VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth vs. VMware Aria Automation

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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

VMware Aria Automation

Ranking in Cloud Management

2nd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

170

Ranking in other categories

Configuration Management (7th), Network Automation (3rd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (17th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (4th)

VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth

Ranking in Cloud Management

21st

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Cost Management (5th)

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 11.1%, down from 11.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth is 2.0%, down from 2.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

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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Steve Staten

Cloud Advisor Specialist at Converge Technology Solutions Corp

The solution has excellent scalability, great dashboards, and is stable

I use the solution daily, multiple hours a day to identify possible savings by analyzing the various displays as well as the policies for possible cost savings for our customers CloudHelth has helped our organization with trying to right-size virtual machines based on current utilization and…

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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

"Scalability is perfect. We haven't had any issues."

"Aria Automation gives you the flexibility to deploy tenants with customized blueprints for permissions and policies. Version 7.8 consisted of multiple products, so you had to deploy a lot of virtual machines on one of the servers. Starting from 8.6, VMware consolidated all the components into one Linux appliance. This allows the option to use vRA or DevOps capabilities."

"Before it would take months to deploy a VM, now, with this solution, we can deploy many VMs in one hour. We can do a stack of them with Mediaware."

"I like its capacity, the self-service portal, and operational automation. The most beneficial feature is that it saves time when creating new virtual machines, deploying security measures, and writing infrastructure code, making things easier and faster. We have a standard we follow, reducing the time spent repeatedly rewriting everything."

"We needed vRA to easily integrate with our hypervisor, orchestration, security (tenant segmentation, PCI), workflows, custom code, and internal monitoring/management tools. Since we didn’t have time to develop our own web front-end during the development sprints, vRA saved considerable time and resource cycles. Its ability to easily integrate with all of the VMware cloud products as well as public cloud providers, like AWS and Azure, out-of-the-box, makes it an even more powerful tool."

"Instead of only deploying templates, we can deploy blueprints which are easier on day-to-day operations."

"It's much more stable than the highest available variant."

"We also use it to pre-install the applications that the people selected when they ordered the machine, so they get a fully functional machine."

More VMware Aria Automation pros

"This solution is fast and very easy to understand, even if you are not a technician."

"The most valuable thing I have found is the cost saving recommendations"

"We are able to create an internal price of the product that we can then sell to clients. We get the cost plan at a good discount and then resell it with a mark up to our enterprise-level clients. This flexibility in pricing is one of the solution's best features."

"The solution is useful for cloud transparency and visibility in reports and dashboards that I have generated, especially the pre-populated dashboards."

"The product is easy to use in terms of monitoring all the environments. It works for multiple clouds."

"We use dashboards quite heavily, but one of the features that have really stood out is some of the policies we've created to alert us of particular situations."

"It's stable. For report presentation, it's been fast."

"The pricing is rather competitive right now."

More VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth pros

Cons

"The basic support is not there for Google Cloud and Azure. They are unable to provision nor do cost controls. Google is still left out. It is great that they have done AWS, but we are a retailer which means nothing to us because it is a competitor. Azure is good, but Google is where a lot of our development environments are."

"The upgrade experience is horrible. It's not straightforward, there are a lot of failures, a lot of support interactions. It's not something that we are able to pull off ourselves. I've been with vRA since it was termed vCSA. We've gone through multiple rounds, and it has never been easy."

"I think they could probably do more if they created more actions and more use cases to automate things."

"Most of the time the upgrade experience has been good but sometimes things break after upgrading. For example, some API codes stopped working."

"vCenter and vRA, I believe they share two different databases so sometimes you have to somehow sync them up. I wish there was only one database between the two or, somehow, one database would rule over the other one, so if you have both products, the vCenter might use the vRA database. Otherwise, when you do stuff in vCenter, you have to write a command on vRA to update the databases."

"When it comes to the orchestration workflow, you're on your own. The documentation and resources are very limited, and you have to learn everything on your own."

"It is complex to use for new users. It should have automated tools or drag-and-drop functionality."

"VMware Aria Automation could improve reporting of the policies. They are difficult to customize. We have many policies but they are not able to be modified to what we want."

More VMware Aria Automation cons

"CloudHealth needs to start building out Turbonomics-types of features that help the customers who are using CloudHealth really understand everything down to the server level, the virtual machine level."

"The Perspectives feature could be better."

"I would like to see better integration from CloudHealth to create easier setup and implementation."

"The solution doesn't offer the best functionality, unfortunately. Some features just simply aren't on offer. The solution needs to offer more product milestones."

"The performance and accuracy of Cloud Health need to be improved."

"They should provide information or tools to tune the cloud resources according to the environment size."

"It would be helpful to have a mobile version or a tablet version, especially for people who are outside of the office."

"If you are working with the OS you need help and other connectors to get more information."

More VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This is an expensive product and the high price is starting to become an issue for us."

"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."

"VMware Aria Automation is expensive."

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

"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."

"The cost of the solution is reasonable for us. Although it is relatively high, we prioritize stability and integration over cost."

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

"Customers say this solution is costlier compared to its competitors."

More VMware Aria Automation pricing and cost advice

"The licensing fees depend on how big the company is. If you are a larger company then you have a better contract with a better price. The price is different for a small company."

"CloudHealth has a subscription-based model."

"There could be flexibility in pricing for the product."

"I give the cost of the solution an eight out of ten."

"The pricing is competitive and while other products are good they are considerably more expensive."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Educational Organization

20%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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 ...

What do you like most about CloudHealth?

The product is easy to use in terms of monitoring all the environments. It works for multiple clouds.

What needs improvement with CloudHealth?

There could be flexibility in pricing for the product. They should provide information or tools to tune the cloud resources according to the environment size. It will help us get the right cost. Ad...

What advice do you have for others considering CloudHealth?

I rate VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth an eight out of ten.

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Comparisons

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VMware Aria Operations vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 14% of the time

Morpheus vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 11% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 9% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs VMware Aria Automation

Compared 7% of the time

More VMware Aria Automation Competitors

Cloudability vs VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth

Compared 21% of the time

Azure Cost Management vs VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth

Compared 19% of the time

IBM Turbonomic vs VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth

Compared 16% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth

Compared 10% of the time

AWS Cost Explorer vs VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth

Compared 8% of the time

More VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth Competitors

Product Reports

VMware Aria Automation

Download VMware Aria Automation product report

VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth

Download VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth product report

Also Known As

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

Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth, CloudHealth

Overview

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

VMware Tanzu CloudHealth, formerly known as VMware Aria Cost Powered by CloudHealth, is a specialized cloud management platform tailored for Multi-Cloud Cost Optimization. It offers comprehensive visibility into cloud spending across various providers, enabling users to identify areas for optimization and make informed resource allocation decisions. With features like reserved instance management, resource rightsizing, and automated cost governance policies, it facilitates financial management for optimal cost efficiency. Beyond cost optimization, Tanzu CloudHealth enhances cloud operations through workload optimization and governance automation, catering to multi-cloud environments encompassing public, private, and hybrid clouds. Its primary focus remains on enabling organizations to effectively manage and reduce cloud expenditures while supporting operations across diverse cloud platforms.

VMware

Sample Customers

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

Pinterest, Dow Jones, RhythmOne, Ziff Davis, Acquia, Mentor Graphics, Lookout, Veracode, SwiftKey, Amtrak, Shi, Imgur, SumoLogic, NewsUK, Cloudera, Canvas

VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth vs. VMware Aria Automation