Densify vs VMware Aria Operations comparison

Densify and Broadcom are both solutions in the Virtualization Management Tools category. Densify is ranked #11, while Broadcom is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.7. Densify holds a 4.9% mindshare in VM, compared to Broadcom’s 26.0% mindshare. Additionally, 80% of Densify users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

Densify

Read 9 Densify reviews

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287 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Operations

Read 376 VMware Aria Operations reviews

8,198 Views
3,361 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Densify

VMware Aria Operations

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 13, 2024

VMware Aria Operations and Densify are leading competitors in the cloud management and optimization sector. VMware Aria Operations holds an edge in deployment flexibility and customer service, whereas Densify shines with its optimization capabilities.

Features: VMware Aria Operations is tailored for comprehensive cloud management with features such as performance monitoring, troubleshooting, and capacity optimization meeting enterprise requirements. It facilitates performance analytics, proactive alerting, and resource allocation recommendations. It also integrates smoothly with other VMware products. Meanwhile, Densify excels in precise optimization for compute resources, delivering fine-tuned scaling insights and effective cost reduction strategies. Its advanced optimization algorithms and detailed analytics empower organizations to achieve operational efficiency.

Room for Improvement: VMware Aria Operations could benefit from enhanced integrations with non-VMware ecosystems and improved real-time analytics for more actionable insights. Users have expressed a need for greater customization in alert settings and a more consolidated interface to streamline workflow. Densify, while exceptional in optimization, may need to broaden its scope to cover more general cloud management tasks. Improved customer onboarding processes and more comprehensive documentation could enhance user experience. There is room to simplify its configuration process for ease of use in diverse environments.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Aria Operations provides an efficient deployment experience backed by robust customer support, making it ideal for enterprises seeking fast integration with existing systems. Its service reliability and extensive support resources ensure responsive assistance. Densify offers competent deployments but is best suited for more specialized use cases that might require advanced configurations. While it delivers solid customer service, feedback suggests the need for more widespread support resources to facilitate smoother deployment experiences.

Pricing and ROI: VMware Aria Operations offers flexible pricing models that reflect its extensive capabilities, thus delivering significant ROI for businesses in need of versatile cloud management solutions. Its price performance ratio is often justified by the broad range of functionalities it includes. On the other hand, Densify may entail higher initial costs due to its specialized features focused on optimization, but it offers strong ROI by consistently achieving cost reduction through accurate resource management and optimization. Its targeted benefits can be particularly rewarding for organizations focused on maximizing efficiency and lowering operational costs.

To learn more, read our detailed Densify vs. VMware Aria Operations Report (Updated: January 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Densify vs. VMware Aria Operations

January 2026

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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

Densify

Ranking in Cloud Management

39th

Ranking in Virtualization Management Tools

11th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Migration (13th), Cloud Analytics (6th), Cloud Cost Management (25th)

VMware Aria Operations

Ranking in Cloud Management

2nd

Ranking in Virtualization Management Tools

1st

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

376

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Virtualization Management Tools category, the mindshare of Densify is 4.9%, up from 2.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations is 26.0%, down from 33.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Virtualization Management Tools Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
VMware Aria Operations	26.0%
Densify	4.9%
Other	69.1%

Virtualization Management Tools

Featured Reviews

Amit Kantia

Infrastructure capacity & demand manager at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Its most valuable feature is the ability to capture attributes in the console, but it is not a stable solution

I recommend others to use Densify. They can not only use it for reporting but for automation as well. They can implement the policies on the console easily during the build-out procedure. Stability is the primary concern to us as it is causing lots of problems. We can only make significant decisions if Densify allows us, and it takes lots of time. Thus, I rate the tool as a six out of ten.

Read full review

AldoDomini

Senior System Network Analyst at Net spa

Have faced limitations due to high costs but have maintained reliability over time

The primary issue is the pricing, which is very expensive for my company's budget. We cannot afford to pay such a large fee. We are not Microsoft or BMW; we are a small company. As a small company, I have no power to negotiate directly with VMware. Perhaps larger companies have more opportunity to contract directly with VMware, but I do not have that leverage. The only path I can follow is to change solutions. Net.spA is a company working in the field of waste management. We are not a technological company, so we do not have a large margin to justify purchasing and maintaining the VMware infrastructure at current costs.

