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NetBrain vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 6, 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

NetBrain
Ranking in Network Automation
6th
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Network Troubleshooting (18th)
VMware Aria Automation
Ranking in Network Automation
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
172
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (3rd), Configuration Management (10th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (28th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Network Automation category, the mindshare of NetBrain is 7.3%, down from 12.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 4.0%, down from 8.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Automation Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
NetBrain7.3%
VMware Aria Automation4.0%
Other88.7%
Network Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Deborah Gamelin - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President at Asset Track for Cloud, LLC
Good monitoring and troubleshoot capabilities, improves overall network traffic visibility
In my organization, we had 130,000 network devices that needed to be brought into the solution and mapped. NetBrain can handle the scale but the engineers that manage those devices have to go in and update all of them to allow NetBrain permission to poll them. It can get a little stressful for everybody when you're trying to roll out new stuff when you've got other issues that have to be addressed with other devices. In some cases, our devices had no automation at all. One example is the Cisco 3650. Right now, if you went through the inventory list, you see that we have different versions running. Some are on one version, whereas others are on another version. The problem with upgrading them is that they need to be done overnight because we don't want to disrupt any network traffic during business hours. Consequently, it could take us years to upgrade the versions before we can even get them onto these new tools. This may be an internal issue but it's a big one when you have a lot of devices. Even if you had 10,000 devices, it's still an issue. You have to consider the compatibility of the device against the tool, and being able to use certain commands to upgrade it.
VasilisGiannitsiotis - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT at ITSolutions
Automation has streamlined complex financial workflows but still needs more intuitive orchestration
Something to improve in VMware Aria Automation would be related to VCF 9, as I do not know what it is trying to bring because they exposed it as the solution of everything. So VCF 9 will bring VCF Automation and VCF Operations, the new product line of VMware. I have not seen what this brings or what else it includes. Maybe in the area of vRealize Orchestrator, this would be beneficial because VRO can do everything. Perhaps a more user-friendly way to use that tool would be helpful because the possibilities there are endless. I am looking for more user-friendly navigation in VMware Aria Automation.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Enables maps to be drawn out."
"Once it's up and running and you don't have the strange requirements I had, and you just want some basic maps, it'll work."
"This product has good network monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities."
"NetBrain is faster, better and level sets the engineering technical sets."
"Other advice to users considering the solution would be: go with NetBrain."
"NetBrain is a very simple tool."
"This tool is exactly what we wanted and needed."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that you can click once and have a link test, see your network, and get an overall view of your network and its state."
"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."
"After utilizing vRA we have reduced this to less than an hour for a complete, production-ready infrastructure deployment."
"We use it to deploy databases and testing environments. It spins up quickly and also break down fast."
"The benefit to our organization is time to market; it has streamlined the process so that they can deploy systems, test the systems, and get the product to market faster."
"We had a lot of config drift before, and this really helps us keep it on track. Speed to provision is probably our biggest, significant gain."
"The most valuable feature of VMware Aria Automation is the versatile automation and deployments."
"The self service portal: People don't have to come to us to request something. They can just go fill out a form. Within 30 minutes, they have what they requested."
"I like its capacity, the self-service portal, and operational automation. The most beneficial feature is that it saves time when creating new virtual machines, deploying security measures, and writing infrastructure code, making things easier and faster. We have a standard we follow, reducing the time spent repeatedly rewriting everything."
 

Cons

"When I used the installed product before, I wasn't very satisfied with the support."
"The solution could integrate more automation."
"It's okay on the value, a bit expensive for just maps, but makes it a lot easier to see things visually and take it from there."
"Support needs to improve for the installed product and some of the reporting could be more flexible to provide more complete cataloging."
"If you're comparing NetBrain as an NDR, I would rate it as a four or five, however, NetBrain has a different aspect of looking at things within the network."
"The pricing needs to be improved."
"Each device needs to be configured to allow NetBrain to poll for the information it needs, which can be very time-consuming for a large network."
"It would be nice if the setup was a little simpler. Also, if the solution could provide more training materials for new people coming into our company so they can quickly learn how to use the functionalities."
"The initial setup was not straightforward. It was not simple, and we had a PoC. We had VMware help us deploy it, and it took them an exorbitant amount of time."
"There is some performance lag, but that could be on our end."
"Each new version seems to bring a new set of bugs to the table and upgrading is risky, especially for a tool at the core of the operations and infrastructure."
"I think debugging can be improved. In case of errors, the devOps team finds it difficult to read the Python stack traces at times."
"vRealize Automation on the back-end is still a little complicated. It has a lot of moving pieces, simplifying that from a pure infrastructure point of view would be a good thing. I would then like to have more out-of-the-box functionality and integrations with VMware components."
"I would like to see a simpler way of provisioning it. As is, we can automate the provisioning of a VM, however, when it comes to the external IPs, that is outside of VMware."
"It's not a smooth upgrade process. For a DTA environment, which is very simple, it is a smooth process, but for our production environment, which is quite enhanced and has a lot of dependencies, it's not easy at all, and it results in a lot of errors... It takes a lot of retries to upgrade which ends up being costly."
"The integration is a bit tight. I need the right package to use it properly. The new automation processes for VMware are messy, and support could be better."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is expensive, but less expensive than some of the competition and worth the price."
"Licensing is based on a per-device basis, which means that it can get very expensive if you have a large number of devices."
"It is an open-source product."
"SaltStack is an open-source product."
"Better pricing is always handy, but I feel it's at the right price point."
"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."
"The pricing is very high."
"The solution has helped to increase infrastructure, agility, speed, and provisioning in the time to market."
"It is an expensive product. After VMware's acquisition by Broadcom, there was a rise in the price of VMware Aria Automation."
"We do plan to see ROI with any new implementation of new technologies being implemented within our environment."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
Outsourcing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise131
 

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...
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 ...
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 ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CompuCon, TD Ameritrade, Move Inc.
Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
Find out what your peers are saying about NetBrain vs. VMware Aria Automation and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,924 professionals have used our research since 2012.