CloudStack vs Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) comparison

Apache and Nutanix are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. Apache is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.0, while Nutanix is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.8. Apache holds a 4.8% mindshare in CM, compared to Nutanix’s 5.7% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Apache users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of Nutanix users who would recommend it.

CloudStack

Read 31 CloudStack reviews

1,888 Views
1,385 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)

Read 102 Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) reviews

3,639 Views
1,313 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

CloudStack

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

CloudStack and Nutanix Cloud Manager compete in the cloud management solutions category. While CloudStack is noted for its cost-effectiveness, Nutanix Cloud Manager has the upper hand with advanced features that justify its higher price.

Features: CloudStack offers high scalability, diverse hypervisor support, and strong community backing. Nutanix Cloud Manager provides integrated hyper-converged infrastructure, streamlined management capabilities, and advanced analytics.

Room for Improvement: CloudStack could enhance its customer service response and simplify network management. Nutanix Cloud Manager might benefit from reducing deployment complexity and allowing more customization flexibility for nuanced user needs.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: CloudStack tends to facilitate deployment through its open-source nature and extensive documentation but primarily offers community-driven customer service. Nutanix Cloud Manager, although potentially more complex to deploy, provides a structured model and professional customer service.

Pricing and ROI: CloudStack offers a compelling ROI due to its low setup costs, which is beneficial for price-sensitive businesses. Nutanix Cloud Manager offers competitive ROI by enhancing operational efficiencies, justifying the higher initial investment for organizations seeking comprehensive solutions.

To learn more, read our detailed CloudStack vs. Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

CloudStack vs. Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)

June 2025

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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

Ranking in Cloud Management

10th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)

Ranking in Cloud Management

1st

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

102

Ranking in other categories

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (3rd), Virtualization Management Tools (4th), Cloud Cost Management (2nd), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (7th)

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of CloudStack is 4.8%, down from 6.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is 5.7%, down from 5.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

Wido Den Hollander

Community Ambassador at 42on

A solution that strikes a balance between user-friendliness, scalability, and stability

The market keeps changing, and so does technology. I think that container technology in CloudStack is an area that needs to be improved. Regarding container technology, Kubernetes is something many people want to use and something which, as of now, many are using currently. However, there is still room for improvement in Kubernetes, particularly with networking functionality and network virtualization. When it comes to what needs to be improved in CloudStack, I would say that it should stay the way it is currently. It should continue being a stable product that people can rely on since many may be inclined to follow the latest trends and hype, which is not always good for a solution's stability. It is crucial to prioritize stability, which is a key factor that companies seek. In my view, the platform could benefit from adding more metrics. More metrics would offer more insights and data on the platform's performance, utilization, and usage. Overall, I believe that having more metrics available would be highly desirable.

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Vipin Kumar Sha

Cloud Engineer at CtrlS Datacenters Ltd

Stands out with auto-scaling, auto-scheduled snapshots, and single-vendor support

The areas that could be improved include the Nutanix Move tool, which is presently used for migrating VMs from one setup to a private cloud. It can be improved by adding some other setups, such as Citrix Xen, Red Hat Virtualization, and Red Hat OpenShift. There are many other cloud products that need to be added to the Nutanix Move tool, which would be really helpful for us in India, where we use different setups such as Red Hat Virtualization, OpenShift, Citrix XenCenter, Hyper-V, and VMware. The second suggestion is regarding the different clusters in Nutanix. Although Nutanix is very user-friendly and codeless, the individual clusters cannot be logged in at the same time via Prism, which takes time and can be wasteful. We have multiple clusters within Nutanix. Prism serves as the central management interface, allowing us to access these different clusters. When we log in through Prism, it takes a certain amount of time—sometimes several minutes—to log into each individual cluster. This can be quite time-consuming. Another important issue, especially for our customers in India and other data centers, is the need for proper VM tool reports. We require detailed information such as VM names, IP addresses, CPU assignments, and CPU utilization. This data should be exported in an Excel format. For example, if a virtual machine has four CPUs, the Excel report should include entries like: VM name, IP address, 4 CPUs, and current utilization (e.g., if 2 out of 4 CPUs are being used). We also need to capture other parameters, such as memory and disk configurations (e.g., hard disk 1 and hard disk 2), whether any ISOs are mounted (like CD/DVDs), USB drives attached to the VM, storage types (like NVM), and any RDMs associated with the VM. By extracting all this information into an Excel file, we would create a handy inventory for all the engineers. This detailed VM list would be extremely beneficial for cloud engineers and managers working with Nutanix.

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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

"Over the years, we have valued CloudStack for its stability."

"The initial implementation process was quite good."

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

"The structuring of the components and isolated environments helped us when using parts of the framework at different levels of product development."

"The API with CloudStack made integration into various external facing web applications simple enough."

