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Spacelift vs VMware Aria Operations 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

Spacelift
Ranking in Cloud Management
17th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
AI Software Development (19th)
VMware Aria Operations
Ranking in Cloud Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
376
Ranking in other categories
Virtualization Management Tools (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Spacelift is 1.4%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations is 4.3%, down from 8.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Aria Operations4.3%
Spacelift1.4%
Other94.3%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Sudheer Kumar Jamjam - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead Cloud DevOps Engineer at Deloitte
Everything can be visibly managed, scheduling and state management features are pretty good
We've integrated it with source control management tools like GitLab and Bitbucket. The scheduling and state management features are pretty good using Spacelift. It integrates with tools like Terraform and Kubernetes for policies, but we haven't worked on the compliance part. Spacelift streamlines collaboration among our development and operations teams. We use it for CI/CD as well. It can handle automation strategies. Whenever you put your YAML files and integrate them with Spacelift, it will scan the code and show where you need to make changes.
AldoDomini - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Network Analyst at Net spa
Have faced limitations due to high costs but have maintained reliability over time
The primary issue is the pricing, which is very expensive for my company's budget. We cannot afford to pay such a large fee. We are not Microsoft or BMW; we are a small company. As a small company, I have no power to negotiate directly with VMware. Perhaps larger companies have more opportunity to contract directly with VMware, but I do not have that leverage. The only path I can follow is to change solutions. Net.spA is a company working in the field of waste management. We are not a technological company, so we do not have a large margin to justify purchasing and maintaining the VMware infrastructure at current costs.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"One key feature is the Spacelift policies, which we can attach to deployments to ensure compliance with our standards."
"Spacelift is like an extension of Terraform, where everything can be visibly managed."
"I appreciate that I just have to connect to my AWS account with my credentials, and Spacelift handles the rest."
"Knowing the HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) makes it easier to use without issues."
"A valuable feature of Spacelift is that you can attach labels, and it is a modernized tool for infrastructure deployments. It is pull request-based, and you can see all the Terraform plan and apply logs on the pull request itself, which is not available across any other CI/CD tools."
"It allows for a bit more transparency regarding consumption and it also helps us plan ahead."
"It can compare hardware to software, and I have all the information in one place."
"It is a cloud-friendly application."
"The most valuable features of VMware Aria Operations include its excellent monitoring capabilities."
"Can be customized according to customer requirements."
"The dashboards are really good. They give you a glimpse of what is really going on in your virtualized environment. The ability to create customized dashboards based on your needs is also great."
"From a troubleshooting standpoint, beforehand it took us a lot of time to actually go into esxtop, pull the actual raw data that was actually happening from a storage level, a network level, a CPU/VCPU and memory level. But having all of these resources at our fingertips, from a graphical user interface, we can pinpoint the pitfall very easily"
"Most valuable features are the dashboards that we can customize per-user that logs into them. If we need to make a dashboard that's very high-level for our executive to see how our virtual environment's handling things, we can do that. Or, if we need to deep-dive technically, we can do that for our engineers."
 

Cons

"Spacelift currently lacks features that can help with complex type deployments and coordination for major deployments."
"If you are a small enterprise organization, below 500 people, I would not recommend it."
"The self-hosted version does not have a lot of features compared to the SaaS version, such as cloud integrations for Azure and GCP."
"In the free version, there's no straightforward way to be notified once a deployment is finished."
"Synchronization can be difficult when using older and newer versions with Kubernetes and HashiCorp."
"One of the big areas that would help us in the future is to focus on using vROps more as a tool to help us respond to these CVEs and security vulnerabilities that are coming in today's world. We're getting CVEs upon CVEs about security vulnerabilities, whether it's a process, or architecture, or VMware bug. It would be nice to be able to have those come into vROps and help us track them across our environment... It would be nice if we could integrate that into a vROps dashboard, which sees every host and every VM in the environment."
"Pricing is the only concern I have."
"vRLI still needs a lot of improvement to even start comparing with the market leader, Splunk, in terms of data analysis and customized charts/reports generation."
"vROps is, by its nature, a very complex product."
"While the initial setup was somewhat straightforward, there is some complexity. Going forward, I would like there to be more clarity in the process. Because to complete the setup process, our team had to open up a case with the technical support, and they had to guide us through the process."
"I wouldn't say that this solution is user-friendly. You need to know a lot of tricks to know how to use it. It's quite buggy and quite slow when it comes to loading."
"Sometimes it's difficult to find some features like they were in previous versions."
"I would like more application dashboards to be available."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is a bit expensive product."
"If you compare the prices of VMware and the cloud solutions along with the components that you may use, I feel that it may be costly."
"We have licenses on a three year basis. Licensing costs are much higher, but given the stability of the solution, it is a reasonable price."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"The solution is costly."
"If one is low price and ten is high price, I rate the product price a ten."
"The solution has helped to reduce the time to troubleshoot issues."
"We have seen huge ROI. It has certainly reduced troubleshooting."
"Five or six years ago, when we took it, it was a very good option. Now, I think I have to reevaluate, to be honest."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Educational Organization
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business65
Midsize Enterprise62
Large Enterprise278
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Spacelift?
I've never checked the pricing because I enjoy using it for free. Besides the notification feature, I haven't needed any paid features.
What needs improvement with Spacelift?
There are a few areas for improvement. For instance, getting notification webhooks is not easy. In the free version, there's no straightforward way to be notified once a deployment is finished. Spa...
What is your primary use case for Spacelift?
I use Spacelift to deploy my applications, particularly AWS applications and infrastructure to my personal AWS account.
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 VMware Aria Operations a user friendly solution?
In terms of user-friendliness, VMware Aria Operations is one of the best solutions out there. It is not overly complex to set up and you can rely on the technical support to provide you with assis...
What is the most useful new feature of VMware Aria Operations?
For me, the alerts features are the most unique part of this product, no matter the current name it uses. When they introduced the new version of VMware Aria Operations, they also introduced more a...
 

Also Known As

No data available
VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), vCenter Operations Manager (VCOPS)
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Science Applications International Corporation, Tribune Media, Heartland Payment Systems, Telkom Indonesia, Columbia Sportswear, iGATE, CSS Corp, Angel Broking, Adira Finance, Hipskind, Beiersdorf Shared Services, Innovate Mas Indonesia, Adobe, Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi , Join Experience S.A, Borusan Holdings, Department of Transport - Abu Dhabi
Find out what your peers are saying about Spacelift vs. VMware Aria Operations and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,797 professionals have used our research since 2012.