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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 (7th), Network Automation (6th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (21st), 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 initial setup process is straightforward."
"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."
"I can define all components and create a blueprint for consumption across all services."
"The solution is very, very stable, it doesn't crash or freeze, and it's very reliable."
"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."
"There are workflows, automated workflows, of different tasks between different infrastructure divisions, like your VMware, your firewall, and your network."
"You can scale it easily."
"The self-service capabilities are by far the best that we've seen in terms of features."
"Our users can order VMs using the API."
"It has integration with the rest of VMware solutions."
"The main benefit of vRA is a faster deployment for our customers, because before implementing vRA we were building VMs from scratch, but vRA allows us to create images so we can deploy a VM in just a few minutes."
"There are a lot of different benefits with this product, because there are a lot of things that we're trying to automate."
"SaltStack is a one-stop-shop for your datacenter's management, monitoring and state control needs."
"In terms of recovery, it takes only a tenth of the time that's required compared to a human element."
"All were really good at what they do, but SaltStack seemed to be much more feature rich than the competition."
 

Cons

"We're moving away from it due to the fact that they discontinued the product and introduced something new that does not fit our purpose."
"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."
"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."
"They should provide an entire cloud offering, from architecture to network security features."
"They can add some of those features to make the platform more usable for different backgrounds and developer skills."
"You don't get all the solution's benefits if you have older switches."
"Cisco can improve their product by being agnostic, not just specific to Cisco components but also supportive of other vendors."
"The product is very expensive."
"I don't find it to be user-friendly or intuitive because, in my case, when I have to deploy SAP systems, I need to jump between the vRA, the vRO, and the actual vCenter itself. I need to go back and forth to do different things... I wish they could make it just one application, just vRA, that does all that. There might be a way to do it but I haven't figured out how to do it yet."
"Because we're running on the older version, we've actually had a lot of stability issues."
"One of the features that's a struggle today is some of the public cloud extensibility. Some of the plugins that are native to vRA and vRO, I'd like to see them come out earlier for vRO. I understand that in vRA, the plugins are a little bit more polished because the VRA is the GUI. But we'd like to see them released earlier in vRO, prior to a GUI being released. Azure, for example, is a public cloud provider but we have some instability issues with the plugin in vRO. It's okay for us if we separate the vRA from vRO plugin releases. So I'd like to see some increased stability in some of those public cloud plugins."
"More detailed documentation on implementing feature sets and more examples of real world processes would help."
"From that perspective, technical support has not done very well."
"The GUI is clunky and hard to use."
"They need to help in managing the change of corporate culture involved in establishing the solution."
"With distributed, installation is a pain. I have always gotten into errors when employing a distributed environment, which provides High Availability."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's pricing is expensive."
"The tool's pricing is balanced with the market."
"The solution is extremely expensive and has additional fees for things like monitoring."
"Better pricing is always handy, but I feel it's at the right price point."
"From the customer perspective, the value was worth it."
"I would rate the pricing a ten out of ten, with ten being very expensive."
"The tool is expensive since it is an enterprise product."
"The pricing for this solution is roughly 20% lower than the competitive products in the market."
"Customers say this solution is costlier compared to its competitors."
"The solution is pretty expensive but provides good workload management."
"vRealize automation really should be a front door to the whole VMware suite of products."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Construction Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Educational Organization
7%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Construction Company
8%
 

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: July 2026.
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