"We had a relevant reduction of bureaucracy tasks."

"You can build your own cloud and make it customizable with APIs."

"Everything in CloudStack works effectively."

More CloudStack pros

"The stability and reliability of the Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) platform have been excellent, as we have had zero outages."

"Moreover, the deployment process was so easy and smooth that post rack and stack and management IP configuration, it just took less than 2 days to configure the cluster of 40 nodes, upgrade the firmware, create file service and VM space and integrate with our infrastructure."

"The single pane of glass is valuable. Seeing all my clusters there and getting all the alerts in one place helps to manage our global infrastructure. To me, the ability to view or see everything in one single place is very valuable."

"Prism Pro has given us a central administration of our entire virtual environment. Everything can be managed and updated through Prism. Being able to turn features on and off with one slide of the mouse is such a great feature. It allows us to manage storage and containers as well as the actual machines through one pane of glass. No need for any additional software. Pulse is in my opinion is one of the best features. Having the cluster monitor itself and notify support of any issues is a plus plus."

"The most valuable features of Nutanix Prism Pro are the user interface is quite easy to understand and it provides easy management for administrators."

"The ease of use is a valuable feature. For us, it's a consistent interface. It's very easy to train our employees on it, and it's a newer generation interface. It's homogeneous, and every product and subset tie together, giving a very similar look to everything."

"The unified platform is also very user-friendly and clickable, similar to the Windows environment, making it easier for users to navigate and maintain."

"I recommend my teammates and others to choose Nutanix because it is very user-friendly, and we have multiple ways to enhance our knowledge related to infrastructure."

More Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) pros

Cons

"VPN P2S is cutting all connections except the CloudStack environment for the user when he is connected. I would like to have VPN like Cisco's AnyConnect."

"CloudStack lacks a billing solution which would complete it as a full 360-degree product."

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

"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."

"The number of contributors to this solution is relatively small compared to other solutions. However, if more frequent users of CloudStack contribute to the open-source community, it will significantly enhance the overall community experience and make it more useful for everyone involved."

"It's really hard to delete zones, clusters, datacenters. You need to follow strict rules, which were not properly documented at the time."

"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 main reason why we started looking for another solution: backups, replication, HA, and dependency on secondary storage. CS is quite sensitive for infrastructure, and any kind of network disruption between CS and secondary storage leads to VM hanging."

More CloudStack cons

"We need to get more training and achieve much more consistent training. There is training, and there are courses, but in local terms, we are missing something that would allow us to have a more widespread training program."

"If you're still running tiered architecture for the storage, it would be good to give stats on the amount of data that is warehoused in the cold tier versus the hot tier."

"Azure has a public cloud offering, and it also has a CSP model that allows Microsoft partners to provide Azure as a service to their customers. Cost Governance only works on the standard public cloud, not the CSP model. When I was at my previous company, we frequently got requests for Azure CSP support. We also got some requests for Alibaba Cloud and Oracle Cloud, but Azure CSP was the biggest one."

"I would like to see a desktop application for administration of the solution. That's the thing I missed the most. Other solutions have a client that you can install on your computer. You can actually connect to and do the administration from an application instead of using a web portal, which is what Nutanix provides."

"Nutanix, as of today, they do not have many of the features that VMware hypervisor provides, such as the memory layer."

"While there are multiple clouds supported, we want less friction around the ease of delivery. We want the ability to integrate other clouds, unify the accounts."

"Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) can be improved as the NKP product needs to mature a little more."

"Scaling with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is not as straightforward as they claim, largely due to the assumption that you have IPv6 enabled on your switches, which we did not."

More Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"CloudStack is an open-source product."

"It is a 100% open-source solution needing just an Apache license. Also, there are no hidden fees to be paid."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"You will see great value from it if you utilize the self-service part of Calm. The price you pay for it will only give you equal value if you use the self-service part to enable other teams. If you only use it as a deployment mechanism, I think it's rather expensive."

"The product is very cheap."

"The solution is expensive."

"The tool is expensive."

"The solution's price is reasonable."

"Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is cheaper than VMware and other products."

"The solution is a bit high in price for what we are receiving as features. I feel they are overcharging us at approximately 25 percent. That is something that they should change."

"It is expensive when you are looking at small locations that need low-latency workloads, but for larger locations, as compared to other guys, even using VMware, it is not that expensive because if you add it all up, it is going to be pretty much the same value."

More Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

20%

Educational Organization

10%

University

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

34%

Financial Services Firm

Educational Organization

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about CloudStack?

The initial implementation process was quite good.

See all answers

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?

CloudStack lacks a billing solution which would complete it as a full 360-degree product. Additionally, more themes and drag-and-drop interfaces could enhance the user experience. Improved document...

See all answers

Which set of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) features do you find to be the most useful?

