Runecast vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

Runecast and VMware are both solutions in the Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) category. Runecast is ranked #25 with an average rating of 9.0, while VMware is ranked #17 with an average rating of 7.8. Runecast holds a 0.1% mindshare in CSPM, compared to VMware’s 0.3% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Runecast users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of VMware users who would recommend it.

Runecast

Read 1 Runecast review

493 Views
128 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Automation

Read 170 VMware Aria Automation reviews

8,330 Views
250 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Runecast

VMware Aria Automation

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Runecast and VMware Aria Automation based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Wiz, Palo Alto Networks, SentinelOne and others in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM).

To learn more, read our detailed Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

July 2025

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Helped 865,164 peers since 2012

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

Runecast

Ranking in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

25th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

GRC (18th), Vulnerability Management (38th), Container Security (33rd), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (20th), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (19th), Compliance Management (10th)

VMware Aria Automation

Ranking in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

17th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

170

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Management (3rd), Configuration Management (7th), Network Automation (3rd), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (5th)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) category, the mindshare of Runecast is 0.1%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 0.3%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

Featured Reviews

Burak AKCAGUN

Business Development Manager at Axoft Ukraine

Helps with risk assessments for containers, assessing security, and ensuring container compliance

I rate the overall product a nine out of ten. Customers can conveniently view all companies in a single dashboard if they have different companies. This feature eliminates the need for different solutions and separate installations. Moreover, the solution extends beyond servers, encompassing various platforms such as VMware and Kubernetes. Additionally, end-users can install the solution from their client's perspective.

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Le Quang Long

Cloud Engineer at BIDV - Ngân hàng TMCP Đầu tư & Phát triển Việt Nam

Significantly streamlined operations with good automation that helps with simplifying workflows

It helps me build a big catalog and provide it to my end users. It helps us automate the workflow of creating many VMs and the TensorFlow key method. I do not meet many people to operate it live beforehand. It operates for both of my products, but as a product, it is complicated to integrate and automate with other products.

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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

"Runecast is a good partner for VMware. Once we have installed it, we can see all the problems and issues. It also has VMware knowledge-based articles."

"It helps me build a big catalog and provide it to my end users."

"The extensibility of the solution when it comes to writing your own ABX actions is a valuable feature. You can write it in PowerShell, JavaScript, or Python, which is great."

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

"vRealize Automation has improved the speed of provisioning just by automating things, making people think about whether a human really needs to do something or can we make the machines do it for us. It is a lot faster to deploy things now."

"The solution has helped us to increase infrastructure agility, mostly because, in addition to it being able to do its thing on its own, it has tie-ins to other parts of our CICD pipeline. We use Jenkins for our build process which, of course, vRA has plugins for, to be able to integrate with it. We use Chef and there is the Chef build as part of our image that we standardized to deploy, and that can tie in with our section of the pipeline that it does for applications."

"The most valuable feature is the portal where you can assign permissions to specific people to request specific items in the catalog and allow them to provision things for themselves. Or it enables them to request different services that you can create through vRO and vRA."

"value; It does a lot of things automatically that would take our group, when we're already strapped for time, a lot of time to go through and clean stuff out of databases and the like."

"We have it deployed in a highly-available environment and scalability is nice because we just had another ESX host and then we are able to increase the capacity."

More VMware Aria Automation pros

Cons

"The product lacks network assessment capabilities. We cannot view our network assets or scan switches, routers, or IPs for vulnerabilities and issues."

"It has some limitations for scalability, especially for remote data center management. For some components, everything need to be centralized."

"SaltStack's features are minimal."

"I would like to see more out-of-the-box blueprints and workflows for the rest of VMware's products and its portfolio."

"The setup is difficult. You need a technical person to help you set it up."

"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."

"This solution could be integrated with more hardware for an improved offering."