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

"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."

"Densify's ability to aggregate multiple on-premise vCenters and multiple cloud accounts, gives it a level of visibility not found in many places."

"The ability to increase server density inside of my environment, which has helped me drive reduction in costs."

"The solution's tech support is excellent."

"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 Densify Control Console, and Environment Status."

"One would be the automatic rebalancing of the environment. That was one feature which helped. With that, we could improve our efficiency of our VMware infrastructure."

"I would say that the initial thing is that it provides us with a technological basis to expand capacity management beyond Excel."

More Densify pros

"What we do, as a whole for our group... is storage virtualization and the compute side. This product brings all those pieces into one interface and now we can actually correlate data between them."

"Instead of having a lot of people spend time doing manual tasks, it allows us to have dashboards and instantly show us any issues that we have, rather than trolling through log files."

"I find the stability of VMware Aria Operations to be impressive, rated as a stable nine out of ten."

"It is easy to drill down directly to the root cause of a problem. It goes from network to storage and having access to all the metrics. When you run 100 percent virtual, then everything is in one tool."

"VMware Aria Operations has positively impacted incident response times, making it easier to solve problems with virtualization."

"The most valuable feature is the insight into real-time performance."

"One of the most valuable features is the trending analysis of our environment to make capacity-planning decisions, in addition to providing real-time analysis of events."

"The system dashboards allow us to drill down into systems and find how they are talking to each other. They allow us to fix issues quickly and easily for the end user."

More VMware Aria Operations pros

Cons

"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."

"Some parts of the interface are rather complex and require a bit of time to navigate, but this has never stopped us as a Densify advisor is readily available to help with our "how to" queries."

"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."

"A closer integration to the service management processes."

"Normalization of CPU utilization is required. At present, the data is available based on entitlement level."

"Unfortunately the tools and mechanisms which really came to maturity in the cloud, and were not mainstream on-premise, are still not implemented."

"The solution's stability is the primary concern for me."

"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."

"If this tool can integrate with other products, for example, those that monitor the network devices or any other storage devices, it will be very beneficial."

"Where the product could improve would be the UI."

"I don't find this solution to be intuitive and user-friendly. It's a large and difficult product to learn. We need to search for more information."

"User-friendly? It could probably use a little work there. It is something of a beast. There's a lot that it can do and getting in there and getting everything working the way you want it to can be challenging."

"There is a learning curve because it's a complex program. There is a lot to consume in terms of the metrics inside of it. That's the biggest hurdle: trying to understand all the places to go look."

"If I could integrate with vCenter with vROps, then I could execute more things by managing vSphere from within vROps. That would be great."

"The customization of reports isn't as great as I would like to see it. There are some canned ones."

"I would like to see more integration between vRealize Operations, Log Insight, and Network Insight. It would be nice if they worked a bit better together."

More VMware Aria Operations cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cost is always involved, but then I feel that this solution is better than other products that we have."

"There was some sticker shock, as this is not just another software product to spit out graphs."

"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."

"Setup cost is negligible, as it scales fairly well."

"Cost is an issue on vROps. The Standard edition, for an organization our size, is just not useful at all. However, I like the price point of vROps Standard. But as a company, the Advanced is the minimum version that we can use, because we need the customization, we need a lot of the features that Advanced brings. But the price is substantially higher than Standard. It's always been a challenge to try to go in to my leadership and say, "Here's what I want." I've always got to go back and super-justify it and it's not an easy win. Whereas, if the pricing were closer to the Standard model, or maybe even a little bit above that, it's an easier conversation with leadership. But because it really feels like more than double the price, I'm not sure the value, double the money, is there, as an easy-sell to my leadership."

"We did an enterprise license agreement with our VMware partner and put this in our bundle. We tried it and loved it, so we use it now."

"If the VMs were trimmed, then we wouldn't have to buy as much software/hardware, and this means less licenses. While most of it is VMware licenses, which are relatively cheap, there are SQL licenses for Microsoft, and this is where we could start saving a lot of money."

"vRealize Operations has proved to be a cost effective solution for our big environment."

