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CloudStack vs Firefly comparison

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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

CloudStack
Ranking in Cloud Management
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
34
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Firefly
Ranking in Cloud Management
15th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.6
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of CloudStack is 2.2%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Firefly is 0.6%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
CloudStack2.2%
Firefly0.6%
Other97.2%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Tharun Kumar Reddy Thamatam - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Infrastructure Consultant at Infosys
Achieving seamless infrastructure management with optimized network and user access controls
I believe enhancements could be made in CloudStack, particularly in the management servers. I had the opportunity to collaborate with one of the Apache CloudStack developers, leading to the installation of additional agents for better information retrieval from hypervisors. We implemented configurations, ensuring consistency across hosts and VMs. We also utilized Ansible or YAML files to automate password upgrades during patching activities and database management, showcasing our customization efforts for improvement. For future releases, it would be beneficial if Apache enhanced CloudStack by integrating alerting systems directly. We've had instances where hypervisors experienced overloads without prior alerts, so proactive alerts within the tool would better prepare us for addressing issues swiftly, preventing disruption in business operations. A portal summarizing system metrics alongside alert capabilities would greatly enhance our operational efficiency.
RasanpreetSingh - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Cloud Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Automation has streamlined cloud cost control and governance yet onboarding still needs improvement
The best features Firefly offers include cost saving and drift detection, which native infrastructure as code solutions do not provide. Drift detection and governance are great features for Firefly that help me identify unutilized resources that can save costs. Firefly's drift detection and governance help me day-to-day by notifying me of any configuration drifts, such as when developers change configurations that I cannot control. For example, if I have a number of VMs running and their configurations are changed, Firefly alerts me to these changes, allowing me to identify gaps in configurations that can be corrected. Firefly's accuracy and reliability in output are impressive, with approximately 80% accuracy in building the required code for various services from the foundation services like EKS and VPC. Firefly has positively impacted my organization mainly through cost savings and governance. It allows me to have a centralized dashboard for a complete view of my AWS accounts to find problems easily. Additionally, it has saved me time because I no longer need to write every Terraform from scratch, as Firefly provides best industry practices code. For example, I monitored my database instances and found that someone had expanded the ACU size from the required number to ten times more, which began costing me $10,000 monthly extra for one AWS account. Firefly detected this and saved me the $10,000 extra expenditure.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"CloudStack is a very feature-rich product; it gives you a lot of control over your VM networks and has extensive integration with storage plugins where you can use many open source tools to bring storage into your CloudStack environment for backups or even to run VMs."
"CloudStack manages infrastructure with 2-4 thousands of hosts easily."
"It gives us the ability to manage and segregate a guest network with openvSwitch and VLAN IDs."
"It was easy to deploy, both for PoC and production (with HA)."
"The product gives us the ability to orchestrate large virtual environments and is flexible enough to allow us to configure it for what we need. We value the flexibility of the networking feature set as well as the ability to build virtual private clouds."
"You can manage infrastructure with a few people, since product is monolithic."
"It is very easy to install and manage. It has the all modules in one node, unlike other software (OpenStack). The product allows a customized look and feel, and the ability to add custom workflows."
"I liked the separation of the isolated network versus the shared network."
"Firefly is excellent for generating text images and editing images."
"Firefly generating that code is a game changer for organizations."
"Firefly has positively impacted my organization mainly through cost savings and governance, allowing me to have a centralized dashboard for a complete view of my AWS accounts to find problems easily and saving me time because I no longer need to write every Terraform from scratch, as Firefly provides best industry practices code."
"We save about fifty percent of our time because earlier, to get images for one page, the marketing team used to take one or two days to provide the right assets."
"Firefly has impacted my work positively by making it more creative and productive."
"Firefly has a positive impact on my organization by improving cloud governance, infrastructure consistency, and engineering productivity."
"Firefly has a positive impact on my organization by improving cloud governance, infrastructure consistency, and engineering productivity."
"Firefly saves one employee, it saves 5 million annually, and we are currently improving 40% of our go-to-market time while reducing cost by 30% and increasing revenue by approximately 20%."
 

