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VMware Aria Automation vs nOps comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

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

nOps
Ranking in Cloud Management
29th
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
4.6
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Aria Automation
Ranking in Cloud Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
172
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (8th), Network Automation (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (20th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of nOps is 0.9%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 5.5%, down from 11.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Aria Automation5.5%
nOps0.9%
Other93.6%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Tom Weeks - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Director of Engineering at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
Automates savings plan management and improves cost visibility while reducing cloud infrastructure needs
I find it to be a valuable cost-savings tool. Its best features include several things: first, it is hands-off, so I can set it and forget it. I get it set up, and it manages AWS savings plans on my behalf. This frees my team up to work on more valuable work without losing out on valuable discounts. It also provides a dashboard with more detailed insights into cost and AWS cloud costs than what comes out of the box with AWS Cost Explorer. Third, the nOps Kubernetes agent automatically resizes pods based on usage, which allows us to run significantly fewer EC2 instances than we would otherwise. nOps has positively impacted my organization by saving both time and money.
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

"I find it to be a valuable cost-savings tool; its best features include several things: first, it is hands-off, so I can set it and forget it, and it manages AWS savings plans on my behalf, freeing my team up to work on more valuable work without losing out on valuable discounts."
"The solution provides actionable reporting and cost-saving recommendations."
"One customer saved 35 percent on their cloud bill, which is pretty significant."
"nOps smoothly integrated with our AWS infrastructure and achieved significant savings without much intervention from our internal team."
"Since making this shift, we have seen a twenty to thirty percent reduction in the total AWS compute expenditure, which represents a significant win for us."
"The most valuable feature would be the scalability, as it's very easy to add more capacity once it's set up, and in terms of provisioning, it has definitely helped speed-wise by simplifying making the environment bigger without the downtime of waiting for more hardware."
"Our speed of provisioning has also improved; we used to build systems manually, which would take four hours or a day, but nowadays we're able to spin something up off a template that we update every so often and it takes about 20 minutes."
"They make it simple to create Python-based templates and, when necessary, create functions for actions that are not covered by the Jinja engine."
"The preset policies and templates are useful. I would say that vRA is one of the best solutions we have. The CI/CD features also look helpful even though we aren't using them at the moment. We plan to get more involved and train our customers as much as possible."
"With the advent of the automation, we've been able to give DevOps the ability to spin up environments, give them lease times, and then have it automatically reclaim the environment."
"SaltStack being so fast makes it very convenient and practical; allows me to get information about my servers in no time."
"It has cut down the time for building out a machine; a process that used to take three hours is down to 20 to 30 minutes, so if the users need a machine fast, we can get it presented to them quicker."
"In terms of recovery, it takes only a tenth of the time that's required compared to a human element."
 

Cons

"From the features, I would like to see RDS RIs and maybe better visibility on how the engine is deciding whether to use spot or on demand, to replace the instance or not"
"I suggest improving the heat map capability with the option to use showback values as the x and y-axis."
"However, it misses a perfect score because multi-cloud feature parity is still catching up to its gold-standard AWS toolset."
"The customer support is lacking but still pretty good."
"The upgrade process 6.x to 7.3 was a significant effort. I'm hoping that 7.3 to the next version is much smoother."
"They should concentrate on navigation and service improvements."
"The solution is intuitive, but not necessarily user-friendly. In particular, it's the documentation."
"New versions are quite scalable, but when it comes to managing a Telco environment, it has bottleneck."
"The solution could be lighter. As an administrator, I would like to simplify the number of services I need to deploy. They took a significant step in that direction by removing all the Windows dependencies that we had in the past, but there are still a lot of services consuming resources."
"The stability is why I rated it a seven and not higher. There were several cases where we had to restart some services because it wasn't working correctly anymore. People cannot extend their machine or replay their machine. There is no alert to say that there is a problem and that we should stop the service. The monitoring system is not very good."
"The stability needs a lot of work. The troubleshooting component of vRealize is a pain. The administration and the upgrades are not up to the mark. If they were able to improve on that, that would be the best thing and would make it much easier to run it in the enterprise."
"It requires a lot of Windows servers, which we don't like, and the external load balancer configurations, which we also don't like."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Customers say this solution is costlier compared to its competitors."
"I would rate the pricing a ten out of ten, with ten being very expensive."
"The pricing for this solution is roughly 20% lower than the competitive products in the market."
"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."
"I would rate it high because, compared to other solutions, VMware’s pricing is quite expensive. VMware products have become significantly more costly in recent years, leading to higher costs."
"It made the provisioning of the virtual machines easier and faster. We can react more quickly to customers' demands."
"It is an open-source product."
"As far as value is concerned, it has been essential to our environment. We have been able to deploy VMs quickly and the developers have their own sandbox, so they can spin up and destroy VMs at their own will."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
24%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Government
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

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for nOps?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it was very easy, and it was also brokered by us with the client. I did not purchase nOps through the AWS Marketplace.
What needs improvement with nOps?
While the AWS integration is flawless and deeply mature, I believe the multi-cloud capabilities for platforms such as Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform can sometimes feel a bit less comprehe...
What is your primary use case for nOps?
My primary use case for nOps is automated AWS cost optimization, FinOps compliance, and infrastructure visibility. I use it to instantly surface underutilized resources and automate the management ...
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

nOps - Cloud Optimization Platform
VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
Find out what your peers are saying about VMware Aria Automation vs. nOps and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.