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Horizon Cloud Service vs VMware Workstation comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 5, 2024

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

Horizon Cloud Service
Ranking in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
11th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Desktop as a Service (DaaS) (4th)
VMware Workstation
Ranking in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
57
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) category, the mindshare of Horizon Cloud Service is 3.1%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Workstation is 12.0%, down from 16.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Workstation12.0%
Horizon Cloud Service3.1%
Other84.9%
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1970973 - PeerSpot reviewer
Virtual Desktop and Applications Offerings Global Offering Manager at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees
Cloud-based platform offers flexibility with robust protocol and exceptional user management
The main benefit of Horizon Cloud Service is that it is cloud-based, allowing our organization to leverage the service without having to manage all infrastructure directly. This offers significant flexibility and efficiency. Additionally, Horizon Cloud Service has a robust protocol, making app management straightforward. The scalability of Horizon Cloud Service is also excellent, and its stability is strong for our use cases.
GC
Director of IT at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Creating and destroying test machines has simplified our operations and reduced manual recovery time
The Snapshot feature has helped with workflows by allowing us to more easily reconstruct something if we lose it or need it. We've been making Snapshots on a consistent basis, mainly of servers. The VX Rail has worked effectively because we can create machines as we need them. It's helpful for resetting and has helped with our operations because I had set up failover servers on Vertex, but we don't have to do that anymore since VMware will just create a new machine immediately if we have a problem. We're doing our domain servers on there, and we've been very happy with that. We appreciate that we can create machines simply to test things out and then destroy them. I use it for a test machine for checking emails, so if the email has a virus in it, we can just destroy the machine and create a new one. We're slowly moving into the VMware environment, although the pricing with Broadcom has been a disaster.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product’s on-premise version has the ability to create an image of any updates or changes in the system."
"The most valuable feature of VMware Horizon Cloud is the ability to manage a great number of desktops at once and the remote access for users that are working from outside of the office or from different offices in the country."
"The most valuable feature of VMware Horizon Cloud is all of its capabilities together."
"Horizon Cloud Service provides deployment flexibility across multiple clouds with a scalable architecture that easily scales virtual desktops and applications up or down based on demand."
"The main benefit of Horizon Cloud Service is that it is cloud-based, allowing our organization to leverage the service without having to manage all infrastructure directly."
"The product allows a VPN connection, adding extra value to its features."
"VMware Horizon Cloud is easy to use and the full development cloud is very good. The main features of VMware are included. It's a cloud-based virtual desktop infrastructure software that allows you to permit the virtual desktops and applications to any device from the single unified management control. These are managed from the dedicated remote session desktop."
"The tool remains pretty stable."
"VMware Player's best feature is the ability to run different OS's simultaneously."
"The most valuable feature of VMware Player is the ability to snapshot with or without memory."
"The most valuable features of the VMware Workstation solutions are the ESXi and vCenter."
"The technical support is good."
"The product is stable, very easy to deploy, easy to use, easy to configure, and easy to set up."
"VMware Workstation allows multiple operating systems in the same physical machine."
"The most valuable feature of the VMware Workstation is the ease to create a development environment. When you have different ongoing developments, you often need to create a lot of different development environments. With this workstation solution, you can have a development environment for all the things you develop."
"The most valuable features of VMware Workstation are the DirectX support, you can run Microsoft Hyper-V in virtual environments which is good for me to test different installations. Additionally, you can set up different VLANs, and overall it is a complete solution."
 

