Last week, we covered the basics around both Nerdio and Hydra. This week, we are going to discuss how both platforms stack up against each other. For me, it’s very important to be objective and look at both platforms. We all know that Nerdio is the market leader and has more features, but in fairness to Hydra we need to look at in a different light. I will focus on the capabilities that Hydra has and how they stack up against Nerdio.

My viewpoint on things overall will probably be a little different. My POV is on how to advocate and help the standard administrator. Many people won’t have top-tier talent to support their DaaS infrastructure anymore and that’s okay. Let’s see how both platforms stack up and how we can all help each other.

Today, we will cover:

• How Does Nerdio Stack Up Against Hydra?
• Does Hydra Get the Job Done?

How Does Nerdio Stack Up Against Hydra’s Core Features?

So, the main question we came to ask ourselves today is how these features compare. Let’s focus on a few key areas:

• Image Management
• Managing File Shares
• Host Pool Management
• Session Host Management
• Auto-scaling
• User Session Management
• Licensing and Pricing
• Scripting
• RBAC

Nerdio vs. Hydra on Image Management

If we start from the beginning, Nerdio gives you two options when creating images:

• Add from Azure VM
• Add from Azure Library

Both configure very similarly, but the Azure VM type requires you to shutdown the VM and get the SAS URL. Basically (so a bit more difficult than Hydra).

They make up for that with significantly more capabilities (Hydra only lets you set the name, description, resource group, run a script on it, set the service account that runs the script, tag it, and set how many older versions you want to keep). 

With Nerdio, you can do these things:

• Set the OS
• Set the VM Size
• Configure the Disk Size
• Security Type
• Join it to AD
• Skip Removal of Local Profiles
• Enable TZ Redirection
• Set the TZ
• Uninstall FSLogix/AVD agents
• Enable App-V
• Optimize the Disk Type
• Provide custom admin credentials
• Set the Azure Compute Gallery (new or existing)
• Set the Azure Region
• Specialized Images
• Hibernation Support
• Set Replicas
• Run Scripted Actions (like Hydra)
• Add Apps 

Images are a conversation that people have strong opinions on. Many people who come from the Citrix/VMware world don’t mind the whole build a VM, customize it, generalize it, capture it, and go! Hydra does a better job than Nerdio on that because Nerdio requires the SAS URL from the disk, which I don’t love. I do love that there’s a feature with Hydra to automatically refresh those images you captured:

With that said, I do prefer that you can create an image without needing to build a VM. Whether its their built-in scripted actions or just manually create the gallery image, it’s something I’ve come to really appreciate.

Nerdio vs. Hydra on File Share Management

Nerdio does offer some more advanced Azure File Share capabilities overall. 

One of the main ones is the ability to create new Azure Files shares directly from Nerdio along with being able to add the file share permissions to make life even easier. 

You also have the ability to restore previously archived versions of the FSLogix profile for specific users, which can be useful. It’s a little silly, but I like that they deep link the file share so I can get to it directly from Nerdio as well. 

The other capability to look at is the automation around growth of fileshares. Hydra can work with any fileshare for auto-scaling, but Nerdio requires premium shares. 

Nerdio does get you some nice stuff for requiring premium shares with more granular provisioning of quota and deep scaling logic based on latency, which makes it more of an art form:

Nerdio vs. Hydra on Host Pool Management

The session host management is very similar between the two products. A few of the key differences they have are:

• Ability to migrate from Static Host Pools to Dynamic Host Pools
• Creating new pools
• Cloning pools
• Applying configs across host pools

It’s highly subjective how important these capabilities are since Hydra can manage the static host pools in similar ways, but dynamic host pools are significantly more efficient than static. Thus far, this category is the closest between the two and many would argue one of the most important.

