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VMware Aria Automation vs nOps comparison

Why PeerSpot?
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

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

nOps
Ranking in Cloud Management
16th
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
4.4
Number of Reviews
6
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 (10th), Network Automation (7th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (27th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of nOps is 0.9%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 5.5%, down from 9.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Aria Automation5.5%
nOps0.9%
Other93.6%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Tom Weeks - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Director of Engineering at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
Automates savings plan management and improves cost visibility while reducing cloud infrastructure needs
I find it to be a valuable cost-savings tool. Its best features include several things: first, it is hands-off, so I can set it and forget it. I get it set up, and it manages AWS savings plans on my behalf. This frees my team up to work on more valuable work without losing out on valuable discounts. It also provides a dashboard with more detailed insights into cost and AWS cloud costs than what comes out of the box with AWS Cost Explorer. Third, the nOps Kubernetes agent automatically resizes pods based on usage, which allows us to run significantly fewer EC2 instances than we would otherwise. nOps has positively impacted my organization by saving both time and money.
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

"The solution provides actionable reporting and cost-saving recommendations."
"Since making this shift, we have seen a twenty to thirty percent reduction in the total AWS compute expenditure, which represents a significant win for us."
"nOps smoothly integrated with our AWS infrastructure and achieved significant savings without much intervention from our internal team."
"nOps has positively impacted my organization by saving significant costs because we run many instances and shifted from on-demand to Spot, which resulted in substantial savings."
"I find it to be a valuable cost-savings tool; its best features include several things: first, it is hands-off, so I can set it and forget it, and it manages AWS savings plans on my behalf, freeing my team up to work on more valuable work without losing out on valuable discounts."
"One customer saved 35 percent on their cloud bill, which is pretty significant."
"We've been using this product for a while and the stability is fantastic."
"The main benefit of vRA is a faster deployment for our customers, because before implementing vRA we were building VMs from scratch, but vRA allows us to create images so we can deploy a VM in just a few minutes."
"I personally spend a lot of time in vRealize Orchestrator, so being able to directly tie into the back end on the APIs, I find that to be what really is the most advantageous thing for me."
"I think vRA stands at the top of the list of the products that we rate, because of the problems that it has helped us to solve, in terms of providing the services to our end customers."
"The automation part is valuable, especially where vRA integrates with vRO, because it reduces the amount of effort we have to make."
"A lot of its DevOps for infrastructure capabilities improve reliability. Much effort was put in by some customers, like a large automobile manufacturer, a large telecom, and two large banks, to achieve a certain level of capabilities in this space. These DevOps for infrastructure capabilities have saved time for developers. In one use case for a large marketplace, a typical release cycle took about 80 hours and was brought down to three hours by automating deployment for developers. The quicker that deployments happen, the faster that they can do their product release cycles."
"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."
"The ability to programmatically describe the desired state of a single, or an entire fleet of servers, on-premises, and in a cloud environment."
 

Cons

"From the features, I would like to see RDS RIs and maybe better visibility on how the engine is deciding whether to use spot or on demand, to replace the instance or not"
"At the same price currently offered, there should be lower percentages for some other packages because the service is currently offered at a very high cost percentage."
"I suggest improving the heat map capability with the option to use showback values as the x and y-axis."
"However, it misses a perfect score because multi-cloud feature parity is still catching up to its gold-standard AWS toolset."
"The customer support is lacking but still pretty good."
"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."
"They can improve on the dashboard representations and the options for non-technical people."
"We still struggle a little bit with the configuration as far as making sure that we have all the endpoints where they need to be, because that's not as agile as we'd like in the back-end. We're working towards that with our DevOps teams to make sure that we're touching the right endpoints and getting the right data."
"I'm not aware if a UI exists or not."
"The deployment mechanisms for the initial deployment of the product line lacks the appropriate documentation to give someone who's never used it before... There might be cases where someone wants to go to the website, go to the doc section, and do a step-by-step on how to deploy it. That's really not as brushed-up as other documents I've seen that they have. That would definitely be an improvement on their end."
"For the administrator, it can be a little challenging. For the administrator, there are a lot of moving parts. It is fine once you figure out where the knobs are you need to twiddle, but it can be a challenge to get it up and running."
"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."
"Licensing's expensive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"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."
"The tool is expensive since it is an enterprise product."
"The pricing for this solution is roughly 20% lower than the competitive products in the market."
"There is confusion between licensing levels. There are three different licensed versions of vRealize Automation, and there are different things which can happen in each of them."
"vRealize automation really should be a front door to the whole VMware suite of 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."
"SaltStack is an open-source product."
"I would rate the pricing a ten out of ten, with ten being very expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
20%
Comms Service Provider
17%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
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

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for nOps?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it was very easy, and it was also brokered by us with the client. I did not purchase nOps through the AWS Marketplace.
What needs improvement with nOps?
While the AWS integration is flawless and deeply mature, I believe the multi-cloud capabilities for platforms such as Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform can sometimes feel a bit less comprehe...
What is your primary use case for nOps?
My primary use case for nOps is automated AWS cost optimization, FinOps compliance, and infrastructure visibility. I use it to instantly surface underutilized resources and automate the management ...
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

nOps - Cloud Optimization Platform
VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
Find out what your peers are saying about VMware Aria Automation vs. nOps and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
917,433 professionals have used our research since 2012.