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Cisco Intersight vs CloudStack comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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 Intersight
Ranking in Cloud Management
15th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (12th)
CloudStack
Ranking in Cloud Management
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
34
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Cisco Intersight is 1.6%, down from 2.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CloudStack is 2.2%, down from 5.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
CloudStack2.2%
Cisco Intersight1.6%
Other96.2%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

HH
Systems Engineer at First Rand Bank Ltd.
Automation and seamless incident handling transform operational efficiency
I would like AI to be more integrated into Cisco Intersight. It would be great to have a chat session mode AI so that when I am on standby and encountering issues, I could engage with it, much like ChatGPT. For instance, if I need to find commands for UCS Manager, it should provide that information.
Tharun Kumar Reddy Thamatam - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Infrastructure Consultant at Infosys
Achieving seamless infrastructure management with optimized network and user access controls
I believe enhancements could be made in CloudStack, particularly in the management servers. I had the opportunity to collaborate with one of the Apache CloudStack developers, leading to the installation of additional agents for better information retrieval from hypervisors. We implemented configurations, ensuring consistency across hosts and VMs. We also utilized Ansible or YAML files to automate password upgrades during patching activities and database management, showcasing our customization efforts for improvement. For future releases, it would be beneficial if Apache enhanced CloudStack by integrating alerting systems directly. We've had instances where hypervisors experienced overloads without prior alerts, so proactive alerts within the tool would better prepare us for addressing issues swiftly, preventing disruption in business operations. A portal summarizing system metrics alongside alert capabilities would greatly enhance our operational efficiency.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cisco Intersight has valuable features for workflow automation and inventory administration."
"Intersight can validate our environment."
"What I like most about Cisco Intersight is its manageability."
"Overall, I rate Cisco Intersight a ten out of ten."
"Intersight offers many features that provide great value to companies."
"I find the integrations to be the most valuable feature."
"Using Intersight with this small team makes our job easy."
"We enjoy having an inside view of all the data centers and all the EdgeX nodes within a single portal rather than going into the EdgeX connections one by one."
"It is very easy to install and manage. It has the all modules in one node, unlike other software (OpenStack). The product allows a customized look and feel, and the ability to add custom workflows."
"We acquired some good clients for our billing and control portal solutions with CloudStack and it improved our business greatly."
"If you are looking for a stable product that is easy to install with a lot of documentation, a portal that is very easy to understand and manage and that can be modified, you should use CloudStack."
"Multiple types of hypervisor support, multi-zone support, and VPC are great valuable features."
"Killer features for me were: support for many hypervisors, ability to match business logic, "everything in one box," available APIs."
"We like the virtualization capabilities."
"Everything in CloudStack works effectively."
"It works, and pretty much always has, and reliability and support for enterprise features, with a multi-tenant interface, makes CloudStack a very compelling solution."
 

Cons

"Cisco Intersight is a stable product, but it needs some improvement."
"Technical support from Cisco has been mixed. For complex issues, it's challenging to get the right engineer quickly unless you have a specific contract like CX."
"The product's setup should be easier."
"In the future, the solution needs to plan on an extension to cover a broader range of objects since, at present, there are some Cisco devices within the range of Intersight UCS that it can't manage."
"It's a very complex solution."
"I would like AI to be more integrated into Cisco Intersight."
"The usability must be better."
"There is a significant issue regarding migration from UCS Manager into Intersight without formatting the Fabric Interconnects (FI), which is problematic in a production environment."
"The absence of the feature, deploy an instance from a snapshot, is the weak point of the platform. It is a feature that everyone needs nowadays."
"More integration with third-party products (we know that OpenStack has a better level of integration)."
"After Citrix divested CloudPlatform to Accelerite, commercial support was absolutely atrocious."
"For time consuming operations like storage migrations, volume Snapshot restore and the like, we faced issues like MySQL operations timing out and status update failures. Those areas needs improvement."
"CS has very descriptive logging, and every time I faced issues and asked for help, I didn’t get any reply from the community. Reason? Its quite obvious. CS runs on specific environments, unique to each case. So, unless it is a functional issue of CS, nobody can help you. All issues were resolved by myself going through logs. This is another reason why you need smart enough people to manage it. Engineers must have knowledge of hypervisors and understand how CS interacts with them."
"Multi-deployments."
"The product could improve by embracing newer technologies like GPU virtualization."
"We did encounter issues with stability, and the main issue was secondary storage. When it is not available, XenServers and hypervisors are affected. And CS doesn’t do anything to reboot, or fix. Come to think of it, maybe it shouldn’t, considering their approach – CS just orchestrates everything else on the hypervisor and storage level."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"You can get a free license for monitoring but need to purchase a license if you need extra control."
"It's just the standard licensing cost. There are no additional fees."
"Cisco Intersight is not cheap, but it's not the most expensive product either."
"Cisco Intersight has competitive pricing. On a scale of one to five, my rating for its pricing is four."
"The product is cost-effective."
"​Give an effort to planning. If possible, contract a specialized consultant company for the initial setup and knowledge transfer.​​"
"CloudStack is an open-source product."
"CloudStack is an open source solution, so you don't need to pay anything for it. When our company develops something specially for CloudStack, it is donated to the Apache Software Foundation and provided to anyone that wants to use it."
"The solution is open-source and free."
"There is no license, so the product is free unless you are buying professional technical support services."
"The Apache CloudStack is open source, so you do not have licenses to purchase."
"It is a 100% open-source solution needing just an Apache license. Also, there are no hidden fees to be paid."
"As far as I know, CS is still free of charge. If you want to pay some money, Citrix Cloud Platform is based on CS, I think. As for hypervisors – everything as usual, you need to pay for VMware and vCenter. As for XenServer, recently they changed the free feature list, so you may need to pay some money to get useful features like XenMotion."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Construction Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Educational Organization
9%
Construction Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise12
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Cisco Intersight?
The firmware management in the S-Series is not as Cisco described when we purchased it. You should be able to manage firmware without bringing the host down, but that is not the case. Unfortunately...
What is your primary use case for Cisco Intersight?
We are a cloud provider serving customers with IaaS.
What advice do you have for others considering Cisco Intersight?
I have experience with B-Series, C-Series, and S-Series equipment. I would recommend the S-Series but not the C-Series. I would rate this solution an eight overall.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CloudStack?
CloudStack is open-source, so there is no cost apart from learning. Billing solutions, if outsourced, come at a moderate cost.
What needs improvement with CloudStack?
Enhancements for CloudStack can focus on integrating more hypervisors, as mentioned regarding current features. We're working on a new feature that will allow for certain limited functions, but ove...
What is your primary use case for CloudStack?
My usual use cases for CloudStack involve an AWS style private cloud or public cloud. I can deploy an AWS style cloud using the open source tool that is CloudStack. The use case depends on the cust...
 

Also Known As

Intersight
Vmops, Cloud.com
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

EXMAR, RapidScale
GreenQloud, Exoscale, TomTom, ASG, PC Extreme, ISWest, Grid'5000
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Intersight vs. CloudStack and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.