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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
36th
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
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
70
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 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 2.7%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Cloud Director2.7%
Red Hat CloudForms1.9%
Other95.4%
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

"Red Hat CloudForms is stable once it is up and running."
"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."
"The optimization of the solution is quite interesting."
"The most valuable features of Red Hat CloudForms are the benefit of the collective functionality."
"Red Hat CloudForms is stable once it is up and running."
"Red Hat CloudForms is a stable product. There is no issue with the stability."
"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."
"I am impressed with the product's reports."
"It is a very stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The most valuable features are: Remote console (ability to control booting and OS installation process), support for Windows desktop OS's (mostly used as test machines for software development companies), and the resource pool payment model (pay for resources instead of paying for hourly use)."
"This is the go-to tool for anyone looking for standard out-of-the-box capabilities in a fully multitenant public cloud software that they can leverage to offer services to their customers."
"Overall, we are happy with the product."
"The most valuable feature of VMware Cloud Director is segregating the underlying infrastructure for the end user."
"The most valuable feature of vCloud Director is its ability to host customers on their own cloud."
"VMware Cloud Director is quite scalable; I would rate it nine out of ten."
"Stability in solutions is fantastic."
 

Cons

"I have issues with the solution's permissions. Unlike VMware, the product doesn't allow folder-type permissions."
"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's provisioning engine needs to be improved."
"The solution is still quite immature."
"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."
"The complexity of the solution is a bit high in comparison to VMware."
"Because the solution needs to integrate with other products that surround it, there is a lot of configuration required, and this can be quite complex. It's not as easy as it is with, for example, VMware."
"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."
"Metering is one of the areas where I find Cloud Director leaves much to be desired."
"The stability is good but not excellent because of the interoperability between different components of VMware products, which form a private cloud."
"I would like to see mode accessory recovery and integration with SD-WAN."
"Technical support needs to improve its skills and respond to queries faster."
"If you use it for a lot of customers, it is too heavy for this solution."
"Initially, the setup was complex but VMware is working to simplify the integration."
"There are some shortcomings. There are bugs with opening support."
"vRealize Orchestrator is an expensive tool."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Red Hat CloudForms is a bit expensive."
"It is definitely cheaper than VMware. Everything is included. There is no challenge there."
"The product's licensing is based on the number of servers."
"The price of Red Hat CloudForms was not competitive, it was expensive."
"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."
"It is better than other solutions out there when it comes to cost."
"It runs our company in the millions of rand every month."
"I recommend using the Enterprise or Enterprise Plus licenses because they unlock all of the solution's capabilities."
"vCloud Director is a very expensive solution."
"The licensing cost is high for vCloud Director. It is mostly a perpetual license."
"The solution is costly, efficient, and robust versus alternative solutions."
"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."
"My company has no problems with the pricing of the product as we got good discounts from VMware."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
8%
Construction Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

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 Enterprise12
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: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.