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Cloudify vs VMware Cloud Director 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

Cloudify
Ranking in Cloud Management
40th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Cloud Director
Ranking in Cloud Management
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Cloudify is 1.5%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 2.5%, down from 6.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Cloud Director2.5%
Cloudify1.5%
Other96.0%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Mark Wittling - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Architect at Cox communications
Works very well for advanced service chaining requirements and has extremely advanced engineers for support
We had a manager who thought that Cloudify could be used as a replacement for Horizon in OpenStack, but we found that Cloudify lacked the user interface or GUI for doing multitenancy and basic platform management tasks. Cloudify was really good at launching, for example, firewalls and configuring them and doing service chaining and rather advanced things like that, but it didn't meet the requirements for a basic platform management solution. It is something that seems to work better as a bolt-on or an augmented solution. It is a bit mis-marketed as a Cloud Management solution. It is not that. It is more of a service orchestration and automation tool. It is very good at doing that, but it fails to meet basic platform management requirements. Once you have it running, you can't really do anything with it without writing code and scripts. It requires a full-time DevOps person to use it. We deployed a Palo Alto firewall with it. That's basically what the project was for us, and it worked flawlessly once we got it finished, but it took another 12 weeks to get all of the automation and everything else coded, tested, and working. There is certainly a place for this technology, but when we got rid of OpenStack and moved to VMware, we either had to go with the vRealize Automation Suite to do this kind of automation, or we had to find an alternative solution to manage the private cloud. So, we put Cloudify in, but we really couldn't find it useful for basic platform administration tasks.
KuldeepSingh4 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Experienced users benefit from resource isolation and valuable self-service portal while seeing potential in enhanced infrastructure visibility
VMware is not going further with VMware Cloud Director. They are integrating the VMware Cloud Director feature with Aria Automation only for the upcoming versions, primarily with the VCF 9, and slowly they are integrating some of the parts they have already integrated, and they might not continue with VMware Cloud Director in the future. They can make it more granular to ensure hardware-level segregation, the underlying infrastructure level of segregation for the end user, and a separate security boundary where users can access the end-to-end layer. End-to-end layer means my software layer along with the hardware layer. If they want to do a certain level of troubleshooting primarily on the ESXi part, that is what I feel is lacking for now because for an end user accessing the SSP, the underlying infrastructure is a kind of black box for them. For VMware Cloud Director, it can be more comprehensive if we enable public cloud integration as well. In today's date, customers are adopting a multi-cloud environment where VMware Cloud Director is much feasible to leverage the underlying VMware backend architecture. If VMware Cloud Director could be made to have more integration with the public cloud and do the day one, day two jobs for public cloud interface as well, that would be beneficial. Additionally, I recommend leveraging the VMware Cloud Director layer if a customer has a multi-cloud environment and is planning some cross-cloud migration capability. Cross-cloud migration refers to if a customer has something on Azure, wanting to bring it up on VMware or maybe from VMware to AWS, vice versa. In that case, VMware Cloud Director should provide some cross-cloud migration capability as well.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We have found that this is not an undue burden, and the extra work gives immense flexibility and portability."
"Valuable features are auto-scaling and load balancing."
"The solution includes the option to run background scripts and processes from a connected API."
"It has enabled us to create the DICE Deployment Service and simplified deployment of any other services (monitoring, continuous integration, etc.)."
"The best feature of Cloudify is that it enables a single platform to communicate with the DB, with applications, and with the entire infrastructure."
"This is a somewhat complex solution for very complex use cases where there are multiple cloud vendors, multiple infrastructures, and multiple configurations."
"It's easy to create a cloud server, such as Linux with JBoss or WebSphere, which is good for continuous deployment."
"Cloudify provides the infrastructure-as-code, as well as operational action capabilities (orchestrated startups or upgrades, and more)."
"It is a great product."
"Via the Meet the Expert sessions I spoke to Ninad Desai and Gurusimran Khalsa from VMware who were both very helpful (thanks guys) and I even tried the VMware stand in the Solutions Exchange but they didn’t have anyone to talk about vCD."
"Overall, we are happy with the product."
"It has enabled us to provision new clients faster; we don't have to configure a new host nor configure a new VM, we just have to secure it."
"This solution has helped us make money and provision our clients faster."
"The overall dashboarding is very crystal clear."
"Customer Service: Excellent. Technical Support: Excellent."
"vCloud Director is a scalable solution, and we have 10 customers who use it."
 

