IBM Spectrum Computing vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

IBM and Broadcom are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. IBM is ranked #28 with an average rating of 8.0, while Broadcom is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.0. IBM holds a 1.2% mindshare in CM, compared to Broadcom’s 7.1% mindshare. Additionally, 57% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

IBM Spectrum Computing

Read 9 IBM Spectrum Computing reviews

750 Views
525 Comparison Views

57% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Automation

Read 171 VMware Aria Automation reviews

7,806 Views
4,293 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

IBM Spectrum Computing

VMware Aria Automation

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

IBM Spectrum Computing and VMware Aria Automation are competing in the domain of cloud management and automation. While IBM Spectrum Computing is favored for pricing and support, VMware Aria Automation is distinguished by its extensive features, providing value aligning with its higher costs.

Features: IBM Spectrum Computing offers powerful scalability and workload management, optimizing resource allocation in varied settings. Additionally, it provides effective high-performance computing solutions and integration capabilities with OpenStack. VMware Aria Automation excels in automation capabilities, integrating seamlessly with various platforms, and its blueprint functionality is intuitive and enhances operational efficiency.

Room for Improvement: IBM Spectrum Computing's complexity in setup could be simplified, as could its integration with other vendor tools. The system might also benefit from more user-friendly interfaces. VMware Aria Automation can enhance its cost transparency and simplification of initial configuration processes. Improvements in support for non-VMware ecosystems would increase its competitiveness.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Aria Automation provides a streamlined deployment with comprehensive documentation and responsive customer service, making setup and maintenance efficient. IBM Spectrum Computing focuses on post-deployment support, ensuring system optimization. Although deployment is generally smooth, enhancing initial setup assistance could improve user experience.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Spectrum Computing is known for its cost-effectiveness and dependable ROI, attracting budget-conscious enterprises. VMware Aria Automation, with its superior features, justifies its higher initial investment through significant ROI, due to enhanced automation and integration capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Spectrum Computing vs. VMware Aria Automation Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Computing vs. VMware Aria Automation

December 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 881,082 peers since 2012

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

IBM Spectrum Computing

Ranking in Cloud Management

28th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

5.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Hadoop (6th)

VMware Aria Automation

Ranking in Cloud Management

3rd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

171

Ranking in other categories

Configuration Management (7th), Network Automation (6th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (19th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (5th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Spectrum Computing is 1.2%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 7.1%, down from 10.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
VMware Aria Automation	7.1%
IBM Spectrum Computing	1.2%
Other	91.7%

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

OmarIsmail1

Infrastructure Technical Specialist II at Clicks Group

Senior Technical Specialist appreciates intelligent workload management, strong support, and scalability

The best features of IBM Spectrum Computing are common across many of their storage products. The software is solid, meaning that the code is stable. They take business seriously, which is what IBM stands for - International Business Machines. They always maintain a business-oriented approach in their software development. It's not simply clicking through interfaces; in IBM software, they consider their actions, process flows, and workflows around business processes. It requires understanding IBM and their methodology, as the software operates accordingly. I have utilized IBM Spectrum Computing's intelligent workload management feature. We use Insights, which is connected to the cloud. This provides AI capabilities for analyzing the configuration, offering smart recommendations on new code, warning about bugs in current code, and suggesting configuration improvements through its advisor tool. The predictive analytics feature in IBM Spectrum Computing enables optimal software performance through Insights. However, being a storage administrator requires foundational knowledge and understanding beyond these tools. For troubleshooting, it's efficient in spotting bottlenecks, but understanding the terms and metrics is essential as it provides answers that need interpretation.

Read full review

Le Quang Long

Cloud Engineer at BIDV - Ngân hàng TMCP Đầu tư & Phát triển Việt Nam

Significantly streamlined operations with good automation that helps with simplifying workflows

It helps me build a big catalog and provide it to my end users. It helps us automate the workflow of creating many VMs and the TensorFlow key method. I do not meet many people to operate it live beforehand. It operates for both of my products, but as a product, it is complicated to integrate and automate with other products.

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

"This solution is working for both VTL and tape."

"The most valuable aspect of the product is the policy driving resource management, to optimize the computing across data centers."

"Easy to operate and use."

"Spectrum Computing's best features are its speed, robustness, and data processing and analysis."

"The best features of IBM Spectrum Computing are common across many of their storage products."

"I have utilized IBM Spectrum Computing's intelligent workload management feature through Insights, which is connected to the cloud."

"IBM's ability to cluster compute resources is impressive, with built-in support for scenarios like VR and active-active configurations,"

"We are satisfied with the technical support, we have no issues."

More IBM Spectrum Computing pros

"It's also absolutely easy and intuitive. It uses the same basic layout as the rest of the product suite so it's really easy to navigate, find your way around between the tabs and the areas."

"Even with the virtualization, it would take us at least three or four days to create a VM. With vRA we have brought that down to seven minutes. The solution has helped increase infrastructure, agility, speed of provisioning, time to market, application agility. Everything got super fast."

