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 8.7. Apache holds a 4.7% mindshare in CM, compared to Nutanix’s 5.5% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Apache users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of Nutanix users who would recommend it.

CloudStack

Read 32 CloudStack reviews

2,031 Views
1,848 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)

Read 105 Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) reviews

5,867 Views
3,872 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: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

CloudStack vs. Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)

July 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

6.7

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

7.3

Number of Reviews

105

Ranking in other categories

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

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of CloudStack is 4.7%, down from 6.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is 5.5%, down from 6.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

Nelson Marcos

Engineer Manager at Globo.com

It's easier to provision VMs than other solutions and you can customize it to integrate with load balancers

My teammates have complained about the upgrade. The source code had massive files that had to be merged with our own development to upgrade to the latest version of CloudStack. It was quite painful for them. CloudStack could add some cost management tools to give me some control over the costs associated with the number of users of my services.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"CloudStack provides an environment that is very simple to use, with built-in APIs and a web interface that supports almost all features of AWS and Azure."

"Everything in CloudStack works effectively."

"Multiple types of hypervisor support, multi-zone support, and VPC are great valuable features."

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

"The most valuable feature from my point of view is access to environment via console through separate browser window."

"It works, and pretty much always has. Reliability and support for enterprise features, with a multi-tenant interface, makes CloudStack a very compelling solution."

"It was easy to deploy, both for PoC and production (with HA)."

"CloudStack, by default, gives us a zone-based setup which makes it easier to manage datacenters located in different geographical areas."

More CloudStack pros

"It's easy to set up."

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

"The tool's management for clusters is amazing and simple. It's quite simple to use it daily. With 1-click centralized upgrades, I can update my entire cluster using the data tech software from a single point in an easy way. It shows me that I have an update, then I just apply it, wait a few minutes, and all of the clusters are updated. It doesn't matter if it's a software update or something like bills. Everything is done from one central point. Also, the dashboard are really good. We have some relevant formations where I can see my cluster's CPU age, memory age, virtual machines, etc. All information can be viewed in an easy way, which provides me a cloud-like experience on an on-prem solution."

"The solution's support for scripts... has reduced the man-hours it takes to deploy and support applications because we don't have to rewrite all the scripts."

"The scripting, where you can use libraries, is a valuable feature. We don't really make the blueprints, as we have a third-party company that makes them for us. But it enables calling APIs in the blueprints. When we create a machine, we use IPAM from Infoblox and we can get an IP address. It's one platform to script and we can then use all the APIs to complete the scripts. It gives us a central management tool from which we can do a lot of things automatically."

"One of the most valuable features is the hardware and how they have set it up to be pretty redundant. If something goes down, you can just swap it out and you're back online. If a drive or even a whole node goes down, it's pretty easy to get it back up and running."

"The customer service and technical support I've received have been phenomenal."

"The Nutanix technical support is very, very good."

More Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) pros

Cons

"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."

"This product needs a lot improvement on the development side. Every new version introduces new bugs. It lacks many features needed for NFV like DPDK, SR-IOV support, etc."

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

"It is not widely used so Google does not help very much when you are troubleshooting, and the CloudStack forum is not very active."

"Lack of support for third-party software vendors such as Veeam and Zerto creates limitations on comprehensive offerings which would include backup and disaster recovery."

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

"Environment is sensitive, so, unlike VMware, you can not afford middle-skilled engineers, they will ruin everything."

"We recognize that CloudStack is an easy-to-use cloud management platform and, in my opinion, there has been a large number of improvements in the past few years, particular when it comes to the modern UI and overall ease of management. However, I believe that CloudStack needs to grow their marketing in the commercial side. They don't have a great piece of market share right now."

More CloudStack cons

"I'd like them to offer a more flexible licensing model."

"I would like to see integrated analytics in the dashboard that accurately displays graphics, such as CPU usage, the overall health of the infrastructure, and specific virtual machines that we refer to frequently."

"They should include more use cases for automation in administering the environment."

"The support provided after office hours could use some improvement."

"Better AI would be a feature I would want to see in the next update."

"Nutanix Cloud Manager could partner with more partners to bring technologies that align with the area's policies and business needs."

"The interoperability with different clouds can be better so that one can even integrate the infrastructure of different clouds. They can interoperate better with other clouds because currently, you have to buy Nutanix resources in the cloud."

"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."

More Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"The solution is open-source and free."

"CloudStack is an open-source product."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"Its acquisition and support cost is nominal. It is not too high, and it is not too low. It is within the budget, and there are no issues on that part."

"I think it can be more cost-effective."

"At the end of the day, the product justifies the cost, and it leads to a conversation with management over whether we actually need this feature and if there are any use cases for why we would want to keep it."

"It's always difficult to discuss Nutanix pricing because the cost varies wildly depending on the customer and the region. Desktop virtualization is simpler because there is a defined scope. You can tell the Nutanix salesperson how many users you have. In a more traditional environment, it's always best to have NCM for monitoring because you'd be crazy not to."

"On a scale from one to ten, if one is a low price and ten is a high price, I rate the solution's pricing a six."

"In my opinion, Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is expensive."

"It's cost-effective. It's not necessarily cheap, but it's also not inordinately expensive. It comes down to how much you use it to offset some of the costs."

"Nutanix has good central management tools where one guy can manage the entire system. Looking at other systems, I need a guy to manage the servers and another guy to manage the cell network and storage. I need a bigger team for other solutions compared to Nutanix where I can use a small team and reduce my operations to manage the cluster. Sometimes what you hear with this solution is, "It is so expensive," but the cost and benefits that Nutanix has inside are really good."

More Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

19%

Educational Organization

12%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

33%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

OpenNebula vs CloudStack

Compared 73% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs CloudStack

Compared 8% of the time

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs CloudStack

Compared 7% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs CloudStack

Compared 5% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs CloudStack

Compared 5% 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 15% of the time

Morpheus vs Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)

Compared 13% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)

Compared 12% of the time

Nutanix Prism vs Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)

Compared 10% of the time

More Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

CloudStack

August 2025

Download CloudStack product report

Buyer's Guide

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)

August 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)

July 2025

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