Many of the capabilities that Hydra delivers in Session Host Management you will find in Nerdio’s Host Pool properties like this one below:

Nerdio vs. Hydra on Session Host Management

We discussed earlier, that Hydra has a nice set of things they can do with session hosts. Nerdio, can do all of those capabilities, and add a few additional ones:

• Generate RDP file for the host
• Exclude from auto-scaling
• Deploy apps
• Better insights on the health of the hosts:

In terms of spinning up session hosts, Nerdio keeps it pretty simple, because most of those settings are covered in the host pool section:

Hydra offers significantly more capabilities when creating new session hosts:

It’s pretty neat some of the stuff you can do just from a tech perspective when it rolls out additional session hosts like installing extensions, agents, different local admin credentials, etc. This is another area that mainly depends if you need it. Both do a decent job overall.

Nerdio vs. Hydra on Auto-scaling

Nerdio does a great job in terms of auto-scaling.

You can define these additional items with Nerdio:

• Desktop Image Template
• VM Size
• Disk Size and Type (Hydra can auto-change the disk type)
• More Advanced Scaling Logic
• Rolling Drain Mode (doesn’t drain all users at once)
• Pre-Staging of Hosts
• Detailed Auto-scaling Insights of the Policy
• Intelligent Recommendations powered by Azure OpenAI

Nerdio vs. Hydra on User Session Management

These two are identical with the two small differences. You can shadow user sessions and Nerdio now has their remote management capabilities known as “Console Connect”

Nerdio vs. Hydra on Licensing and Pricing           

One of the major drivers for people to use Hydra is the value.

In their free tier, you can have one host pool with 5 session hosts for free, which is pretty neat overall. This is often why Hydra has been so beloved among MSPs and Microsoft MVPs for a long time.

With Hydra, you only pay $5 per concurrent user per month. They also offer discounted pricing for MSPs/annual licensing.

Nerdio also offers a Community Edition version which is free for up to 25 users. You get the full set of NME capabilities. It’s an interesting prospect from a “free” perspective whether 25 users or 5 session hosts is more beneficial to you, but for most lab environments NME is a better deal.

Nerdio has two licenses (one for $6 and one for $10) per monthly active user (MAU).

Their licensing can be seen below. Basically Premium features are: advanced Self-service User Portal, per-user cost chargeback reporting and PowerBi Connector, advanced compute auto-scaling, intelligent personal desktop automation, storage auto-scaling, Azure Capacity Extender, Azure API Limit Booster, Multi-Azure Cloud AVD, and SCCM app connector:

For all intents and purposes, many of the Hydra capabilities map to the $10 Nerdio license, which makes the cost a significant savings for customers provided Hydra meets all of the customers’ requirements.

Obviously as indicated by the table, that $5 extra cost with Nerdio provides a ton of capabilities like Intune device management, remote support, Windows 365 management, and much more. Licensing is highly subjective and it depends on the customer. Personally, I still think the value you get from Nerdio is what most enterprises would prefer. Pricing to me is somewhat irrelevant because Nerdio/Hydra pay for themselves.

Nerdio vs. Hydra on Scripting

Hydra scripting only has a few scripts and collections. For scripts they support:

• Optimization for Win10/11
• Install Windows Updates
• Remove Device from Entra ID
• Shrink FSLogix Disks

Collections are a combination of scripts and actions like this below:

Mainly, the idea is that you work with the templates and build your own orchestrations, based on your needs. The pliability is very useful.

With Nerdio, you have a large collection of Windows Scripts or Azure Runbooks.

You can see a list of some of the Windows Scripts here, but there are about 55-60 total scripts available. The full collection of scripts and runbooks are on their Github.

The Azure Runbooks are very useful, which lets you do complex automations like building your entire AVD environment from scratch powered by the Nerdio API/Graph API to deploy things seamlessly.

Having a robust catalog is something people have come to love from products like Entra and Okta. I hope Login VSI will grow this out, because to me it’s a necessity.

