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CloudSphere 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

CloudSphere
Ranking in Cloud Management
43rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (18th)
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 CloudSphere is 1.5%, up from 0.7% 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%
CloudSphere1.5%
Other96.0%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Vibhor Gupta - PeerSpot reviewer
Migration Customer Solution Manager at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Great discovery, good support, and generally reliable
The area they need to focus most on is the capability of assessment and the landing zones. It’s lacking right now. Cloud transformation has four to five cases, including planning, discovery, assessment, and the MVC, which is called the minimal viable cloud. That comes with the architecture design or landing zone creation, where we will create resources on the cloud which we are provisioning. If we are moving onto the cloud platform, AWS, or zero GCP, we need an account. We need resources to be able to compute the network. Most organizations have their landing zone process and know how to create the resources account, compute the network layer and the security layer. However, this landing zone creation is not there in CloudSphere as a feature. It cannot create any of the cloud providers' accounts or their network security computing as a part of the orchestration layer. That orchestration layer is missing in this product. It will not discover all the applications, although they also have the catalog. They are constantly announcing their catalog to identify applications based on the service which we are discovering. 50% of the time, the application will discover automatically. However, for the other 50%, we need to find the application based on its running process. That's the automation method that we need to follow and that they call blueprint. We need to create those blueprints and then we need to tag those applications. That is the one process that takes time when we do the discovery. One of the cons of this product is that it will not discover all the applications running. It will not discover SAP or some kinds of applications that are running on those inside the application of the servers as well. When we start the scanning of, for example, 500 servers, it will not handle the scan. We need to differentiate the jobs - for example, one job for 100 servers, a second job for another 100 servers, et cetera. We cannot scan the 1,000 servers together. That causes it to take time. There’s a graph missing. It shows where all the servers have interdependencies; however, when we do actual work, it will not work properly in terms of what we present to the customer.
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

"Provides multiple kinds of services for managing the clouds of multiple customers."
"The scalability of the solution is a godsend."
"CloudSphere is a good solution that works well and can integrate with multiple clouds and manage all our customers."
"When I started using CloudSphere, it wasn't mature, and it had multiple issues. For example, my team experienced server issues while using the solution, but recently, I noticed how much CloudSphere has improved. There used to be some latency issues with CloudSphere. It even gave error messages in the past when you select an option such as "the web server is not responding", but it has improved a lot, and now I don't get any errors from CloudSphere. What I like best about CloudSphere is that it has a lot of beneficial features, and it has a single pane for managing multi-cloud environments, which I find very helpful, and it's the main benefit you can get from CloudSphere."
"CloudSphere is very mature and very effective."
"For the customers I work with, it provides flexibility as far as storage is concerned, so it's security and access."
"We do not need to install any appliances or any agents."
"The product is helpful for the management, optimization, and utilization of resources."
"We’ve already deployed three-tiered applications with just a push of a button to deploy from dev to staging to production."
"The tool has a self-provisioning feature, which helps us manage projects easily. The solution is easy to use, secure, and reliable."
"The solution is reliable and performs well."
"VMware Cloud Director is very easy to manage; the final user or the tenant can learn the deployments and manage the virtual data center, and the virtual data center is very straightforward."
"The deployment is easy."
"Using the self-service capabilities, our customers can quickly use the product with instructions and learn it within an hour."
"Our customers host their applications with us like they would host it with AWS or Azure, so the most valuable part of the product for us is the ease of creating resources for them to run their applications and infrastructure for doing business."
"Customer Service: Excellent. Technical Support: Excellent."
 

Cons

"Their customer support leaves a lot to be desired. The standards are not that great."
"CloudSphere is not keeping up with the pace of the cloud and there are a number of services that can't be deployed using CloudSphere."
"The next feature I would like to have full disclosure of what's being done with the data."
"The main issue I experienced from CloudSphere was recently resolved, but an area for improvement in the solution is that it lacks the functionality of migrating resources from one public cloud to another. If CloudSphere could provide that functionality, that would be very beneficial to users and companies."
"One of the cons of this product is that it will not discover all the applications running."
"The solution must have a single management console for the resources and VMs."
"When we start the scanning of, for example, 500 servers, it will not handle the scan. We need to differentiate the jobs - for example, one job for 100 servers, a second job for another 100 servers, et cetera."
"We are not happy with the frequent upgrades."
"Choosing VMware in general, is best in terms of functionality, but it is not necessarily cost effective, as their licensing and setup cost are too high."
"vRealize Orchestrator is an expensive tool."
"What could be improved in vCloud Director, particularly from the networking side, is its integration with other network devices. It also needs a more simplified installation because the process is a little bit complicated."
"At Layer 7, the load balancing does not have many features compared to other technologies such as NetScaler from Citrix or F5."
"I'm rather mixed. It is dead simple, but it still feels like duct taped solutions in a lot of aspects."
"The solution's pricing is high, and VMware should consider lowering it."
"It would be beneficial if some features were built into the platform rather than requiring integration with multiple products, reducing complexity and licensing concerns."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It depends on how that model will be used. It might be anywhere between $4 and $15 per license per month. It’s less expensive than other options."
"The product is very expensive."
"vCloud Director is a very expensive solution."
"The solution is costly, efficient, and robust versus alternative solutions."
"We pay monthly for all of the licenses."
"If one means a very bad price, and ten means a very good price, I rate the price as a five on a scale of one to ten."
"The licensing cost is high for vCloud Director. It is mostly a perpetual license."
"The license could be less expensive and we are on a perpetual license."
"The solution is expensive so pricing is rated a four out of ten."
"It enables us to provision new clients more quickly."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Construction Company
11%
Logistics Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
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 Business1
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

HyperCloud
vCloud Director
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Affymetrix, Bell Helicopter, Yavapai-Prescott Indian Tribe, Porterville Unified School District, Interact for Health, VirtueCom, Warren Memorial Hospital, Front Porch, RMH Group, Meyers Nave, Intraworks, Information Technology, ETTE, Clackamas Community College
MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.
Find out what your peers are saying about CloudSphere vs. VMware Cloud Director and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.