Cisco UCS Director vs Densify comparison

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Cisco UCS Director

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Densify and Cisco UCS Director compete in cloud optimization and infrastructure management. Cisco UCS Director has an advantage due to its robust features that justify its cost.

Features: Densify focuses on intelligent cloud optimization with advanced analytics, resource management, and the ability to aggregate multiple cloud accounts for comprehensive visibility. Cisco UCS Director offers extensive infrastructure management capabilities, including automation across physical and virtual environments, multi-cloud management, and strong integration with other Cisco solutions.

Room for Improvement: Densify could enhance its functionality by expanding its integration with more third-party applications, improving its user interface for non-technical users, and offering more detailed reporting features. Cisco UCS Director might benefit from simplifying its deployment process, expanding support for non-Cisco infrastructures, and enhancing its documentation for easier user navigation.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cisco UCS Director has a complex deployment model but offers substantial support for users, ensuring assistance throughout the deployment process. Densify provides a streamlined deployment experience with efficient customer service, making it easier for teams to get started quickly.

Pricing and ROI: Densify presents a cost-effective option with quicker ROI due to its targeted functionalities, facilitating resource management efficiencies. Cisco UCS Director, with its higher upfront investment, offers significant long-term value, promising extended ROI through its integrated management capabilities and automation features.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco UCS Director vs. Densify Report (Updated: February 2026).

Cisco UCS Director vs. Densify

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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 UCS Director

Ranking in Cloud Management

21st

Average Rating

7.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Densify

Ranking in Cloud Management

39th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Migration (13th), Virtualization Management Tools (11th), Cloud Analytics (6th), Cloud Cost Management (25th)

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS Director is 1.9%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Densify is 1.7%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Cisco UCS Director	1.9%
Densify	1.7%
Other	96.4%

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

ErnieRumfield

Senior Telecommunications Engineer at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

Managing extensive VoIP services becomes efficient and seamless

We use Cisco UCS Director primarily for managing our VoIP service to maintain seamless service delivery. We operate in an enterprise government environment Cisco UCS Director is straightforward to use, which we greatly appreciate. It helps save time by making it quicker to roll out new call…

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Amit Kantia

Infrastructure capacity & demand manager at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Its most valuable feature is the ability to capture attributes in the console, but it is not a stable solution

I recommend others to use Densify. They can not only use it for reporting but for automation as well. They can implement the policies on the console easily during the build-out procedure. Stability is the primary concern to us as it is causing lots of problems. We can only make significant decisions if Densify allows us, and it takes lots of time. Thus, I rate the tool as a six out of ten.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cisco UCS Director is straightforward to use, which we greatly appreciate."

"A product that really aids in systems management without complexity."

"Better visibility and better control are the main benefits people receive from Cisco UCS Director; the automation and the orchestration part, these three to four points are the key factors to decide on Cisco UCS Director."

"UCS director enables us to be more productive and more agile, and also more self-sufficient because we don't have to depend on anybody else."

"I can manage multiple workloads whether it's on AWS, Azure, or on-premises. They can be managed by using the UCS Director."

"Cisco's knowledge base is extensive."

"This is a user-friendly solution that is very good and easy to use."

"The main feature of this solution is the integration with all the Cisco solutions and other vendors."

More Cisco UCS Director pros

"One would be the automatic rebalancing of the environment. That was one feature which helped. With that, we could improve our efficiency of our VMware infrastructure."

"The Control Console provides a very easy to read dashboard of "too little/just right/too much" resources both for current data and on a historical or predictive basis."

"The Densify Control Console, and Environment Status."

"The solution's tech support is excellent."

"I would say that the initial thing is that it provides us with a technological basis to expand capacity management beyond Excel."

"The Control Console is an incredible way to give a quick view of current capacity utilization allowing technical people to drill down quickly and allowing business/management people to get a quick overview of the environment."

"The ability to increase server density inside of my environment, which has helped me drive reduction in costs."

"Densify's ability to aggregate multiple on-premise vCenters and multiple cloud accounts, gives it a level of visibility not found in many places."

More Densify pros

Cons

"The product could allow more programmatic opportunities through better development of the API."

"Simplifying the user interface would go a long way to making it more usable."

"Normally, UCS Director is used primarily for orchestration, but when we look at a non-Cisco data infrastructure components, the UCS Director needs a bit more improvement in terms of integration with third-party systems and with existing older systems."

"We cannot depend on this solution to manage all of the data center's infrastructure."

"The tool should be a lot more intuitive and make it easy for us to understand and migrate."

"It is not easy to add or expand the product."

"There could be an improvement with the integration with the newest solutions from other vendors' technologies."

"There aren’t any areas of improvement that immediately come to mind."

More Cisco UCS Director cons

"Initially we talked about some custom reporting, wherein our customer expected certain reports on a few areas, like how the storage is allocated, how the network performance is doing, and how the network utilization is happening for a virtual machine."

"The solution's stability is the primary concern for me."

"It seems that the mechanism for integration is, it goes so far but I think there could be some standard integration to normal remedy service now etc. I think that should be out of the box."

"A closer integration to the service management processes."