"We haven't hit any limits yet, scalability is good."

"Today, if I want to provision one VM, it takes me five minutes. Earlier, it would take a minimum of 30 minutes to go and choose everything. Now, I can just do one click and it can provision my whole VM. We also integrated with our Alexa, so even through voice functionality, I can create a VM. One of the guys at VMware, along with our partner, deployed that in our environment. If I say, "Hey, Alexa, I need a VM with four gigs of RAM," it will go and start creating it."

"We have faster delivery times through its automation."

"We monitor the configurations against CIS standards. We run CIS benchmarks and maintain configurations with higher CIS values for each server."

"The most valuable feature of VMware Aria Automation is the versatile automation and deployments."

"We have integrated our CICD pipeline into an automatic catalog request through some API calls. It can request and provision new virtual machines behind the NSX load balancer, straight out of the CIDC pipeline and add those nodes to the load balancer, request SSL certs, do SSL termination at the load balancer so that it's not encrypted behind the scenes, all of which has really been helpful."

More VMware Aria Automation pros

Cons

"This solution is no longer managing tapes correctly."

"The deduplication software isn't quite up to speed with the market."

"IBM's sales and support structure can be challenging."

"We'd like to see some AI model training for machine learning."

"We have not been able to use deduplication."

"Spectrum Computing is lagging behind other products, most likely because it hasn't been shifted to the cloud."

"Lack of sufficient documentation, particularly in Spanish."

"The deduplication software isn't quite up to speed with the market. While IBM has excellent compression technology, specifically on their FlashCore modules, they lag behind competitors such as NetApp in deduplication capabilities."

More IBM Spectrum Computing cons

"It would be nice if, at the director level, the manager level, there was a pretty graphic. They don't like to see numbers and line items, they want to see graphs and scales and real world pictures. That would support better reporting."

"7.5 is not user-friendly, in fact, it's a nightmare. They changed everything on the graphic user interface, the mode where the user interacts with the product."

"The solution is intuitive, but not necessarily user-friendly. In particular, it's the documentation. It's a lot of going-through-the-weeds types of scenarios. There is just an abundance of information, so it's a matter of understanding how the objects or the relationships exist, and then, obviously, being able to access that information and knowing how to make use of it."

"We had a lot of issues at first. Especially with doing any kind of upgrades, it was a complete tear-down and a complete rebuild of all the Blueprints. The upgrade process was not easy or intuitive at all. But it seems to be getting better."

"The high price of the tool is an area of concern where improvements are required."

"They can improve on the dashboard representations and the options for non-technical people. I would like to see the ability to customize that and maybe provide them with helpful guides to what subscriptions they have. Sometimes, I find that I have to do more explanation to people who do approvals. I would really like to customize the display to the terms they use in their particular business unit. So a little bit more of a nod to the customization of the UI for non-technical users would be helpful."

"It is too broad scale and complicated. It takes too many clicks to do things."

"The most important thing that we missed in vRanger was the possibility to mount several images instantaneously and present it so we can run it immediately."

More VMware Aria Automation cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Spectrum Computing is one of the most expensive products on the market."

"This solution is expensive."

"There is confusion between licensing levels. There are three different licensed versions of vRealize Automation, and there are different things which can happen in each of them."

"I'm very interested in the integration with Puppet. However, my organization doesn't have the funding for something like Puppet right now. If VMware would integrate that feature set (Puppet) into vRA. That would be very awesome."

"We have seen significant ROI. We used to have physical servers, it took 90 days to get a server, order it, buy it, and get it in. We have it down to 10 minutes, building a server with virtualization, and now that's too slow. So, we let the customer do it at their speed. Therefore, it is pretty much up in a couple of minutes and they have a server."

"From the customer perspective, the value was worth it."

"The solution is pretty expensive but provides good workload management."

"We do plan to see ROI with any new implementation of new technologies being implemented within our environment."

"The pricing is very high."

"The solution is free of cost."

More VMware Aria Automation pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Management solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

18%

Manufacturing Company

16%

Transportation Company

Performing Arts

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	32
Midsize Enterprise	24
Large Enterprise	130

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Spectrum Computing?

IBM Spectrum Computing consistently offers competitive pricing. When solutioning new implementations, IBM always presents the best solution and price. In a recent comparison with Pure Storage and N...

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Computing?

IBM Spectrum Computing had limitations with remote copy services between head office and disaster recovery sites. In the last year, IBM has improved the code by re-engineering it to policy-based re...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for IBM Spectrum Computing?

The typical use case for IBM Spectrum Computing is that it's an all-rounder. It can be used in various scenarios, such as the retailer I work for that has batch processing. It's on-demand when perf...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Is there any way to try VMware Aria Automation for free?

When it comes to VMware Aria Automation, you have three choices for free runs: Hands-on Lab (HOL) Advanced lab A free trial I cannot describe in detail the second and third options as my company ...