For me, the features related to cost savings are the best part of NCM. Of course, the whole product is worth using and when it comes to cloud management, there is a reason why it is favored by so m...

See all answers

Are the setup process and further maintenance of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) difficult?

When I came into my current organization, NCM was already set up. According to the team that dealt with it, the product was fairly easy to set up. Compared to other products, our IT rates are set u...

See all answers

Is Nutanix Cloud Manager’s Intelligent Operations feature effective?

Yes, this is a highly effective feature and the rebranding only made things better as they introduced more improvements. You can benefit from Zero coding task automation Automated optimization Tic...

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Comparisons

OpenNebula vs CloudStack

Compared 72% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs CloudStack

Compared 8% of the time

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs CloudStack

Compared 6% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs CloudStack

Compared 5% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs CloudStack

Compared 4% of the time

More CloudStack Competitors

VMware Cloud Director vs Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)

Compared 18% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)

Compared 16% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)

Compared 14% of the time

Morpheus vs Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)

Compared 12% of the time

Nutanix Prism vs Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)

Compared 11% of the time

More Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

CloudStack

June 2025

Download CloudStack product report

Buyer's Guide

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)

March 2025

Download Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) product report

Also Known As

Vmops, Cloud.com

Nutanix Cloud Manager Intelligent Operations, Nutanix Cloud Manager Self-Service, Nutanix Cloud Management Cost Governance, Nutanix Cloud Manager Security Central

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 Manager (NCM) is a cloud management tool that drives consistent governance across private and public clouds for its users. The solution brings simplicity and ease of use to managing and building cloud deployments by providing a unified multicloud management that addresses common cloud adoption challenges.

Nutanix Cloud Manager offers four key value drivers:

Intelligent operations: They include monitoring, insights, and automated remediation.
Self-service and orchestration: This capacity category of the product includes tools for managing application and infrastructure workloads across multicloud environments.
Cost governance: NCM offers cost governance through accurate visibility into public and private cloud metering, cost optimization, and chargeback.
Security central: The solution facilitates users' security operations through alert automations with intelligent analysis and compliance controls.

Nutanix Cloud Manager provides coverage for Nutanix private clouds as well as for VMware's. The solution also supports several popular public cloud providers, including Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). NCM provides additional flexibility for users, as it is also available as a fully managed Software as a Service (SaaS). This product allows companies to benefit from all of Nutanix multicloud self-services, application automation, security compliance, and governance, without depending on Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Features

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) has features in the four key categories already mentioned. Some of the main capacities of the solution include:

Codeless task automation: This Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) feature allows IT teams to build automation and improve productivity with zero coding required.
Automated optimization: This feature detects the performance of VM deviates and raises an anomaly alert automatically without the need for configuration.
Capacity usage and scenario analysis: This feature’s runways enable pay-as-you-grow scaling and improves capacity usage with optimizations.
Self-service provisioning: This feature allows users to publish blueprints directly to end users through Nutanix Marketplace.
Application lifecycle management: Through this NCM feature, users can provision, configure, scale, upgrade, and delete applications across cloud environments as well as provide access to multiple teams at a time.
Hybrid multicloud orchestration: This Nutanix Cloud Manager feature allows users to automate the provisioning of hybrid cloud architectures from a single control plane.
Showback, chargeback, and budgeting: Nutanix Cloud Manager uses this feature to allow users to automatically create cloud consumption reports, define chargeback policies, and set up budget alerts.
Automated right-sizing and intelligent purchases: Through leveraging machine learning (ML) algorithms, users can benefit from the automatic detection of anomalous spending patterns.
Security monitoring and remediation: This feature of Nutanix Cloud Manager allows users to utilize over 250 audits for public clouds and over 500 for Nutanix on-premises.

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Benefits

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) provides its users with several benefits. These include:

Nutanix Cloud Manager offers intelligent operations through the automation of operational tasks.
NCM gives users self-service opportunities and centralized role-based IT governance, which allows them the freedom to control their processes better.
Companies can benefit from cost and security governance with intelligent analysis and regulatory compliance.
The product has been made available across all regions in 2022, allowing worldwide access to its services without limitations.
NCM is suitable for beginners, as it offers low to no code actions.
Nutanix Cloud Manager provides real-time security, ensuring the cloud data of companies is protected at all times.

Reviews from Real Users

An IT Operations at an energy/utilities company likes Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) because the product provides visibility, simplifies operations, and saves time and cost.

Drew P., a network systems administrator at Moda Health, rates NCM highly because the product saves man-hours with excellent speed on outcomes and provides a continuous validation process.

Nutanix

Sample Customers

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

JetBlue, International Speedway Corporation, Volkswagen SAIC, Brighton and Hove City Council, Foresters Financial, Janus International Group, Cloud Comrade, Serco

Buyer's Guide

CloudStack vs. Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)

June 2025

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