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SkyKick Cloud Manager vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

SkyKick Cloud Manager
Ranking in Cloud Management
63rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
1
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
172
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (8th), Network Automation (5th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (20th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of SkyKick Cloud Manager is 0.5%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 5.5%, down from 11.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Aria Automation5.5%
SkyKick Cloud Manager0.5%
Other94.0%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Robust, reasonably priced, and offers good features
The solution works really well and is very easy to use. It's possible to set up the solution in-house without integrators. The solution is stable. It can scale well. Technical support has been good. The solution is robust and offers great features that other options do not have. It has reasonable pricing.
VasilisGiannitsiotis - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT at ITSolutions
Automation has streamlined complex financial workflows but still needs more intuitive orchestration
Something to improve in VMware Aria Automation would be related to VCF 9, as I do not know what it is trying to bring because they exposed it as the solution of everything. So VCF 9 will bring VCF Automation and VCF Operations, the new product line of VMware. I have not seen what this brings or what else it includes. Maybe in the area of vRealize Orchestrator, this would be beneficial because VRO can do everything. Perhaps a more user-friendly way to use that tool would be helpful because the possibilities there are endless. I am looking for more user-friendly navigation in VMware Aria Automation.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Technical support has been good."
"compare-to-competition; Citrix was on our short list. But over the last ten years, we have been a big VMware shop. We wanted to continue with VMware because we are confident that VMware can address any kind of problem situation, any challenges. But with Citrix, we didn't find that kind of credibility when we did solution testing, a PoC."
"The benefits are that it gives you a heads-up display and dashboard of the way everything's running. The ability to automate around those tasks is really where we get the value."
"Self-service and automation reduce the amount of time to build a virtual machine and reduce the operation costs."
"We like vRA because it helps make systems available on time for our customers, on demand."
"One of the best features and advantages of VMware Aria Automation is that it has a nice user service portal where a user can log in and, through a catalog, pick and choose something from a deployment, pipeline, or a VRO workflow."
"It allows us to be more agile and provide services to our company more rapidly."
"Before, it took us two days to provision new machines, and today the whole process is done in about two hours."
"We like the seamless, non-vendor-specific application that we can provide with it."
 

Cons

"I'm fairly new to the solution and need to explore it further."
"It is not intuitive or user-friendly. It's complicated as heck. We actually hired VMware Professional Services to come in. I understand the newer version, which we're not quite on yet, is easier and that the interface is better. But the product is really a profession unto itself. The user interface could be improved on."
"vRealize Automation on the back-end is still a little complicated. It has a lot of moving pieces, simplifying that from a pure infrastructure point of view would be a good thing. I would then like to have more out-of-the-box functionality and integrations with VMware components."
"The initial setup was complex from beginning to delivery. The current version is a bit more complex than version 7 to deploy."
"Our customers feel it's very costly."
"Salt does not support performing remote actions that require a sudo password with Salt SSH (agentless Salt execution)."
"Hands down, the main thing for improvement is Windows orchestration. Repo is very limited and multiple issues occur when installing vendor products."
"Automation: We want to be able to have a lot more preconfigured solutions."
"7.5 is not user-friendly, in fact, it's a nightmare. They changed everything on the graphic user interface, the mode where the user interacts with the product."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"As far as value is concerned, it has been essential to our environment. We have been able to deploy VMs quickly and the developers have their own sandbox, so they can spin up and destroy VMs at their own will."
"It is an expensive product. After VMware's acquisition by Broadcom, there was a rise in the price of VMware Aria Automation."
"Better pricing is always handy, but I feel it's at the right price point."
"I'm very interested in the integration with Puppet. However, my organization doesn't have the funding for something like Puppet right now. If VMware would integrate that feature set (Puppet) into vRA. That would be very awesome."
"So much can be done with the Open Source side, and especially for smaller shops. I personally think the pricing for Enterprise is hard to justify."
"VMware Aria Automation is expensive."
"This is an expensive product and the high price is starting to become an issue for us."
"A simplified version for small businesses would be good."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise131
 

Questions from the Community

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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...
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 ...
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 ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Arterian
Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
Find out what your peers are saying about Broadcom, Nutanix, IBM and others in Cloud Management. Updated: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.