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Densify vs NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

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

Densify
Ranking in Cloud Migration
11th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (31st), Virtualization Management Tools (8th), Cloud Analytics (6th), Cloud Cost Management (20th)
NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP
Ranking in Cloud Migration
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
64
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Storage (9th), Cloud Backup (27th), Public Cloud Storage Services (11th), Cloud Software Defined Storage (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Cloud Migration category, the mindshare of Densify is 4.5%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is 6.1%, down from 14.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Migration Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP6.1%
Densify4.5%
Other89.4%
Cloud Migration
 

Featured Reviews

AbhishekGupta2 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr PreSales Cloud Architect at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees
Optimized cloud costs and automated right‑sizing have reduced spend while reporting needs improvement
The best features Densify offers are actionable optimization recommendations, which tell you how to reduce costs while maintaining performance; the ML-powered predictive analytics feature, which considers historical patterns to provide recommendations; multi-cloud coverage for optimization across AWS, Azure, and GCP; and a solid balance between performance and cost. Out of those features, I find myself relying on actionable optimization recommendations and predictive analytics features the most because Densify goes one step beyond by providing recommendations considering historical patterns, especially for workloads that only spike during certain times of the month. Densify has positively impacted my organization by providing significant cost savings through right-sizing and eliminating inefficient resources, allowing faster decisions based on data, and reducing manual intervention for cloud operations, thus providing automation of basic cloud routines. I usually see a twenty-five to thirty percent cost saving in my customer's environment, and from a time-saving perspective, it has almost halved the time of the operations team.
SB
Principal Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Offers performance control and cloud integration while supporting data management with granular flexibility
The scalability of NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is interesting. We have thought about it, but we haven't used it. I think the scalability is something you scale up rather than respond to peak demand. It wouldn't help with outages either; the scaling is manual, and there are no processes we've used to automate that for unexpected scenarios. We like the scalability; it's enough for what we're planning to use, but we haven't used any advanced features. The standard platform is NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, which is their cloud service. In fact, that's probably the most experience I have with NetApp. I've experienced it on-premise, but kind of secondhand.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The Control Console is an incredible way to give a quick view of current capacity utilization allowing technical people to drill down quickly and allowing business/management people to get a quick overview of the environment."
"The solution's tech support is excellent."
"The Control Console provides a very easy to read dashboard of "too little/just right/too much" resources both for current data and on a historical or predictive basis."
"I would say that the initial thing is that it provides us with a technological basis to expand capacity management beyond Excel."
"The tool will come back and tell us that we can operate with 1,000 minutes as an example, save 90% on the contractual rate and not run into any issues."
"The ability to increase server density inside of my environment, which has helped me drive reduction in costs."
"The Densify Control Console, and Environment Status."
"This product has provided us with a more comprehensive solution that is now replacing nearly all other tools which were previously used in the different platforms and environments within the account."
"ONTAP has been very stable for us, specifically in the cloud environment. It allows us to have high availability as well as standalone systems if that's what we want within our specific workloads. Also, on-premise has been a very stable environment. We have very few outages and when we do, we work with support to get systems back online in a timely manner."
"The solution provides us unified storage, no matter what kind of data we have."
"With NetApp, you can integrate malware scanning or malware protection. This is something valuable that is not offered in SaaS solutions typically."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is that it makes our data readily available and we don't have to go through a lot of trouble to access it."
"NetApp's Cloud Manager automation capabilities are very good because it's REST-API-driven, so we can completely automate everything. It has a good overview if you want to just have a look into your environment as well."
"The solution’s Snapshot copies and thin clones in terms of operational recovery are good. Snapshot copies are pretty much the write-in time data backups. Obviously, critical data is snapshotted a lot more frequently, and even clients and end users find it easier to restore whatever they need if it's file-based, statical, etc."
"One of the most valuable features is its similarity to the physical app, which makes it familiar. It's almost identical to a real NetApp, which means you can run all of the associated NetApp processes and services with it. Otherwise, we would definitely have to deploy some hardware on a site somewhere, which could be a challenge in terms of CapEx."
"ONTAP is great for helping you migrate on-premise workflows to cloud environments."
 

