OpenNebula vs Spacelift comparison

Why PeerSpot?

OpenNebula and Spacelift are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. OpenNebula is ranked #24 with an average rating of 7.0, while Spacelift is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.4. OpenNebula holds a 1.5% mindshare in CM, compared to Spacelift’s 1.2% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of OpenNebula users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Spacelift users who would recommend it.

OpenNebula

Read 15 OpenNebula reviews

3,579 Views
3,400 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Spacelift

Read 17 Spacelift reviews

2,970 Views
1,723 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

OpenNebula

Spacelift

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

OpenNebula and Spacelift compete in the cloud infrastructure management domain. OpenNebula holds an advantage in terms of cost-effectiveness and community support, whereas Spacelift is superior in automation and integration capabilities.

Features: OpenNebula provides simplicity in virtualization management, supporting a wide range of hypervisors and offering seamless onboarding. Its open-source nature and community support are valuable. Spacelift excels with advanced automation features, continuous integration and delivery tools, and a focus on infrastructure as code, making it appealing for modern DevOps environments.

Room for Improvement: OpenNebula could enhance integration with more modern DevOps tools and expand its feature set to compete with proprietary solutions. Improving user interface design might increase usability. Spacelift could lower its pricing to be more competitive and simplify initial setup processes for new users. Providing more comprehensive documentation can assist enterprises encountering complex setups.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: OpenNebula offers straightforward deployment with strong community-driven support ideal for organizations seeking open-source solutions. Spacelift, on the other hand, provides a scalable deployment model with dedicated customer service aimed at complex enterprise needs, emphasizing personalized assistance.

Pricing and ROI: OpenNebula appeals to cost-sensitive organizations with its low setup costs and flexible expansion options, providing significant ROI by saving on licensing fees. Spacelift's higher pricing reflects its premium features and focuses on long-term value for companies prioritizing scalability and modernization, potentially offering substantial ROI for those needing advanced cloud management capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed OpenNebula vs. Spacelift Report (Updated: September 2026).

Buyer's Guide

OpenNebula vs. Spacelift

September 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

OpenNebula

Ranking in Cloud Management

24th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Spacelift

Ranking in Cloud Management

6th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

AI Software Development (14th)

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of OpenNebula is 1.5%, down from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spacelift is 1.2%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Spacelift	1.2%
OpenNebula	1.5%
Other	97.3%

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

FOURES Jean-Philippe

Products Manager at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Reliable, simple to manage, and offers great technical support

The support of VXLAN fits with our network management. Thanks to this we can propose mixed solutions using virtual resources on OpenNebula and bare metal servers hosted in our facilities linked to each other on the sale network. This use case is very useful when some applications need bare metal power (Kubernetes workers, huge databases, AI models computations, et cetera). The cluster management is very useful for splitting our different clusters (mutual vs dedicated). We can manage deployments and capacity planning without pain. The API is also really simple and it helped us to develop the Terraform provider to manage OpenNebula like any other cloud infrastructure.

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G Srivastava

Senior Cloud Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Automation of cloud infrastructure has transformed how our team manages Terraform workflows

Spacelift has other features beyond Terraform, including Ansible, Pulumi, Terragrunt, and it also helps with Kubernetes, although we haven't used it for the other tools. We have only used it for Terraform Infrastructure as Code, and it has helped us significantly. One standout feature compared to Terraform Cloud is the ability to apply policies. For example, we want to restrict engineers in our team from building servers with a particular SKU, such as in Azure, where we do not want to run servers with a SKU higher than the standard D4sv5. We can apply those policies in Spacelift, and the RBAC and access policies features are really excellent in Spacelift, which we do not find in any of the other competitor tools. The pricing is also competitive compared to Terraform Cloud. The access policy features allow us to assign specific policies since we have three environments in our company: Dev, QA, and Prod. We assign policies so that anyone can run code from Dev and QA servers, but we assign a policy for specific people, such as managers, to run code in Prod. This is a very good feature from Spacelift that we have implemented for the access policy. Spacelift has positively impacted our organization as a CI/CD tool for application deployment and development. Although we use other CI/CD tools like Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions, there wasn't a specific tool for Terraform Infrastructure as Code until Spacelift came along. It allows us to easily configure our servers and build a number of them on our cloud. While other CI/CD tools have started to include configuration features, Spacelift offers many other benefits that make it an excellent tool to use.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"OpenNebula has very good integration with SAP Storage, is easy to use, has a good UI, and is very scalable."

"It's easy to integrate OpenNebula with our IT systems."

