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Cisco CloudCenter [EOL] vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

 

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 (3rd), Configuration Management (8th), Network Automation (6th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (20th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (5th)
 

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

"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."
"The initial setup process is straightforward."
"The solution includes a lot of features and is useful because you can configure all the way down to ports."
"Cisco CloudCenter's scalability is good."
"The solution is very, very stable, it doesn't crash or freeze, and it's very reliable."
"You can scale it easily."
"The tool is really at the center of our whole digital transformation."
"The initial setup is fairly straightforward if you have a basic setup."
"Before it would take months to deploy a VM, now, with this solution, we can deploy many VMs in one hour. We can do a stack of them with Mediaware."
"All were really good at what they do, but SaltStack seemed to be much more feature rich than the competition."
"We have been able to integrate with AWS to deploy continuous delivery services with an extremely quick turnaround time."
"We have it deployed in a highly-available environment and scalability is nice because we just had another ESX host and then we are able to increase the capacity."
"He liked the way SaltStack (on the entire cluster) was up and running in a few minutes, and also gave him flexibility to generate traffic, make config changes, etc. on the fly."
"The best feature I saw with the VMware Aria Automation product was that it was easy to handle."
"We like vRA because it helps make systems available on time for our customers, on demand."
"It provides velocity both from management and customer perspectives, from ingesting new catalog items, developing new workflows for additional features, and/or allowing customer access to multiple guest OS instances at scale in a shorter time frame."
 

Cons

"The improvement I would like to see is not one thing particular to CloudCenter. I'd say it's more of a message that the system is still using a lot of the different products and if they would all just fit better together, they all could be faster together."
"I'm not a big fan of CloudCenter. I don't have anything against it, however, the on-premise version has been so hard to upgrade and maintain."
"The product is very expensive."
"The improvement I would like to see is not one thing particular to CloudCenter. I'd say it's more of a message that the system is still using a lot of the different products and if they would all just fit better together, they all could be faster together."
"They should provide an entire cloud offering, from architecture to network security features."
"Cisco can improve their product by being agnostic, not just specific to Cisco components but also supportive of other vendors."
"The tool should improve its security on the XDR part."
"Improvements are needed in UI and multi-tenancy for this solution."
"It has some limitations for scalability, especially for remote data center management. For some components, everything need to be centralized."
"Stability has gotten a lot better. However, the vRO aspect, when you have a multi vRA head, is a little bit finicky still. vRO still needs to stay on one appliance and be one application, because, when you have two, you can't see runs on the other one that are happening when you're not logged into that one."
"Technical support could be improved. I definitely feel that the product is accelerating faster than the support engineers are able to keep up with the knowledge needed to know what's going on."
"I'm not wanting any particular feature; but there should be cost reductions. VMware comes at a high cost, and that's why we are in the process of transitioning to a more affordable alternative."
"It is bleeding edge technology, but at times, it is buggy."
"Our customers feel it's very costly."
"There are still some issues such that, if you are going to go 100% cloud, if you don't want anything on-premise, there are some other solutions that might have a leg up."
"I don't find the solution to be intuitive and user- friendly. The GUI is really complicated."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's pricing is balanced with the market."
"The tool's pricing is expensive."
"The solution is extremely expensive and has additional fees for things like monitoring."
"I would rate the pricing a ten out of ten, with ten being very expensive."
"I'm very interested in the integration with Puppet. However, my organization doesn't have the funding for something like Puppet right now. If VMware would integrate that feature set (Puppet) into vRA. That would be very awesome."
"It is an expensive product. After VMware's acquisition by Broadcom, there was a rise in the price of VMware Aria Automation."
"This is an expensive product and the high price is starting to become an issue for us."
"It made the provisioning of the virtual machines easier and faster. We can react more quickly to customers' demands."
"Customers say this solution is costlier compared to its competitors."
"The solution is free of cost."
"From the customer perspective, the value was worth it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Construction Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
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 Broadcom, Nutanix, IBM and others in Cloud Management. Updated: May 2026.
893,311 professionals have used our research since 2012.