Red Hat CloudForms vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

Red Hat and Broadcom are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. Red Hat is ranked #35, while Broadcom is ranked #3 with an average rating of 7.9. Red Hat holds a 1.8% mindshare in CM, compared to Broadcom’s 6.2% mindshare. Additionally, 66% of Red Hat users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

Red Hat CloudForms

Read 10 Red Hat CloudForms reviews

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945 Comparison Views

66% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Automation

Read 171 VMware Aria Automation reviews

8,437 Views
4,556 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Red Hat CloudForms

VMware Aria Automation

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

VMware Aria Automation and Red Hat CloudForms compete in automation capabilities. VMware Aria seems to have the upper hand due to its seamless AD group integration and advanced automation features.

Features: VMware Aria Automation offers seamless AD group integration which facilitates broad user access and the creation of custom service designs using vCO. It integrates with SaltStack for rapid service alerts and automation of scaling, providing multi-cloud support and remote execution advantages. Red Hat CloudForms provides extensibility through open-source tools, offering robust cross-platform support but often requires manual configuration for achieving full functionality.

Room for Improvement: VMware Aria Automation could enhance its logging capabilities and improve integration with public clouds and DevOps tools. Additionally, users have requested more comprehensive documentation and better testing procedures to resolve bugs in new versions. Red Hat CloudForms is noted for its complexity and challenging user-friendliness. Users suggest the product needs more intuitive plug-and-play features and easier integration processes.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware Aria Automation is typically deployed in private clouds and receives mixed reviews regarding technical support. Some users benefit from swift assistance, while others experience delays in escalation and case handling. Red Hat CloudForms appreciates community-based support for its open-source components, but users report delays with official support channels. VMware Aria is favored for organizations seeking extensive customization.

Pricing and ROI: VMware Aria Automation’s pricing is perceived as high due to its multi-tiered licensing model, though it often yields ROI through reduced deployment times and operational efficiencies. Red Hat CloudForms is less expensive for open-source users but commands higher costs for enterprise solutions. It is less flexible in scaling without additional resources, but both solutions show substantial ROI through reducing manual intervention.

To learn more, read our detailed Red Hat CloudForms vs. VMware Aria Automation Report (Updated: February 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat CloudForms vs. VMware Aria Automation

February 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

Red Hat CloudForms

Ranking in Cloud Management

35th

Average Rating

6.4

Reviews Sentiment

5.8

Number of Reviews

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

171

Ranking in other categories

Configuration Management (7th), Network Automation (6th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (20th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (5th)

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Red Hat CloudForms is 1.8%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 6.2%, down from 11.0% 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	6.2%
Red Hat CloudForms	1.8%
Other	92.0%

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

Ilhami Arikan

Cloud Services Automation Technologies Manager at Garanti Teknoloji

A stable solution that helps to provision servers

We use the solution to provision servers. I am impressed with the product's ability to create dynamic catalogs. The solution's provisioning engine needs to be improved. I would rate the solution's stability an eight out of ten. I would rate the product's scalability a seven out of ten and…

Read full review

reviewer2597814

IT Infrastructure Manager at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees

Compliance is maintained effectively and automation boosts productivity but further improvements in full-time reduction are desired

I am still using VMware tools. In fact, I have to migrate to a new alternative. I do not deal with vCenter or vSphere as or other VMware products yet. I do not deal with vSphere either. I do not use the Horizon Cloud yet or Horizon Desktop. We use VMware Workstation and vRealize. I use vRealize. VMware Aria Automation is compliant. It is not difficult for them. The regulations request us to perform or to have some security managed ways, and the regulations are clear about that, including authentication and everything related to security. Based on my experience, I rate VMware Aria Automation an eight out of ten.

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

"The most valuable features of Red Hat CloudForms are the benefit of the collective functionality."

"They are a very mature product."

"The solution is compatible and integrates with various infrastructures or providers."

"Red Hat CloudForms is stable once it is up and running."

"The optimization of the solution is quite interesting."

"I am impressed with the product's reports."

"The stability of the solution is very good. We haven't had any issues with it."

"The multi-tenancy feature has been very helpful for our clients. It has been working fine and seamlessly for them. Its interface is also very simplified, and it is also an open and easy-to-scale solution."

More Red Hat CloudForms pros

"The best feature I saw with the VMware Aria Automation product was that it was easy to handle."

"VMware Aria Automation supports integration with ServiceNow, Kubernetes, and other tools. It is cloud-agnostic, making it a stronger platform than Ansible."

"Now the customer can manage their own server requirements directly. This is very important because, before that, the process included signing off on forms and sending them to the IT Director. It took at least 10 days to create a VM and send it to the person who needed it. Now, it's no more than a half hour to activate a new VM at the customer's site."

"The IT support for developers is nice as well because they are able to manage the environment themselves."

"The most valuable feature is vRA’s ability to integrate whether with additional VMware vRealize suites or other vendors' cloud products."

"Another valuable feature is the flexible user interface. They can manage all of the servers, the full lifecycle of VMs, on one screen."

