that would be a big draw."
"The tool should improve its security on the XDR part."
"They can add some of those features to make the platform more usable for different backgrounds and developer skills."
"Improvements are needed in UI and multi-tenancy for this solution."
"The solution needs to be more simple."
"A hardened set of tests would be much appreciated."
"It's not cheap. It would be more expensive to get an alternative though because we would have to buy the extras for it."
"Each new version seems to bring a new set of bugs to the table and upgrading is risky, especially for a tool at the core of the operations and infrastructure."
"It has some limitations for scalability, especially for remote data center management. For some components, everything need to be centralized."
"I would like to see more improvement in the way it integrates with other systems."
"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."
"The high price of the tool is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"We are migrating from vRA version 7 to 8, but the migration is really hectic and time-consuming."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's pricing is balanced with the market."
"The solution is extremely expensive and has additional fees for things like monitoring."
"The tool's pricing is expensive."
"We do plan to see ROI with any new implementation of new technologies being implemented within our environment."
"It is pricey for what you get."
"It is an expensive product. After VMware's acquisition by Broadcom, there was a rise in the price of VMware Aria Automation."
"The solution is free of cost."
"This is an expensive product and the high price is starting to become an issue for us."
"Customers say this solution is costlier compared to its competitors."
"The pricing for this solution is roughly 20% lower than the competitive products in the market."
"Better pricing is always handy, but I feel it's at the right price point."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Media Company
9%
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 Business4
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise131
 

Questions from the Community

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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 ...
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

NTT, Baylor College of Medicine (BCM), CollabNet, Pratt & Miller, PZFlex
Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
Find out what your peers are saying about Nutanix, Broadcom, IBM and others in Cloud Management. Updated: October 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.