"Our manpower costs have been reduced due to the automation in conjunction with the usage of the dashboard."

"Our budgets are always tight. We would like to have more features at lower licensing levels for easier access to them."

"There's a smaller category that stands out due to its affordability, especially for recent versions, which I rate as four or five in terms of value. However, if you're looking for a vCenter with older, more advanced features, it comes at a significantly higher cost, and I would rate it around ten. They provide us with a choice between a recent version and one integrated, and I lean towards the former."

"In terms of the pricing for VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), I can't remember exactly how much it costs, but it was included in the VMware vSphere enterprise plus licensing package my company paid for."

More VMware Aria Operations pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Retailer

15%

Manufacturing Company

13%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Marketing Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	1
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	9

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	64
Midsize Enterprise	62
Large Enterprise	278

Questions from the Community

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What's the difference between VMware vRA (automation) and vROps (operations)?

vROP is a virtualization management solution from VMWare. It is efficient and easy to manage. You can find anything you need from the software interface. It provides complete visibility over applic...

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Is VMware Aria Operations a user friendly solution?

In terms of user-friendliness, VMware Aria Operations is one of the best solutions out there. It is not overly complex to set up and you can rely on the technical support to provide you with assis...

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What is the most useful new feature of VMware Aria Operations?

For me, the alerts features are the most unique part of this product, no matter the current name it uses. When they introduced the new version of VMware Aria Operations, they also introduced more a...

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Comparisons

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Compared 25% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

OpenText Migrate vs Densify

Compared 5% of the time

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VMware Aria Automation vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 11% of the time

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 10% of the time

IBM Turbonomic vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 7% of the time

Nutanix Prism vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 6% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Aria Operations

Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Densify

January 2026

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Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Operations

January 2026

Download VMware Aria Operations product report

Also Known As

No data available

VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), vCenter Operations Manager (VCOPS)

Overview

Densify is a hybrid cloud and container resource management platform that makes workloads self-aware of their precise resource requirements and automates the resource management and selection process. This solution helps you control your cloud spend and also helps your apps perform and scale better. Densify enables you to match your cloud requirements with the optimal cloud supply. Additionally, Densify is the only technology that leverages patented, predictive machine learning-powered analytics to perform advanced modeling of workload patterns, and provide precise optimization directives. It is ideal for cloud engineers, container platform owners, and IT finance.

Densify works by:

Establishing application demand patterns that are based on business cycles, seasonality, peaks, valleys, and other variables.
Building normalized models of cloud supply and ingesting the entire cloud catalog and latest technologies.
Considering numerous factors, such as performance benchmarks, cost, technical rules, tags, and policies. The solution uses business and functional tags, operational realities, and granular policy control.

Densify Features

Densify has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Integration with management and provisioning systems
Machine learning-based analytics
Automated resource optimization
App owner collaboration
Tailored efficiency reports
Observability
Controllability
Capacity optimization
Policy driven, automated governance
VM placement
Predictive analytics

Densify Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing Densify. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Automated resource management: Densify provides your organization with automated resource management at scale, with elasticity at an affordable low cost.

Full stack visibility: The Densify solution offers full stack visibility with improved efficiency by determining container size and node resources.

Financial visibility: In addition to full stack visibility, one of Densify’s other advantages is that it offers full financial visibility and cost intelligence for both reporting as well as chargebacks.

Resizing and rebalancing: Densify analyzes your private cloud infrastructure, providing resizing and rebalancing recommendations.

Helps you choose the right host environment: Densify automatically routes workloads to the best hosting environment based on detailed workload requirements. For workloads not requiring immediate placement, it reserves capacity to ensure it is available when required.

A true SaaS implementation: Because Densify is a true SaaS implementation, there is no software to maintain or to learn.

Better for IT finance: The solution is good for IT finance because it collects and analyzes your detailed billing data, giving you visibility into your spending, what services you’re buying, and how to better manage your costs. In addition, it can also generate reports that cover your spending and your utilization of reservations and reserved instances and savings plans.

Reduce risk and costs: Machine learning-based analytics help your organization optimize consumption to eliminate waste and overprovisioning while ensuring performance.

