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VMware Cloud Director vs Zesty comparison

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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

VMware Cloud Director
Ranking in Cloud Management
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Zesty
Ranking in Cloud Management
18th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Cost Management (15th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 2.4%, down from 5.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zesty is 1.0%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Cloud Director2.4%
Zesty1.0%
Other96.6%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Srinivas Rayudu  - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at Zensa Technologies
Managing complex onboarding has been challenging but automated cost optimization delivers strong savings
Zesty is a good solution; however, the learning curve can be complex for new users without a solid tech background, posing a challenge in training and the initial setup process. I would deduct one point for this aspect since everything else is fine. A specific example of where the learning curve caused issues is when we introduced Zesty to our new development team, which struggled to understand the platform while working on a project related to AI and ML. Our system architects explained how Zesty works, but I believe a more proactive approach to training and foundational data could help teams be more self-sufficient and less reliant on internal support.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Customer Service: Excellent. Technical Support: Excellent."
"It has enabled us to provision new clients faster; we don't have to configure a new host nor configure a new VM, we just have to secure it."
"The stability is rock solid."
"Simple, scalable, and comprehensive solution for large enterprises"
"The compatibility with vSAN and NSX is the greatest feature of vCloud. It also has integration with vROps, which is quite nice."
"The most valuable feature of VMware Cloud Director is segregating the underlying infrastructure for the end user."
"The most valuable features of the vCloud Director are global management, added services, and automation."
"What I found most valuable in vCloud Director is the multi-tenancy."
"I think Zesty is a really useful tool, it is really quick, it is really powerful, they are always improving it, and the customer service is flawless."
"One of the reasons we decided to onboard Zesty was that it started supporting Windows instances."
"The turnkey aspect of Zesty is very valuable."
"From a metrics perspective, Zesty reduced our Kubernetes infrastructure spend by about 24% in the first six months, we also cut wasted storage costs by roughly 18% and improved saving plan utilization by around 12%, and on the operational side, we saved roughly 40 to 50 hours a month in manual cloud cost tuning."
"Zesty has positively impacted our organization by providing a good return on investment, with a total reported percentage of savings around 40 to 50%."
 

Cons

"Technical support needs to improve its skills and respond to queries faster."
"It would be beneficial if some features were built into the platform rather than requiring integration with multiple products, reducing complexity and licensing concerns."
"If I just need to look for something quickly, it's quite difficult to find it with the way it's set up now. They should make the search button better."
"I had issues with the support, but I also learned from the support. There is room for improvement in the response time."
"There are some shortcomings. There are bugs with opening support."
"Technical support is something that we've had problems with in the past. Across all the VMware solutions we have not always had the best response from support. To be fair a lot of the issues that came up for us have been quite niche but it seems that in terms of release cycles they introduced a lot of bugs and it's a lot of stuff that support generally has to work quite hard on. There have been cases when we've logged critical priority issues and not had responses in time. I think support is something that can be worked on."
"The tool's price is one of the challenges we faced with the solution, making it an area requiring improvement."
"vCloud Director should include better billing options for businesses like mine or more options for customers to see their usage and billing situation regarding the usage of vCloud Director."
"There are different resource types that we would like to leverage and get reserved instances for, such as RDS instances."
"The biggest area for improvement is still reporting depth."
"I would like to get RDS-reserved instances that I could buy and sell, but that's a limitation on AWS."
"Zesty is a good solution; however, the learning curve can be complex for new users without a solid tech background, posing a challenge in training and the initial setup process."
"It would be really useful if Zesty had more code snippets that were easy to use, an easier library instead of their documentation, and something that provided an automated finish to insert code so it could give you code hints."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If one means a very bad price, and ten means a very good price, I rate the price as a five on a scale of one to ten."
"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."
"The solution is costly, efficient, and robust versus alternative solutions."
"vCloud Director is priced higher than other solutions, such as Nutanix."
"If ten is very expensive, I rate the tool's price as a four out of ten."
"We pay monthly for all of the licenses."
"This is an expensive solution."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing eight and a half to nine out of ten."
"The solution’s pricing is reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Construction Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Media Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise39
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zesty?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was great, as we had a great account manager that we did not have to query too much about it. The free one was nearly good enough to start with...
What needs improvement with Zesty?
I find myself using the online editor the most often, and what would be better is if you could have multiple windows open to work in, something like an actual program rather than having to shift be...
What is your primary use case for Zesty?
My main use case for Zesty is the CMS. For our corporate website, my team uses Zesty's CMS to allow users from any point in the company to upload content, add posts, add pages, and promote the comp...
 

Also Known As

vCloud Director
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.
Walkme, Wiz, Gong, Grubhub, Singular
Find out what your peers are saying about VMware Cloud Director vs. Zesty and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,683 professionals have used our research since 2012.