CloudStack vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) comparison

The compared Apache and Nutanix solutions aren't in the same category. Apache is ranked #7 in CM , with an average rating of 8.2, and holds a 2.6% mindshare in the category. Nutanix is ranked #5 in HCI , with an average rating of 8.7, and holds a 9.0% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of Apache users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Nutanix users who would recommend it.

CloudStack

Read 34 CloudStack reviews

2,115 Views
1,946 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructur...

Read 200 Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) reviews

14,893 Views
7,893 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

CloudStack

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructur...

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between CloudStack and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Cloud Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed CloudStack vs. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Report (Updated: May 2023).

Buyer's Guide

CloudStack vs. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

May 2023

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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

CloudStack

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Management (7th)

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructur...

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

200

Ranking in other categories

Software Defined Storage (SDS) (6th), HCI (5th), Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) (1st), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (4th)

Mindshare comparison

While both are Cloud Infrastructure and Tools solutions, they serve different purposes. CloudStack is designed for Cloud Management and holds a mindshare of 2.6%, down 6.6% compared to last year.
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), on the other hand, focuses on HCI, holds 9.0% mindshare, up 8.3% since last year.

Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
CloudStack	2.6%
VMware Aria Automation	6.2%
Morpheus	4.7%
Other	86.5%

Cloud Management

HCI Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)	9.0%
VxRail	13.2%
VMware vSAN	10.7%
Other	67.1%

HCI

Featured Reviews

Tharun Kumar Reddy Thamatam

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.

Read full review

Obasanjo Biliaminu

Head Systems Administration/Security at Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System PLC

Infrastructure efficiency has improved significantly with quick server provisioning, though physical to virtual migrations need a streamlined in-house tool

From my experience with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), there is one area that needs improvement. When moving a critical infrastructure from a physical machine to Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), we currently have to use a third-party tool to convert the physical machine to a VM. We have to use VMware converter to perform this conversion before moving it to Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI). I would suggest that Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) should develop their own P2V (physical to VM) tools instead of requiring users to rely on third-party solutions.

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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

"CloudStack’s private gateway networking feature is what enables us to offer utmost security and confidentially to our customers and partners, by enabling them to connect to their virtual data centers via dedicated, encrypted, private fiber lines that never touch the public internet space. Ease of setup and management are certainly important additional benefits for us on the engineering team."

"The platform is very simple to scale-out."

"The APIs for automation in CloudStack are excellent; everything is API-driven, and while the API is very rich and hard to learn, you can do everything you would want to do, including everything in the user interface and more."

"Everything in CloudStack works effectively."

"CloudStack supports every operating system that supports hypervisors, which makes the product more attractive, compared to vCloud Director or Azure."

"Valuable features include that it is a user-friendly portal, VPN P2S and S2S possibilities, and it's easy to manage accounts and limits."

"Key features include stability, centralized management design that scales well, and transparent interoperability with different hypervisors and manufacturers.."

"The initial implementation process was quite good."

More CloudStack pros

"It is 100% stable. It's the most stable infrastructure that we have."

"Customer service is awesome. I would rate it ten out of ten."

"It's quite easy to scale, and you have the option to have distributed nodes everywhere around the world that work as one. You can also have a solution for small branch offices with only two nodes for redundancy, and that's good enough to start."

"The management interface of this solution is great."

"It offers very useful data protection."

"Acropolis has a great interface and lots of management features packaged with it at an affordable price."

"Data locality provides super-fast data access and ultra-low latency."

"Great flexibility and scalability."

More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) pros

Cons

"Accounts, domains, and user accounts are set up with public cloud in mind, not private."

"I encountered some stability issues. When I tried to remove high-capacity virtual machines it took a long time to update, and sometimes the VM status failed to update properly in the cloud database. This occurred multiple times, even though I had sufficient resources."

"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."

"From time to time there is a bug in calculating limits of resources for customer domain/account. Maybe it’s a problem with 4.9.2."

"The product could improve by embracing newer technologies like GPU virtualization."

"The area of Apache CloudStack that could stand the most improvement is the functionality/features around the virtual routers. They can be somewhat cumbersome to deal with at times and are the least stable piece of the product."

"It would be great to have a couple of “external” networks for VPC and have the possibility, for each domain, to choose they type of “external” network."

"Companies need to be knowledgeable about cloud technology. It's not for novice users."

More CloudStack cons

"In the next release, I would like better and more competitive pricing."

"One of the very important things that I would like to see in Nutanix, but I'm not sure if it's in the roadmap or not, is to have some kind of caching optimization at remote sites, to build active-active data centers more easily."

"We ran into an issue as a managed service provider because Acropolis isn't designed to be used the way we are running it. For example, if we want to deploy a Kubernetes service, the customer networks need to reach our protected cluster network. We have isolated our customers in separate VLANs. However, our customers' networks must access our cluster network to get features like iSCSI or Kubernetes to run. It's challenging."

"For the company process, the price is too high."

"As far as what could be improved, they have some built-in backup functions already, but any built-in isolation features like vision security features and free LAN features become a security concern."

"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) has really become very expensive."

"One disadvantage of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is it doesn't support external storage. Connecting external SAN storage to Nutanix, it's not supported."

"Some clients find the solution's cost to be too high."

More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"CloudStack is an open-source product."

"The solution is open-source and free."

"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 Apache CloudStack is open source, so you do not have licenses to purchase."

"Give an effort to planning. If possible, contract a specialized consultant company for the initial setup and knowledge transfer."

"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."

"There is no license, so the product is free unless you are buying professional technical support services."