Cost-efficient: The Densify solution is cost-efficient, helping you drastically reduce per-processor software license costs by placing workloads intelligently.

Densify

VMware Aria Operations is a high-ranking virtualization management and cloud management tool that automates and simplifies IT management to the applications it supports. It achieves this through full-stack visibility from physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure. The product allows users to enable self-driving IT operations management across private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. This is conducted with the unified operations platform that delivers continuous performance, capacity and cost optimization, and integrated compliance through artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and predictive analytics.

VMware Aria Operations Use Cases

VMware Aria Operations has several use cases, some of which include:

Continuous performance optimization: VMware Aria Operations allows users to assure application performance at a minimal cost, facilitated by real-time predictive analytics and artificial intelligence. The product can be used to automatically balance workloads, improve consolidation rations, optimize and rightsize workloads, and avoid contention.
Capacity and cost management: VMware Aria Operations can be utilized to reduce cost and improve efficiency with real-time ML-based capacity and cost analytics. The solution uses these tools to visualize cost savings opportunities and accelerate decision-making.
Intelligent remediation: This product can also be used to predict, prevent, and troubleshoot issues with actionable insights. Through other VMware integrations, users can streamline and centralize IT operations.
Integrated compliance: The solution can be utilized to reduce risk and enforce IT regulatory standards for VMware Cloud through integrated compliance and automated drift remediation.

VMware Aria Operations Features

The product has various features which users can utilize. Several of the features that the 2022 version of VMware Aria Operations introduced include:

Management pack builder: This feature is a no-code solution that allows users to expand their operations visibility to anywhere they wish. The builder allows users to connect to a data source using an HTTP or Amazon AWS data source, as well as to make API calls, create objects, and build out relationships with other objects in the product.
Public cloud basic actions: This is a set of features that allows VMware Aria Operations users to initiate actions automatically via the product's UI for AWS, Microsoft Azure, or GCP CE instances.
Rule-based application discovery: Through this new feature of the product, users can easily discover multiple applications running in all or specific areas of infrastructure and view associated resources. This can be achieved through simple user-defined rules, including discovering applications based on tags, object names, and properties.
Aria Operations capacity management: This feature allows organizations to view the results of what-if analysis based on their allocation model and specify business hours for capacity calculations.
Alerts: This is a set of features that include components called Conditions and Symptoms, which are used to alert different types of issues on the platform.
User access management: Through this feature, users can benefit from improved ways to configure in VMware Aria Operations with the introduction of scopes.
Support for raw device mapping storage: This feature allows users to get configuration details about their raw device mapping (RDM), such as disk sharing, compatibility mode, and SCSI Bus Sharing.

VMware Aria Operations Benefits

VMware Aria Operations brings various benefits to the organizations using it. Among them are the following:

The product helps organizations reduce unplanned downtime and maximize return on investment (ROI) in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
VMware Aria Operations simplifies management for hybrid clouds from migration assessments.
Users can benefit from an accelerated journey to VMware Cloud on AWS through this solution.
The product can be delivered on premises or as a service, providing flexibility for its users.
VMware Aria Operations can increase operational efficiency through monitoring and management features.
The solution accelerates decision-making through detailed cost analytics, which is visualized for users' convenience.
VMware Aria Operations allows users to both utilize standard compliance templates and create their own custom ones.

Reviews from Real Users

Mohamed N., a tech lead VMware support engineer at a tech services company, appreciates VMware Aria Operations because it is easy to use, stable, and support is always available.

Mojtaba K., a senior system administrator at a comms service provider, values VMware Aria Operations due to the fact that its dashboards give you a glimpse of what is really going on in your virtualized environment.

Broadcom

Sample Customers

AIG, Bank of America, Cigna, Citi

Science Applications International Corporation, Tribune Media, Heartland Payment Systems, Telkom Indonesia, Columbia Sportswear, iGATE, CSS Corp, Angel Broking, Adira Finance, Hipskind, Beiersdorf Shared Services, Innovate Mas Indonesia, Adobe, Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi , Join Experience S.A, Borusan Holdings, Department of Transport - Abu Dhabi

Buyer's Guide

Densify vs. VMware Aria Operations

January 2026

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