Cons

"Lack of support for third-party software vendors such as Veeam and Zerto creates limitations on comprehensive offerings which would include backup and disaster recovery."
"It is not widely used so Google does not help very much when you are troubleshooting, and the CloudStack forum is not very active."
"The number of contributors to this solution is relatively small compared to other solutions. However, if more frequent users of CloudStack contribute to the open-source community, it will significantly enhance the overall community experience and make it more useful for everyone involved."
"The Windows hosts do not get their hostnames from cloud-init."
"We recognize that CloudStack is an easy-to-use cloud management platform and, in my opinion, there has been a large number of improvements in the past few years, particular when it comes to the modern UI and overall ease of management. However, I believe that CloudStack needs to grow their marketing in the commercial side. They don't have a great piece of market share right now."
"The area of improvement could be the regionalization aspect. For example, managing multiple regions or HubStack deployments together was not thought out thoroughly in the versions I used. We faced issues around managing the global infrastructure and had to develop around it."
"The stability is problematic, in part, because there is no support."
"It's really hard to delete zones, clusters, datacenters. You need to follow strict rules, which were not properly documented at the time."
"The only negative aspect of Firefly I see is the pricing, which is expensive."
"My team and the company that I worked for at that time didn't like the price too much."
"If I talk about the cost, the cost is a little high."
"I chose eight out of ten based on my trial evaluation period, as I felt everything was great, though I believe the AI aspect could improve and having a better onboarding process would help."
"Some of the areas Firefly can improve are a simpler onboarding process for organizations with large and multi-cloud environments, more customization for generated Terraform code to better match existing coding standards and module structures, and more native integrations with DevOps and ITSM tools."
"This is somewhat tricky because if someone does not have good experience on the UX side, they will find it difficult to navigate and find the right asset."
"Some of the areas Firefly can improve are a simpler onboarding process for organizations with large and multi-cloud environments, more customization for generated Terraform code to better match existing coding standards and module structures, and more native integrations with DevOps and ITSM tools."
"The learning curve for new users adopting Firefly can be overwhelming; I believe improvements in onboarding and training materials are necessary to facilitate quicker adoption."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The Apache CloudStack is open source, so you do not have licenses to purchase."
"​Give an effort to planning. If possible, contract a specialized consultant company for the initial setup and knowledge transfer.​​"
"CloudStack is an open-source product."
"There is no license, so the product is free unless you are buying professional technical support services."
"CloudStack is an open source solution, so you don't need to pay anything for it. When our company develops something specially for CloudStack, it is donated to the Apache Software Foundation and provided to anyone that wants to use it."
"It is a 100% open-source solution needing just an Apache license. Also, there are no hidden fees to be paid."
"The solution is open-source and free."
"As far as I know, CS is still free of charge. If you want to pay some money, Citrix Cloud Platform is based on CS, I think. As for hypervisors – everything as usual, you need to pay for VMware and vCenter. As for XenServer, recently they changed the free feature list, so you may need to pay some money to get useful features like XenMotion."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Comms Service Provider
16%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Outsourcing Company
9%
University
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise12
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise9
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CloudStack?
CloudStack is open-source, so there is no cost apart from learning. Billing solutions, if outsourced, come at a moderate cost.
What needs improvement with CloudStack?
Enhancements for CloudStack can focus on integrating more hypervisors, as mentioned regarding current features. We're working on a new feature that will allow for certain limited functions, but...
What is your primary use case for CloudStack?
My usual use cases for CloudStack involve an AWS style private cloud or public cloud. I can deploy an AWS style cloud using the open source tool that is CloudStack. The use case depends on the cust...
What needs improvement with Firefly?
Firefly could be improved by providing more connected plugins or integrations with other tools or some freeware tools which do not require any kind of licensing. Currently, all these UX tools are l...
What is your primary use case for Firefly?
Our main use case for Firefly is generating image variations, which we are using in Adobe Experience Manager on AEM pages and various kinds of images because our solutions are image heavy. We gener...
What advice do you have for others considering Firefly?
I would rate Firefly an eight. I chose eight out of ten for Firefly because it requires some technical knowledge to browse assets from AEM DAM, and we need to have plugins to browse DAM assets in F...
 

Also Known As

Vmops, Cloud.com
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

GreenQloud, Exoscale, TomTom, ASG, PC Extreme, ISWest, Grid'5000
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about CloudStack vs. Firefly and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
921,523 professionals have used our research since 2012.