Nerdio vs. Hydra on RBAC

RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) is an interesting area as well. If you start with Hydra, you have 10 roles that exist and are pre-built:

• Full Admin
  • They can do it all!
• Host Pool Admin
  • Full host pool management
• Host Pool Resource Manager
  • Create/delete session hosts, start/stop/restart session hosts and handle user sessions. They can also start scripts/script collections, and create images.
• Host Pool VM, User Manager, and Remove Hosts
  • Manage user sessions, start/stop/restart/delete session hosts and change drain mode.
• Host Pool VM and User Manager
  • Same as previous but no deletion
• User and Profile Manager
  • Manage user sessions, processes, and delete FSLogix profiles.
• User Manager Plus
  • Manage user sessions and terminate user processes.
• User Manager
  • Manage user sessions.
• Reader
  • Read-only for most data.
• User
  • End users can only see, start, stop, and restart their assigned session hosts along with disconnect/logoff of their own sessions.

You can add a user or a group object ID, scope to a tenant or specific host pool, along with the role. For most people this covers their needs, but a lack of additional/specific granularity could be an issue. On a personal level, I don’t love things that can’t perform basic lookups against Entra. I hope Login VSI addresses this as it’s what customers expect.

With Nerdio, they only have 5 built-in roles today:

• Admin
  • Full Admin
• Desktop Admin
  • Full access to user sessions, view host pools/hosts and restart them, and full access to desktop images and scripted actions.
• End-user
  • User ability to manage their own session (e.g. restart, start, stop their desktop)
• Help Desk
  • Full access to user sessions
• Reviewer
  • Full read-only access

Commonly, those 5 roles will get it done for most customers, but Nerdio does extend things by letting you create custom roles. You can create custom roles for the different modules (Workspaces, Desktop Images, Intune, W365, App Attach, Unified App Management, Scripted Actions, Monitoring, Storage, Advisor, Desktops, etc.)

Nerdio, does support lookups against your Entra ID environment and the ability to apply permissions at the workspace level. For some people that may not be ideal, but it’s not a huge deal.

Overall, when you look at this comparison, either platform is perfectly fine and it will really come down to your preferences and if you have the granularity you need.

Does Hydra Get the Job Done?

Well, if you’re still with me after these many words, let’s discuss Hydra’s place in the market.

I covered many different categories. The pricing makes a lot of sense, because in my estimation Hydra has about 50-60% of the capabilities that Nerdio does today. Nerdio is very focused on growing far beyond AVD, which shows with their new features around Windows 365, Intune, remote management, app management, and more. In addition, Nerdio doing more to implement AI and advanced logic to take auto-scaling further than Hydra does today. Nerdio’s ability to create everything is very appealing to many organizations, but that is probably more of a nice to have than a complete necessity.

I see Hydra as a tool that fits into a specific bucket. Many of my fellow NVPs disagree with me, but I view Hydra as a tool that someone who has a strong VDI background will thrive with. As someone who has moderate VDI/DaaS experience, I find Nerdio to be easier to use with a stronger ROI. We can’t understate the two pricing models either. Some customers will save a ton of money going with CCU (concurrency) vs MAUs (monthly active users). I’ve heard from some customers that flipping to Hydra saved them a ton of money from that alone. Smaller shops also benefit from avoiding the 1K per month minimum of Nerdio.

Nerdio is what I would call a “Super Hero” product because it turns Clark Kent into Superman.

I think Hydra is a decent product, but it does need a UI overhaul. They already have a few hundred loyal customers so they are clearly doing something right. (I don’t know the exact number, but Thomas Poppelgaard said its over 9 million LOL)  Big thanks to my good friend Thomas for keeping me honest on the content as he has been a major supporter of Hydra. They should enhance the UI to make it easier to use and their documentation needs some major updates. These areas will be vital for someone to use Hydra and what a company like Login VSI should be able to provide. I will die on the hill that they are for two different classes of VDI engineers. For me or anyone to find the newest product in the Login VSI portfolio as a viable enterprise product, we need to know the roadmap and what their plans are for the future.