"The solution provides templates for configurations that can easily be exchanged to VMs."

"With a single click, we could set things up and initiate them."

"The ability to use it almost like a public cloud for an organization is a big asset, as it will create a value proposition and can control costs in a great way."

"I'll definitely recommend OpenNebula because it's an open-source solution that's effortless to set up, and the total cost of ownership is low."

"OpenNebula is lightweight, stable, and easy to customize."

"OpenNebula freed my customer from doing the maintenance operations of the servers because now that can be done by his clients."

More OpenNebula pros

"Spacelift has positively impacted my organization by reducing manpower, as it reduced the efforts of resources in the team, where previously a job done by two or three engineers can now be easily managed by one engineer using Spacelift."

"If you're looking to automate your Infrastructure as Code, then Spacelift is the best choice."

"Spacelift impacted our organization positively in several areas, with time-saving by eliminating the need for coordination runs, a 60 to 70% reduction in infrastructure-related incidents, and a significant drop in weekly deployment coordination from six to eight hours to roughly two hours, freeing up meaningful time for actual feature work and improvements."

"SpaceLift has positively impacted my organization by reducing a lot of confusion with the integration of Terraform modules, because a lot of our tooling involved direct and indirect Terraform module creations; now it is more streamlined for each and every resource that we control."

"Spacelift has positively impacted my organization because it works well; it allows everybody to collaborate in the same Terraform repo without stepping on each other's toes."

"SpaceLift impacts my organization positively by giving more agility to the teams when they are deploying, allowing us to manage the AWS resources using Spacelift, so our cloud organization improves after this implementation."

"Spacelift has positively impacted my organization by making it very easy to manage the different modules with a very clear interface."

"Spacelift has positively impacted our organization because we do not have to detect drift or manage Terraform basics ourselves; Spacelift handles this for us with strong governance and security policies based on GitOps principles, which saves considerable time."

More Spacelift pros

Cons

"They have been saying for the past two and a half years that they would develop a feature to hot-add RAM and CPU, but it does not work."

"An area for improvement in OpenNebula is the number of features it has. The solution doesn't have that many cloud features compared to other solutions. You'd say, "Okay, simplicity over a rich feature list?" Some say, "No, I need a big machine or a cloud interface for my customers to manage resources. I don't have to go and do it for them." Some people do it that way, and it works, but I'd like to improve the limited features in OpenNebula."

"The storage feature that they have is a bit confusing."

"Backup features are only available in the enterprise edition. The community version lacks a good solution for making backups."

"Template management also needs improvement in OpenNebula because it's inferior right now."

"They should add more features like object storage."

"As with all enterprise software licensing, the pricing is not intuitive and must be negotiated; grandfathered contracts are better than anything offered today."

"The web interface could be better. It's not very difficult to use, but there's room for enhancement."

More OpenNebula cons

"If you are a small enterprise organization, below 500 people, I would not recommend it."

"I think an improvement for Spacelift would be a feature to run multiple stacks."

"Spacelift could be improved by implementing some of the many AI-based tools available that support a variety of tools like Pulumi, CloudFormation, OpenTofu, and Terraform."

"Spacelift currently lacks features that can help with complex type deployments and coordination for major deployments."

"There are a few areas where there is room for improvement, particularly the initial setup and onboarding experience, which has a learning curve around understanding the concept of contexts."

"Spacelift is good overall, but there are little explanatory aspects, such as navigating particular stacks, that are somewhat difficult to understand for newcomers, especially regarding the process, stack setup, and variable setup for deployments."

"Perhaps the learning curve could be a bit steep if someone is completely new to Spacelift and only has experience with plain Terraform."

"Pricing could be a little lower to make it a very robust tool, and it can improve areas in scalability and integrate some open-source tools."

More Spacelift cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing for OpenNebula used to be free, but now it's no longer free. A customer contacted me asking to move to another provider because of the changes in the licensing terms for OpenNebula. I have no information on how much the OpenNebula license is because the customer pays for it, and I only do the integration."

"The solution is open source so is free."

"We use the Community Edition, rather than the Enterprise Edition."

"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."

"OpenNebula gives good value for money."

"OpenNebuoa has recently come up with a new subscription model that is economical and a lot of new customers are choosing this as it is an easy subscription model."

"It is a bit expensive product."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Comms Service Provider

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

10%

Outsourcing Company

Manufacturing Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Outsourcing Company

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	7
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	3

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	8

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Spacelift?

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was that licensing was somewhat unclear when HashiCorp changed their own licensing.

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What needs improvement with Spacelift?