"One of the features that's a struggle today is some of the public cloud extensibility. Some of the plugins that are native to vRA and vRO, I'd like to see them come out earlier for vRO. I understand that in vRA, the plugins are a little bit more polished because the VRA is the GUI. But we'd like to see them released earlier in vRO, prior to a GUI being released. Azure, for example, is a public cloud provider but we have some instability issues with the plugin in vRO. It's okay for us if we separate the vRA from vRO plugin releases. So I'd like to see some increased stability in some of those public cloud plugins."

"It is not super-intuitive. It does require some skills to understand how to use it. I had no problem, but I had spent a lot of time already learning this product ahead of moving it to an operational status. But as we did so, we had a hard time bringing some people from other groups into the fold, to script and work against this environment. So, the ability to build workflows within that automation needs to be streamlined."

More VMware Aria Automation cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Runecast's pricing is cheaper than that of its competitors."

"The pricing for this solution is roughly 20% lower than the competitive products in the market."

"A simplified version for small businesses would be good."

"The solution is pretty expensive but provides good workload management."

"The tool is expensive since it is an enterprise product."

"From a budget point of view, the pricing is a bit on the higher side."

"From the customer perspective, the value was worth it."

"The pricing is very high."

"They should provide one license for all the sub-products."

More VMware Aria Automation pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

18%

Educational Organization

16%

Government

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Runecast?

Runecast is a good partner for VMware. Once we have installed it, we can see all the problems and issues. It also has VMware knowledge-based articles.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Runecast?

Runecast's pricing is cheaper than that of its competitors.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Runecast?

The product lacks network assessment capabilities. We cannot view our network assets or scan switches, routers, or IPs for vulnerabilities and issues.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

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 Aria Operations vs Runecast

Compared 100% of the time

More Runecast Competitors

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 16% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 13% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 10% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 8% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 6% of the time

More VMware Aria Automation Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP)

July 2025

Download Runecast product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Automation

July 2025

Download VMware Aria Automation product report

Also Known As

Runecast Analyzer

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

Overview

Runecast is an enterprise IT platform that saves your Security and Operations teams time and resources by enabling a proactive approach to ITOM, CSPM, and compliance. Its agentless scanning capability ensures efficient and in-depth assessment of your infrastructure without imposing additional load on your servers.

It automates vulnerability assessment, configuration drift management, and continuous compliance – for VMware, Cloud, and Containers.

Runecast helps reduce operational overhead, increase transparency, and easily assess and remediate infrastructure vulnerabilities. It simplifies managing regulatory compliance, making it an ideal solution for your infrastructure security needs.

It provides continuous audits against vendor best practices, common security standards, and frameworks such as BSI IT-Grundschutz, CIS, Cyber Essentials, DISA STIG, DORA, Essential 8, GDPR, HIPAA, ISO 27001, KVKK, NIST, PCI DSS, TISAX, VMware Security Hardening Guidelines, and the CISA KEVs catalog.

Your team can do more with less via a single platform that checks all your cloud infrastructure, for increased visibility, security, and time-saving. Security teams benefit from simplified vulnerability management and regulatory compliance, across multiple standards and technologies. Operations teams are able to reduce operational overheads and increase clarity, enabling you to be proactive and return to the valuable work you want to be doing.

Runecast has been recognized with Frost & Sullivan's 2023 European New Product Innovation Award in the CNAPP industry for its strong overall performance and commitment to user experience.

Get to know Runecast: www.runecast.com/

Read Customer Success Stories: www.runecast.com/case-studies

Runecast

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.

VMware

Sample Customers

Our customers tell us regularly how Runecast benefits CIOs, CISOs, and both Security and Operations teams across verticals with a proactive approach that results in major time and cost savings, increased uptime and security standards complianceSuccess Highlight 75-85% troubleshooting time savings – Kiel Municipal Hospital90% time savings on reactive troubleshooting – Near East Bank90% time savings in upgrade planning– FLEXdata80% reduction in monthly incidents and issues – University of St Andrews78,000 EUR/year minimum annual cost savings – Notino100s of hours saved on security compliance with remediation scripts alone – Kiel Municipal Hospital75% time saved on troubleshooting and root cause analysis – de Volksbank

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

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

July 2025

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