Cons

"Service management level integration is probably the biggest area for improvement."
"In terms of integration, the tool has great data. However, it's not always meaningful because the true business attributes of how most Fortune 500 companies operate are not maintaining in one tool, they're in a school of many tools."
"Normalization of CPU utilization is required. At present, the data is available based on entitlement level."
"Densify can be improved in a couple of areas: the learning curve for new users, where it feels like an advanced optimization tool that needs time for full leverage; enhancements in reporting and filter options for more detailed custom reports; and improvements in UI performance since some users feel that the UI is a bit slow or outdated, especially with certain interfaces such as the Kubex Console or the Cloud Decks."
"Unfortunately the tools and mechanisms which really came to maturity in the cloud, and were not mainstream on-premise, are still not implemented."
"There are times when results are very slow when we search for servers."
"Initially we talked about some custom reporting, wherein our customer expected certain reports on a few areas, like how the storage is allocated, how the network performance is doing, and how the network utilization is happening for a virtual machine."
"It seems that the mechanism for integration is, it goes so far but I think there could be some standard integration to normal remedy service now etc. I think that should be out of the box."
"From what I've seen with NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, the delivered performance doesn't match the performance that I select; it's about half."
"I would like to see better integration with Active IQ."
"I would like to see them improve the perspective of start and search in the panels. This would allow for better visualization of the contents that are captured in the tool."
"NetApp CVO needs to have more exposure and mature further before it will have greater acceptance."
"It's limited. We're trying to figure out better methods as we need to scale out more."
"Scale-up and scale-out could be improved. It would be interesting to have multiple HA pairs on one cluster, for example, or to increase the single instances more, from a performance perspective. It would be good to get more performance out of a single HA pair."
"I would like NetApp to come up with an easier setup for the solution."
"The only area for improvement would be some guidance in terms of the future products that NetApp is planning on releasing. I would like to see communication around that or advice such as, "Hey, the world is moving towards this particular trend, and NetApp can help you do that." I do get promotional emails from NetApp, but customer-specific advice would be helpful, based on our use cases."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Densify has licensing setup so you can collect data without licensing. It gives you the ability to collect on everything, then choose later what you would like to license."
"Cost is always involved, but then I feel that this solution is better than other products that we have."
"Setup cost is negligible, as it scales fairly well."
"There was some sticker shock, as this is not just another software product to spit out graphs."
"If a customer is only using, say, less than 10 terabytes, I don't think CVO would be a good option. A customer using at least 100 or 200 terabytes should get a reasonable price from NetApp."
"The cost is quite high."
"The pricing could be improved. It is a good product, but it is very expensive for me."
"For NetApp it's about $20,000 for a single node and $30,000 for the HA."
"Compared to other storage vendors, NetApp, is not always able to compete with their pricing. Yet, we acknowledge the ease of use ONTAP brings with the AWS integration."
"The pricing of this solution is definitely higher than what the typical Azure Files and AWS solutions charge, but given the features and the stability NetApp has provided, we are okay with it. We are not complaining about the pricing."
"The AWS consumer-based pricing model makes it easy for developers to use their credit cards to spin up virtual servers immediately."
"In addition to the standard licensing fees, there are fees for Azure, the VMs themselves and for data transfer."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Construction Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise53
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Densify?
Densify can be improved in a couple of areas: the learning curve for new users, where it feels like an advanced optimization tool that needs time for full leverage; enhancements in reporting and fi...
What is your primary use case for Densify?
My main use cases for Densify include cloud cost optimization, predictive resource sizing, assistance in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments, and reducing the manual analysis of the environme...
What advice do you have for others considering Densify?
My advice for others looking into using Densify is to focus on setting up governance policy early, integrate optimization results into your usual sprints, and train FinOps and engineering teams tog...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP?
NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP is actually quite reasonable in price compared to other native cloud storage options. For example, a customer using 100 TB of AWS storage would not benefit from deduplica...
What needs improvement with NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP?
It would be nice to see technology supporting the Elastic Fabric Adapter on Amazon AWS, therefore getting RDMA technology for more low-latency connections.
What is your primary use case for NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP?
I use NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP mostly in customer companies.
 

Also Known As

No data available
ONTAP Cloud, CVO, NetApp CVO
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

AIG, Bank of America, Cigna, Citi
1. Accenture 2. Acer 3. Adidas 4. Aetna 5. AIG 6. Apple 7. Bank of America 8. Barclays 9. Bayer 10. Berkshire Hathaway 11. BNP Paribas 12. Cisco 13. Coca-Cola 14. Comcast 15.ConocoPhillips 16. CVS Health 17. Dell 18. Deutsche Bank 19. eBay 20. Eli Lilly 21. FedEx 22. Ford 23. Freescale Semiconductor 24. General Electric 25. Google 26. Honeywell 27. IBM 28. Intel 29. Intuit 30. JPMorgan Chase 31. Kellogg's 32. KeyCorp 33. Liberty Mutual 34. L'Oréal 35. Mastercard
Find out what your peers are saying about Densify vs. NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.