It would be nice to have out-of-the-box A/B testing with Spacelift because we still use some custom features for that. Out-of-the-box A/B testing is the main thing I would like to add about the nee...

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What is your primary use case for Spacelift?

We manage a lot of AWS deployments with Spacelift configs, so we have a main use case for it. We also use it for versioning and spinning up new environments. Recently we used Spacelift for deployin...

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

OpenNebula

September 2026

Download OpenNebula product report

Buyer's Guide

Spacelift

August 2026

Download Spacelift product report

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

OpenNebula

Spacelift

Overview

OpenNebula offers scalability, ease of deployment, and integration capabilities that enhance cloud management for enterprises. It supports both virtual and bare metal resources, providing a versatile cloud management experience.

OpenNebula provides a robust platform for building, managing, and automating private and public clouds. Its compatibility with platforms like VMware, KVM, and containers makes it ideal for businesses hosting virtual private clouds and deploying Kubernetes clusters. OpenNebula's API and SDK facilitate automation and integration, allowing organizations to connect with IT systems effectively. Despite its strengths, improvements in object storage, REST API integration, and UI enhancements are needed. The documentation can be disorganized, and users encounter challenges with upgrades and community support.

What are key OpenNebula features?

Scalability: Easily manage resources for growing cloud environments.
User-Friendly Interface: Simplifies cloud management tasks.
Integration: Connects seamlessly with IT systems using robust API and SDK.
Hypervisor Support: Works with multiple hypervisors and container platforms.

What benefits do users find in OpenNebula?

Efficiency: Streamlines cloud operations, reducing management complexities.
Versatility: Offers support for both virtual and bare metal resources.
Community and Documentation: Though needing improvement, provides valuable resources for users.
Cost-Effectiveness: Lightweight nature minimizes resource expenditure.

OpenNebula implementation spans industries where cloud automation and management are critical. Companies utilize OpenNebula for deploying private clouds and managing infrastructure. Its support for Kubernetes clusters is beneficial in tech-driven sectors, highlighting OpenNebula's adaptability to different operational needs.

OpenNebula

The Spacelift orchestration platform combines infrastructure provisioning, configuration, and governance to increase platform team efficiency, accelerate developer velocity, and control costs. It connects to and orchestrates infrastructure as code, version control systems (VCSs), observability tools, control and governance solutions, and cloud providers to help deliver secure infrastructure faster. With Spacelift Intelligence, teams can also understand, design, deploy, and govern infrastructure using natural language, giving developers a fast, governed path to infrastructure without adding to the platform team's backlog.

Infrastructure provisioning: Stacks ensure faster, more secure provisioning by automatically combining source code, current infrastructure state, and configuration. The platform works with any major IaC tool or cloud platform and the VCS provider where your teams store infrastructure code.

Configuration automation: Expand your capabilities beyond Terraform and OpenTofu with a workflow that also manages Ansible playbooks.

Governance to balance speed and control: Reinforce security and compliance with controls over developer/DevOps activity. Provide Golden Paths and define custom policies for third-party security vulnerability scanning tools, while accelerating policy creation with best-practice templates. Detect drift automatically, and restore resources to their expected state with drift remediation.

Integrated workflow: Easily create workflows that combine IaC for provisioning, Ansible for configuration management, Kubernetes for container orchestration, and policies for governance. Blueprint templates allow you to open your infrastructure pipelines to developers without losing control.

Infra Assistant: Your AI infrastructure assistant that can understand, design, deploy, and govern infrastructure in plain language. Ask questions about your infrastructure state that dashboards and reports can't answer. Get expert design guidance before you deploy, create and apply policies with AI assistance and diagnose failures faster with AI-generated context across your stacks, dependencies, and history.

Intent: A no-code, AI-based deployment model for maximum speed. Developers request infrastructure through their LLM via Spacelift MCP. Intent translates those requests into governed infrastructure actions with the same policies, credentials, and visibility as IaC, without requiring Terraform expertise.

Spacelift

Sample Customers

Akamai, BBC, Fermilab, Terradue, Surf Sara, Produban, Netways, ESA, China Mobile, BlackBerry, Deloitte, Fuze, Telefonica, Trivago, Nokia, Encore Tech, Beeks.

Visit spacelift.io/customers to see how Duolingo, Figma, Moody's, Checkout.com, 1Password, Redfin and others manage infrastructure for the AI-accelerated software era with Spacelift.

Buyer's Guide

OpenNebula vs. Spacelift

September 2026

Free Report: OpenNebula vs. Spacelift

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