"Normalization of CPU utilization is required. At present, the data is available based on entitlement level."

"In terms of integration, the tool has great data. However, it's not always meaningful because the true business attributes of how most Fortune 500 companies operate are not maintaining in one tool, they're in a school of many tools."

"Unfortunately the tools and mechanisms which really came to maturity in the cloud, and were not mainstream on-premise, are still not implemented."

"Some parts of the interface are rather complex and require a bit of time to navigate, but this has never stopped us as a Densify advisor is readily available to help with our "how to" queries."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would rate the product's pricing an eight out of ten."

"The cost of this solution is significant."

"The budget doesn’t work for the state and local governments."

"On a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price and ten is a high price, I rate the pricing around five to six out of ten."

"Cisco UCS Director is expensive...I rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten."

"I rate Cisco UCS Director's price a three out of ten. Cisco UCS Director is not an affordable product. With Cisco UCS Director, there is a need to pay an overall price, which consists of the product, software, and support."

"Setup cost is negligible, as it scales fairly well."

"Densify has licensing setup so you can collect data without licensing. It gives you the ability to collect on everything, then choose later what you would like to license."

"There was some sticker shock, as this is not just another software product to spit out graphs."

"Cost is always involved, but then I feel that this solution is better than other products that we have."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

16%

Computer Software Company

12%

Marketing Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Retailer

15%

Manufacturing Company

13%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	11

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	1
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	9

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco UCS Director?

While the pricing might be seen as expensive, it provides value for money due to reliable service and excellent technical support.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cisco UCS Director?

It should be more of a cloud-based architecture for Cisco UCS Director, and it should be affordable to small customers as well because the pricing is a major challenge when we talk about Cisco UCS ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Cisco UCS Director?

Mainly in my region and country, large data center customers are using Cisco UCS Director, not the SMB or mid-market customers. More of the on-premise customers are utilizing Cisco UCS Director. Th...

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Comparisons

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Compared 18% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Cisco UCS Director

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OpenNebula vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 9% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 9% of the time

Turbo360 (Formerly Serverless360) vs Cisco UCS Director

Compared 6% of the time

More Cisco UCS Director Competitors

IBM Turbonomic vs Densify

Compared 24% of the time

CloudSphere vs Densify

Compared 8% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs Densify

Compared 6% of the time

Intel Granulate vs Densify

Compared 5% of the time

Flexera Cloud Management Platform (CMP) vs Densify

Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Cisco UCS Director

Download Cisco UCS Director product report

Download Densify product report

Overview

Cisco UCS Director enables automated delivery of physical and virtual data center resources, empowering data centers to move at the speed of business.

Cisco

Densify is a hybrid cloud and container resource management platform that makes workloads self-aware of their precise resource requirements and automates the resource management and selection process. This solution helps you control your cloud spend and also helps your apps perform and scale better. Densify enables you to match your cloud requirements with the optimal cloud supply. Additionally, Densify is the only technology that leverages patented, predictive machine learning-powered analytics to perform advanced modeling of workload patterns, and provide precise optimization directives. It is ideal for cloud engineers, container platform owners, and IT finance.

Densify works by:

Establishing application demand patterns that are based on business cycles, seasonality, peaks, valleys, and other variables.
Building normalized models of cloud supply and ingesting the entire cloud catalog and latest technologies.
Considering numerous factors, such as performance benchmarks, cost, technical rules, tags, and policies. The solution uses business and functional tags, operational realities, and granular policy control.

Densify Features

Densify has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Integration with management and provisioning systems
Machine learning-based analytics
Automated resource optimization
App owner collaboration
Tailored efficiency reports
Observability
Controllability
Capacity optimization
Policy driven, automated governance
VM placement
Predictive analytics

Densify Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing Densify. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Automated resource management: Densify provides your organization with automated resource management at scale, with elasticity at an affordable low cost.

Full stack visibility: The Densify solution offers full stack visibility with improved efficiency by determining container size and node resources.

Financial visibility: In addition to full stack visibility, one of Densify’s other advantages is that it offers full financial visibility and cost intelligence for both reporting as well as chargebacks.

Resizing and rebalancing: Densify analyzes your private cloud infrastructure, providing resizing and rebalancing recommendations.

Helps you choose the right host environment: Densify automatically routes workloads to the best hosting environment based on detailed workload requirements. For workloads not requiring immediate placement, it reserves capacity to ensure it is available when required.

A true SaaS implementation: Because Densify is a true SaaS implementation, there is no software to maintain or to learn.

Better for IT finance: The solution is good for IT finance because it collects and analyzes your detailed billing data, giving you visibility into your spending, what services you’re buying, and how to better manage your costs. In addition, it can also generate reports that cover your spending and your utilization of reservations and reserved instances and savings plans.

Reduce risk and costs: Machine learning-based analytics help your organization optimize consumption to eliminate waste and overprovisioning while ensuring performance.

Cost-efficient: The Densify solution is cost-efficient, helping you drastically reduce per-processor software license costs by placing workloads intelligently.

Sample Customers

Entel, Data#3, Cegal, NESIC, LightEdge

AIG, Bank of America, Cigna, Citi

Cisco UCS Director vs. Densify