See all answers

Which sectors can benefit the most from VMware Aria Automation?

I was looking at VMware Aria Automation case studies recently and I got the impression that three main kinds of companies were using it most often: Social organizations Financial institutions and ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Flexera Cloud Management Platform (CMP) vs IBM Spectrum Computing

Compared 15% of the time

HPE Data Fabric vs IBM Spectrum Computing

Compared 12% of the time

Cloudera Data Platform vs IBM Spectrum Computing

Compared 12% of the time

Morpheus vs IBM Spectrum Computing

Compared 12% of the time

CloudBolt vs IBM Spectrum Computing

Compared 8% of the time

More IBM Spectrum Computing Competitors

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 15% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 9% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 8% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 5% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 4% of the time

More VMware Aria Automation Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Hadoop

January 2026

Download IBM Spectrum Computing product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Automation

January 2026

Download VMware Aria Automation product report

Also Known As

IBM Platform Computing

VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack

Overview

IBM Spectrum Computing uses intelligent workload and policy-driven resource management to optimize resources across the data center, on premises and in the cloud. Now up to 150X faster and scalable to over 160,000 cores, IBM provides you with the latest advances in software-defined infrastructure to help you unleash the power of your distributed mission-critical high performance computing (HPC), analytics and big data applications as well as a new generation open source frameworks such as Hadoop and Spark.

IBM

VMware Aria Automation is a cloud management tool that allows companies to simplify their cloud experience through a modern automation platform. The solution is designed to deliver self-service clouds, multi-cloud automation with governance, and DevOps-based security and infrastructure management. It helps organizations improve IT agility, efficiency, and productivity through its various features.

VMware Aria Automation has multiple use cases that include the following:

Self-service multi-cloud: VMware Aria Automation can be used to deliver consistent self-service consumption. Another use case in this area is for delivering infrastructure across VMware Clouds as well as public clouds.
Multi-cloud governance: The solution can be used to manage cost, performance, networking, configuration, and security at scale for multi-cloud environments. VMware Aria Automation offers all this with an everything-as-code approach.
DevOps for infrastructure: Through VMware Aria Automation, companies can enable a powerful infrastructure as code platform with support for iterative development and infrastructure pipelining.
Kubernetes automation: Users can utilize VMware Aria Automation to automate the management of Kubernetes clusters and namespaces with support for vSphere with Tanzu.
Security operations: VMware Aria Automation facilitates event-driven automation to deliver full-service IT system compliance enforcement and vulnerability remediation.

VMware Aria Automation Features

VMware Aria Automation has various features that allow users to easily perform operations. Some of the solution's capacities include:

VMware Cloud agnostic template: This feature allows organizations to use a single cloud template to deploy with Infrastructure as a Code. Deployment options include VMware Cloud as well as major public cloud platforms such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and more.
Extensibility and customization: This VMware Aria Automation feature allows users to get full extensibility and customization. This can be achieved through Aria Automation Orchestrator, Action-Based Extensibility (ABX), and built-in integrations with common third-party tools.
Self-service multi-cloud: This feature enables users to request and provision infrastructure resources. It can be done across clouds using a unified and consistent Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) consumption layer, idempotent REST API, and self-service catalog.
Centralized policies and governance: VMware Aria Automation offers a feature for users to manage multiple clouds with templatized cloud and policy definition, automated remediation, and cloud environment visibility.
Configuration management: Through this feature of the product, day 1 and 2 control can be achieved for virtualized and cloud environments. This can be done with intuitive configuration automation, compliance enforcement, and vulnerability remediation.
Infrastructure pipelining: Through this feature, organizations can access user-friendly release automation pipelines. They can be specifically tailored for CI/CD in infrastructure use cases.

VMware Aria Automation Benefits

VMware Aria Automation offers its users various benefits. Some of the biggest advantages that the solution brings to companies that utilize it include:

VMware Aria Automation provides faster time to market for companies through offloading manual tasks with advanced workflows and agile templating.
The solution offers high levels of security and control.
This product is suitable for beginners, as it offers a self-service consumption experience for users.
VMware Aria Automation accelerates innovation through Infrastructure as Code and DevOps principles.
The product provides users with flexibility, as it is compatible with the most popular public cloud solutions.
The solution offers fast deployment because of all natively integrated functions.

Reviews from Real Users

Awais J., CTO/CEO at a tech services company, likes VMware Aria Automation because it saves a lot of time, provides more visibility, and has extensive automation capabilities.

An IT consultant at a government rates VMware Aria Automation highly because the product gives you flexibility to analyze and consume resources.

Broadcom

Sample Customers

London South Bank University, Transvalor, Infiniti Red Bull Racing, Genomic

Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Computing vs. VMware Aria Automation

December 2025

Free Report: IBM Spectrum Computing vs. VMware Aria Automation

Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Spectrum Computing vs. VMware Aria Automation and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our IBM Spectrum Computing vs. VMware Aria Automation report.

See our list of best Cloud Management vendors.

We monitor all Cloud Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.