"Nutanix Acropolis AOS price includes no additional costs for features."

"When we purchase a new physical server or a couple of physical servers into our cluster, we always purchase it with Nutanix licensing. We are receiving the license from Nutanix directly and not from the vendor. In the way we're dealing, with the licenses it is a bit costly for us but as the company is getting larger, day by day or year by year, those licensing costs become lower each time for us. We are purchasing the licenses for three years for some of our clusters and for some others for five-year licenses and the licenses are still costly. We have good discounts for the licenses, but it is still expensive."

"My advice is to get the ultimate license, as it is worth it."

"The license is quite clear to me. It's much clearer than what we had with our previous virtualization environment. The licensing is not complex to understand."

"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's pricing is higher now."

"This product is less expensive than some of the competing HCI solutions."

"Reconsidering the licensing packages could reduce the price, especially for companies that may not need all the bells and whistles. Many of the features are based on open-source software, so there's potential to offer more flexible pricing options. Additionally, with the right expertise, companies could potentially create similar environments themselves, reducing the need for extensive support and licensing costs. I rate its pricing a six out of ten. The tool costs around 300,000 dollars per year."

"It is less expensive than the VMware alternative."

More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user244362

Managing Consultant with 51-200 employees

Aug 30, 2015

Nutanix vs. VMware EVO:RAIL vs. FlexPod

Originally posted at www.storagegaga.com/dont-get-too-drunk-on-hyper-converged/ I hate the fact that I am bursting the big bubble brewing about Hyper Convergence (HC). I urge all to look past the hot air and hype frenzy that are going on, because in the end, the HC platforms have to be aligned…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Educational Organization

10%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	13
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	12

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	92
Midsize Enterprise	77
Large Enterprise	82

Questions from the Community

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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

How do I choose between Cisco Hyperflex HX Series and Nutanix Acropolis AOS?

Cisco HyperFlex HS series vs Nutanix Acropolis AOS Cisco HyperFlex gives extended hyper-convergence functions from core to edge and multi-cloud environments. It helps IT and OT teams deploy hyper...

See all answers

What makes Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) worth using?

NCI is a product with many tools and services but the one that, in my opinion, makes it better than similar products and worth using, is the full-stack lifecycle management. This capacity allows u...

See all answers

Have you received reliable help from Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's support when you contacted them?

NCI is one of the best out there. For any software, no matter how good it is, technical support makes it or breaks it for me. You may have an amazing product but if there is not anyone to help you ...

See all answers

Comparisons

OpenNebula vs CloudStack

Compared 38% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs CloudStack

Compared 7% of the time

Turbo360 (Formerly Serverless360) vs CloudStack

Compared 6% of the time

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs CloudStack

Compared 6% of the time

Red Hat CloudForms vs CloudStack

Compared 4% of the time

More CloudStack Competitors

VMware vSAN vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

Compared 10% of the time

VxRail vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

Compared 7% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

Compared 6% of the time

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

Compared 5% of the time

Azure Local vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

Compared 5% of the time

More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

CloudStack

January 2026

Download CloudStack product report

Buyer's Guide

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

January 2026

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) report

Download Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) product report

Also Known As

Vmops, Cloud.com

Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Nutanix AOS, Nutanix Acropolis

Overview

Apache CloudStack is open source software designed to deploy and manage large networks of virtual machines, as a highly available, highly scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform.

Apache

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure delivers high performance and scalability with central management and one-click upgrades. It enhances data protection and reduces deployment complexities, perfect for businesses seeking efficient virtualization.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure offers a comprehensive platform integrating compute, storage, and network for optimal infrastructure management. It supports multiple hypervisors, offering flexibility, efficiency, and ease of use. With features like Prism for centralized management, organizations can manage resources effectively while benefiting from data protection enhancements such as deduplication and compression. Hyper-convergence enables seamless integration, reducing operational costs and increasing scalability. Though the pricing is high, and setup and administration can be complex, the ability to support hybrid cloud implementations and critical infrastructures like VDI and databases provides notable advantages.

What are the key features of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure?

Prism for Centralized Management: Simplifies resource management with a single control interface.
High Performance: Offers efficient I/O operations to enhance processing efficiency.
Scalability: Easily adjusts to growing business needs with one-click upgrades.
Data Protection: Uses deduplication and compression for secure data handling.
Hyper-Convergence: Integrates compute, storage, and network to optimize infrastructure.
Multi-Hypervisor Support: Provides flexibility to choose preferred hypervisors.

What benefits should users look for in Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure?

Cost Effectiveness: Reduces operational costs through resource optimization.
Ease of Management: Centralized control enhances administrative efficiency.
Scalability: Grows seamlessly with business demand.
Data Protection: Increases security and reliability of data management.
Performance Improvement: Streamlines server provisioning and resource management.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure finds adoption across industries for virtualization, cloud services, and infrastructure consolidation. Organizations utilize it for hybrid clouds and virtual server hosting, supporting applications like databases and virtual desktop infrastructures. They report enhanced data protection, disaster recovery capabilities, and improved performance, facilitating effective resource management.

Nutanix

Sample Customers

GreenQloud, Exoscale, TomTom, ASG, PC Extreme, ISWest, Grid'5000

St. Lukes Health System, the City of Seattle, Yahoo! Japan, Sligro, Empire Life, Hyundai AUS, and many others.

Buyer's Guide

CloudStack vs. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

May 2023

Free Report: CloudStack vs. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

Find out what your peers are saying about CloudStack vs. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and other solutions. Updated: May 2023.

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