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Red Hat CloudForms vs VMware Cloud Director comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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
33rd
Average Rating
6.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Cloud Director
Ranking in Cloud Management
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
69
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Red Hat CloudForms is 1.9%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 3.1%, down from 6.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Cloud Director3.1%
Red Hat CloudForms1.9%
Other95.0%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Ilhami Arikan - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
KuldeepSingh4 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Experienced users benefit from resource isolation and valuable self-service portal while seeing potential in enhanced infrastructure visibility
VMware is not going further with VMware Cloud Director. They are integrating the VMware Cloud Director feature with Aria Automation only for the upcoming versions, primarily with the VCF 9, and slowly they are integrating some of the parts they have already integrated, and they might not continue with VMware Cloud Director in the future. They can make it more granular to ensure hardware-level segregation, the underlying infrastructure level of segregation for the end user, and a separate security boundary where users can access the end-to-end layer. End-to-end layer means my software layer along with the hardware layer. If they want to do a certain level of troubleshooting primarily on the ESXi part, that is what I feel is lacking for now because for an end user accessing the SSP, the underlying infrastructure is a kind of black box for them. For VMware Cloud Director, it can be more comprehensive if we enable public cloud integration as well. In today's date, customers are adopting a multi-cloud environment where VMware Cloud Director is much feasible to leverage the underlying VMware backend architecture. If VMware Cloud Director could be made to have more integration with the public cloud and do the day one, day two jobs for public cloud interface as well, that would be beneficial. Additionally, I recommend leveraging the VMware Cloud Director layer if a customer has a multi-cloud environment and is planning some cross-cloud migration capability. Cross-cloud migration refers to if a customer has something on Azure, wanting to bring it up on VMware or maybe from VMware to AWS, vice versa. In that case, VMware Cloud Director should provide some cross-cloud migration capability as well.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"They are a very mature product."
"Red Hat CloudForms is stable once it is up and running."
"The optimization of the solution is quite interesting."
"The most valuable features of Red Hat CloudForms are the benefit of the collective functionality."
"I am impressed with the product's reports."
"I am impressed with the product's ability to create dynamic catalogs."
"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."
"Red Hat CloudForms is a stable product. There is no issue with the stability."
"The product allows us to add or remove features."
"The most valuable feature of VMware Cloud Director is segregating the underlying infrastructure for the end user."
"The most valuable feature of VMware Cloud Director is segregating the underlying infrastructure for the end user."
"vCloud is a good platform for visualization. It is very handy for monitoring. VMware can integrate with all monitoring systems like vRealize, and the management monitoring is good. I'm very happy with VMware. VMware is good in management and monitoring systems."
"We were using VMware, also combined with AirWatch and Boxer. We configured corporate emails on mobiles and used them for MDM applications on tablets, like the launcher."
"The initial setup was complex. There's a lot of things you have to factor in, like security, backup, disaster recovery, monitoring, and how to maintain the platform. It's something we still struggle with, but it's getting better."
"The solution is reliable and performs well."
"It has helped us with user segmentation and QA."
 

Cons

"I have issues with the solution's permissions. Unlike VMware, the product doesn't allow folder-type permissions."
"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."
"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 complexity of the solution is a bit high in comparison to VMware."
"The solution's provisioning engine needs to be improved."
"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."
"The solution is still quite immature."
"Lacks integration with the hyperscalers."
"The product installation process could be easier for new users as well."
"Sometimes, there is a disconnection that happens between vCloud Director and its underlying VMware vCenter, where the actions are supposed to be taking place, making it an area where improvements are required."
"We use vCloud Director along with Terraform, and it's difficult to make them work together. It takes a long time to deploy virtual machines with Terraform in vCloud Director. For example, it can take about one or two hours to create 10 machines. It takes up a lot of our DevOps' and engineers' time in comparison to that with other solutions. This is an area that they should work on and improve."
"The initial setup is not straightforward; it can be complicated. The deployment can take one to two weeks."
"If you have a deployed environment and lose it, you can't easily deploy it back with vCloud Director. Because of this reason, we don't have the data protection, disaster recovery, and container features."
"The product's UI has certain shortcomings that require improvement."
"vRealize Orchestrator is an expensive tool."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's licensing is based on the number of servers."
"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 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."
"The solution is expensive so pricing is rated a four out of ten."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing eight and a half to nine out of ten."
"In certain cases, the price of Cloud Director is quite high, especially with the load balancing and other features they've introduced. That seems quite costly. Overall, for VSPP programming, I think it's okay. However, features like enterprise load balancing and all these other things are very costly."
"The licensing costs are pretty high, but it might depend on the size of the company."
"It's a costly product. The licenses may not be costly, but with every new development in their product, we need to purchase deployment services, and the deployment services are quite costly."
"If one means a very bad price, and ten means a very good price, I rate the price as a five on a scale of one to ten."
"My company has no problems with the pricing of the product as we got good discounts from VMware."
"If ten is very expensive, I rate the tool's price as a four out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise36
 

Questions from the Community

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Would you change anything about VMware vCloud Director if you could?
VMware vCloud Director works very well and there are not many things that I would like to see changed. However, a single thing comes to mind when I think of improvements and that is integration. In...
What is the biggest improvement you saw at your company after you started using VMware vCloud Director?
For my company, VMware vCloud Director noticeably increased operational efficiency. When I started working here a few years ago, my organization was using another cloud management tool. We switched...
Is vCloud Director convenient for building applications?
When it comes to building applications, vCloud Director offers you various methods to create cloud-ready ones. For example: Your DevOps team is supported through Infrastructure as Code services w...
 

Also Known As

No data available
vCloud Director
 

Overview

 

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)
MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat CloudForms vs. VMware Cloud Director and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.