"We have also found it to be intuitive and user-friendly. It's something that, because it has the workflows that are very easily graphed out - you can follow what it's doing, it's very picturesque, you can see what it's doing easily - it's something that you can hand over to a user who is not familiar with it and they can wrap their brain around it pretty quickly."

"VMware Aria Automation has made a lot of things easier. It has really helped the operations team to spin up the virtual machines."

More VMware Aria Automation pros

Cons

"The problem is that the platform requires it to be maintained and updated. Also, a few cases are still pending with the Red Hat support team since they are not closed yet."

"It is difficult to create a complete dashboard that includes all the needed features or catalogs."

"Our clients had challenges or issues with the updates. Its updates should be better managed. They should provide quicker and more stable updates. Its stability can also be better. We initially faced ease-of-use and compatibility issues while integrating it. We had a lot of compatibility issues with other products. Our clients are concerned about whether it is under IBM or it is still Red Hat. Clients are not very clear about the support, and they're not really happy with it. Currently, they're getting support from Red Hat, but going forward, they're not really clear about what would be the life cycle of the product, which is a concern for them."

"The solution's provisioning engine needs to be improved."

"All of the areas of Red Hat CloudForms could improve. It doesn't do half of the things that it says it can do out of the box. It takes configuration to make any of it work, which is not uncommon for solutions similar to this. However, it is frustrating."

"The solution is still quite immature."

"I have issues with the solution's permissions. Unlike VMware, the product doesn't allow folder-type permissions."

"Red Hat CloudForms could improve by allowing more customization of reports. We have to do a lot of coding to accomplish what we want. Additionally, the compatibility with the multi-cloud could improve. The latter versions of the solution removed Google support and the cost comparison between other clouds was high."

More Red Hat CloudForms cons

"Most of the time the upgrade experience has been good but sometimes things break after upgrading. For example, some API codes stopped working."

"I would like to see more integration to do things like DR, from a court perspective. Today, for us, SRM doesn't scale because each of our customers has a local vCenter environment as well as the vCenter in our environment. So we can't get SRM to scale to the point to which we need. From an integration perspective, DR inside of that would be good."

"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."

"The setup needs coding. It's not easy. It's not straightforward."

"The initial setup is complex. There are too many components to integrate, especially when we integrated with different storage types and backup vendors. All the integration made it more complex."

"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."

"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. But that has to be automated as well. If there was a way for us to have the virtual machines connect to switches that are external to VMware, that would be great. That way, it would handle the entire workflow from creation and provisioning of a VM to the connectivity to the external IP addresses which allow our customers to have access to the VM. Currently, that IP configuration has to be done manually."

"Maintaining the product requires effort and a good understanding of the environment, including how to set up the codes and other configurations. Pricing needs to be improved to improve the customer penetration."

More VMware Aria Automation cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Red Hat CloudForms was not competitive, it was expensive."

"It is definitely cheaper than VMware. Everything is included. There is no challenge there."

"Red Hat CloudForms has a subscript-based pricing model. The cost is approximately $20,000 annually which allows you to use as many users as you want."

"Red Hat CloudForms is a bit expensive."

"The product's licensing is based on the number of servers."

"The solution is free of cost."

"Customers say this solution is costlier compared to its competitors."

"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."

"The solution has helped to increase infrastructure, agility, speed, and provisioning in the time to market."

"The cost of the solution is reasonable for us. Although it is relatively high, we prioritize stability and integration over cost."

"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."

"It is pricey for what you get."

More VMware Aria Automation pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

15%

Computer Software Company

13%

University

10%

Marketing Services Firm

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	4
Large Enterprise	7

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

Questions from the Community

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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 ...

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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 ...

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Comparisons

VMware Cloud Director vs Red Hat CloudForms

Compared 10% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs Red Hat CloudForms

Compared 9% of the time

CloudStack vs Red Hat CloudForms

Compared 7% of the time

Morpheus vs Red Hat CloudForms

Compared 7% of the time

Cloudify vs Red Hat CloudForms

Compared 7% of the time

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Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 14% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 8% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 7% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 4% 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

Red Hat CloudForms

January 2026

Download Red Hat CloudForms product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Automation

January 2026

Download VMware Aria Automation product report

Also Known As

No data available

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

Overview

Manage container, virtual, private, and public cloud infrastructures

Managing a complex, hybrid IT environment can require multiple management tools, redundant policy implementations, and extra staff to handle the operations. Red Hat® CloudForms simplifies IT, providing unified management and operations in a hybrid environment.

As your IT infrastructure progresses from traditional virtualization toward an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model, CloudForms evolves, protecting your investments and providing consistent user experience and functionality.

Red Hat

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

Cox Automotive, Penn State, FICO, G-ABLE, Seneca College, ITandTEL, The Paris Lodron University of Salzburg (PLUS), MyRepublic, Macquarie, The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, CBTS, Network Data Solutions (NDS)

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

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat CloudForms vs. VMware Aria Automation

February 2026

Free Report: Red Hat CloudForms vs. VMware Aria Automation

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