Cons

"I did encounter any issues with scalability."
"Install of the product itself could be improved and I would like to see better event monitoring."
"Error handling could be improved; GUI is lacking with respect to user privileges and connectivity."
"Unlike the Docker environment, Cloudify takes time for configuration and its learning curve."
"We'd like to see the maturity of the plugins continue, including Amazon EMR and others."
"The solution could be improved with respect to error handling. If we want to troubleshoot further and deep dive, we don't have access to admin privileges to extract those errors."
"Certainly the UI could use some intensive work, but nevertheless, overall, it’s a complete product with its 3.4 version and much better features are available with 4.0."
"More of the debug functionality is needed; hopefully, we can pause during the server building process."
"We are having a bit of a problem with vCloud Availability. We know that vRA has a new product, HCX. We would like to know about it, then migrate to the product."
"I would like to see mode accessory recovery and integration with SD-WAN."
"There are new updates every quarter, so we need to purchase new support deployment services and some new products."
"If you have a deployed environment and lose it, you can't easily deploy it back with vCloud Director. Because of this reason, we don't have the data protection, disaster recovery, and container features."
"Technical support is something that we've had problems with in the past. Across all the VMware solutions we have not always had the best response from support. To be fair a lot of the issues that came up for us have been quite niche but it seems that in terms of release cycles they introduced a lot of bugs and it's a lot of stuff that support generally has to work quite hard on. There have been cases when we've logged critical priority issues and not had responses in time. I think support is something that can be worked on."
"Cloud Director has room for improvement in many areas. One critical thing that comes to mind is the hyperscalers. They could be more seamlessly integrated into the hybrid cloud."
"It would be beneficial if some features were built into the platform rather than requiring integration with multiple products, reducing complexity and licensing concerns."
"vRealize Orchestrator is an expensive tool."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I wasn't involved in the pricing of it because we were just doing prototype work with it, but I was told by the upper management team that it was quite expensive. That was another reason we switched to Morpheus."
"The licensing cost is high for vCloud Director. It is mostly a perpetual license."
"vCloud Director is priced higher than other solutions, such as Nutanix."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing eight and a half to nine out of ten."
"This is an expensive solution."
"It enables us to provision new clients more quickly."
"The licensing costs are pretty high, but it might depend on the size of the company."
"It's a costly product. The licenses may not be costly, but with every new development in their product, we need to purchase deployment services, and the deployment services are quite costly."
"The solution is costly, efficient, and robust versus alternative solutions."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
12%
Construction Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Construction Company
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise39
 

Questions from the Community

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Would you change anything about VMware vCloud Director if you could?
VMware vCloud Director works very well and there are not many things that I would like to see changed. However, a single thing comes to mind when I think of improvements and that is integration. In...
What is the biggest improvement you saw at your company after you started using VMware vCloud Director?
For my company, VMware vCloud Director noticeably increased operational efficiency. When I started working here a few years ago, my organization was using another cloud management tool. We switched...
Is vCloud Director convenient for building applications?
When it comes to building applications, vCloud Director offers you various methods to create cloud-ready ones. For example: Your DevOps team is supported through Infrastructure as Code services w...
 

Also Known As

No data available
vCloud Director
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Proximus Partner Communications (Israel) VMware NTT Data Metaswitch Spirent Communications Lumina Networks Atos Fortinet
MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.
Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudify vs. VMware Cloud Director and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.