Cons

"There should be more emphasis on the Workspace One access part of the solution. This is essentially identity management provided with Horizon. There needs to be some kind of integration because you are able to have all of these desktops on any device, but you have to have this other component to make it easier from a single sign-on perspective. That's why there should be an emphasis on Workspace One access. It actually comes free with the product, but people don't really know how powerful it can be."
"Logging into VMware Horizon Cloud could be made easier. Additionally, the VMs could be better in their performance."
"The application remoting features have some room for improvement."
"The cost of Horizon Cloud Service is high, however, it could be optimized. The licensing model is complex, particularly for hybrid deployments, and simplifying it could help."
"The product has a lot of bugs."
"It can be very expensive to scale up because each part of scaling up requires you to have new components of the infrastructure."
"The licensing model is complex, particularly for hybrid deployments, and simplifying it could help."
"The licensing model needs to be adjusted, as a cloud license is currently required even for on-premises devices."
"For some virtual machine configurations, you have to go to the text editor and make the configuration changes, which could be improved."
"I need to buy a newer version of the tool to support Windows Server."
"Its networking features need improvement."
"It could have more platforms and CPUs."
"The solution should provide a guide on its installation."
"The product could provide the features available in Microsoft Hyper-V."
"The price should be reduced."
"VMware Workstation uses more resources like CPU and disk space, especially the CPU, which is a shortcoming that needs improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is too expensive as compared to other solutions because of which we don't use it that much. We tend to go more for Hyper-V or Azure just because VMware licensing is quite up there. We sway people away from VMware Horizon Cloud. We have some clients who already have it. They stay on it for a little while, and then most of them end up moving off when we provide them a better solution that isn't as license heavy cost-wise."
"For what you get, it is very compelling. You've got to look at the total cost of ownership of this type of piece of software in terms of being able to utilize it as a cloud service. I don't have to run everything on-premises. When you look at the total cost of just being able to use it and then being able to point it to any public or private cloud, it is very compelling. You have one less thing to manage."
"VMware Horizon Cloud is a low-cost solution. The model that they have is consumption-based. However, some features are expensive."
"I rate VMware Horizon Cloud pricing a ten out of ten."
"VMware Horizon Cloud is an expensive solution. This solution is approximately 30 percent more than Microsoft Azure Cloud. There can be extra costs."
"Initially, the product is cheap, but it starts to get expensive when users try to scale out."
"There is a license required for the use of this solution and there are different tier levels available."
"The product is expensive."
"VMware Workstation has a high price than competitors in the market."
"With a VDI solution, there is always extra cost running a VDI solution but it's not for cost purposes anymore. In the beginning, it was to save money on hardware but at the moment it's other aspects that are more important why you should use a VDI solution."
"The solution's pricing is almost the same as what Google Cloud, AWS, or Microsoft would charge you."
"VMware Workstation is an expensive tool. I rate the product's price a three on a scale of one to ten, where one is a high price, and ten is a low or good price."
"VMware Workstation's costs are lifetime."
"VMware is expensive. Licensing can be tricky. For example, I recently had a client running VMware vSphere Essentials and wanted to migrate to a more scalable solution. However, they had no choice but to purchase a completely new license and deploy a completely new instance of VMware."
"It has the best licensing modules."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Performing Arts
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Media Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
University
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business32
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise17
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware Horizon Cloud?
The cost is considered normal, not remarkable but not outrageous. In terms of expense, compared to other virtualization products, I would rate it as a six.
What needs improvement with VMware Horizon Cloud?
The licensing model needs to be adjusted, as a cloud license is currently required even for on-premises devices. Horizon Cloud Service should continue improving their protocol and work with other h...
What is your primary use case for VMware Horizon Cloud?
Our primary use case focuses on virtual desktop and application hosting. This is spread across different industries. We have a large number of employees, and we are one of the largest GSIs globally...
Which VMware solution would you go with - Workstation or vSphere?
VM Workstation’s setup is so easy, you can use it almost instantly, it works well with Windows and Linux. We like VM Workstation primarily to test environments to determine how well a solution will...
What do you like most about VMware Workstation?
The product is stable, very easy to deploy, easy to use, easy to configure, and easy to set up.
What needs improvement with VMware Workstation?
The product's integration capabilities are an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required.
 

Also Known As

VMware Horizon Cloud, VMware Horizon DaaS
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Marriott, Sprint
Akademiska Hus
Find out what your peers are saying about Horizon Cloud Service vs. VMware Workstation and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.