Apptio Costing Reviews

My main use case for Apptio Costing is to bring cost transparency to the forefront and deliver a modern, streamlined way to realize the true value of IT costs and investments by understanding consumption and unit cost and aligning them to business priorities.

It provides a single source of truth for IT costs and helps eliminate guesswork, reduce waste, and guide more informed decisions.

A quick specific example of how I use Apptio Costing in my day-to-day work is that it has helped us improve accountability, optimize resources, and demonstrate the ROI of IT initiatives while aiming to set a solid foundation for IT financial management with deeper insights.

Apptio Costing has positively impacted my organization as this tool has been a true game-changer because the CFO of our organization trusts the budgets as he is able to see the details, avoiding arbitrary cuts to the budget and enabling us to repurpose staff from one department to another with a better handle on our vacancies against the budget.

We have taken on the IT budgets of six newly acquired locations because they know that we have the tools to adapt and can take on this work without issue or hassle, leading to more than doubling the IT budget from over $80 million to $300 million in the time we've had the product.

Apptio Costing enabled us to handle the IT budgets of those six new locations by allowing us to forecast a multi-year, multi-location budget of a $225 million project effectively in PFP and ended up significantly under budget when it was finished, thus avoiding the need to go back to the board to approve more funds for the project.

The best features that Apptio Costing offers include reducing the total cost of ownership associated with large applications in any organization while providing a business-centric view of technology with insights that help our IT organization unlock and shift resources.

It understands any business unit expense from the app, product, or service down to the general ledger and allocates costs based on consumption metrics, enabling precise resource allocation and budget optimization.

All the features of Apptio Costing are great and helpful, as it helps organizations classify, categorize, and consolidate IT spend, ensuring investments are directed to the highest value-add opportunities.

In addition to the features, cost recovery, where Apptio Costing determines the proper billing amount from each business unit using business rules, and unit rate billing, where it exposes the drivers business units can use to mitigate cost and reinvest in high-value IT activities, also stand out.

To improve Apptio Costing, a fixed asset data input needs to allow for more details such as quantities by line item, not by total amount, and I would appreciate access to more of our plans, as we have to achieve or purge prior monthly plans in order to keep the system running faster for our users.

It is worth mentioning that Apptio Costing does not have historical balance sheets.

I have been using Apptio Costing for the past five years.

Apptio Costing is very stable.

Apptio Costing's scalability is very good as it grows with my organization's needs, and I can handle it seamlessly and perfectly.

The customer support for Apptio Costing is very great as they are supportive and responsive 24/7.

I would rate the customer support on a scale of one to ten as eight out of ten.

Positive

Before switching to Apptio Costing, I previously used Microsoft Power BI, but I switched because it was not that leveraging, was a bit costly, and was not easy to use.

Apptio Costing was deployed in our organization using a public cloud.

I have seen a return on investment, as identifying ownership gaps in technology and applications has been easy while providing IT leaders with operational details tied to the financials, such as how much we are spending on projects versus what we think we are spending.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been that the price is relatively cost-effective, and I do not have a problem with that.

The setting is a bit straightforward when you are able to ingest everything and learn about everything; the setting becomes simple.

Before choosing Apptio Costing, I also evaluated Workiva.

The advice I would give to others looking into using Apptio Costing is that it is suited for IT finance leaders to plan, forecast, and budget, as well as automate some monthly close tasks to save time and cost. On the other hand, it is not suited to replace accounting functions software.

My company has a business relationship with the vendor as customers.

I have additional thoughts about Apptio Costing, as we are striving for a thirty to forty percent reduction in application run cost in 2026, and if we hit this, it will be a major component to making that happen.

I would rate this review an eight out of ten overall.

Apptio Costing is one of the best and a game changer in IT financial analysis tools. In my organization, I use it for annual budgeting, monthly forecasting, and capital project tracking. I also use Apptio Costing to manage IT spend requests.

Regarding my main use case, I use Apptio Costing for cost allocation, showback/chargeback, and TCO reporting.

The best features that Apptio Costing offers include data aggregation, flexibility, support communication, dynamic reporting, ease of use, and IT reporting.

Out of those features, planning, budget, and forecasting in Apptio Costing has made the biggest difference for my team, as it helps with annual budgeting, monthly forecasting, and capital project tracking.

Loading actuals from Oracle in Apptio Costing is great.

Apptio Costing has positively impacted my organization by improving forecast accuracy, streamlining the annual budgeting process and saving a lot of time, and capturing a record of Capex spend approvals has also been improved.

My team now works roughly 40 to 65% faster as a result of the time savings from Apptio Costing.

Apptio Costing can be improved with more spend AI insights.

The user interface of Apptio Costing should be more intuitive and easy to navigate for new users.

I have been using Apptio Costing for seven years.

Apptio Costing is stable.

Apptio Costing's scalability is very good because it has continued to grow with my organization.

The customer support for Apptio Costing is very responsive and proactive.

Previously, I was using IBM Cloudability before switching to Apptio Costing.

I have seen a return on investment from Apptio Costing, which includes the acceleration of the planning process. The controlled environment and automation has been great, saving time and cost, while project accounting has been streamlined to reduce errors.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Apptio Costing was that everything was cost-effective and affordable.

Before choosing Apptio Costing, I evaluated IBM Cloudability as one of the options.

I would rate Apptio Costing as nine out of ten.

I give it a nine out of ten because it has delivered cost transparency, especially to my tech spend.

My advice to others looking into using Apptio Costing is that cost transparency and TCO for the product and platform model that I was unable to achieve previously has now been accomplished. Apptio Costing is a wonderful product for TBM implementation, which also needs a few enhancements to meet current industry standards.

Apptio Costing is a great tool for allocating cost to business units and great for transparency, especially in IT spend and IT tech spend.

My main use case for Apptio Costing is planning and cost transparency. I use it for the IT budget for both direct and chargeback, and leverage it for reporting and forecasting IT expenses.

A quick, specific example of how I use Apptio Costing for reporting or forecasting IT expenses is that cost transparency enables visibility to the business on what costs they are incurring.

This visibility is important for my business because it works really well for IT budgeting direct expenses, and cost transparency could provide better reporting with details for all expenses.

Some of the best features Apptio Costing offers are dashboards, insights, TBM, a data model, the ability to evaluate spend, forecasting capabilities, granular modeling, and report building.

Out of those features, I find myself using reporting and forecasting the most day-to-day because it allows for the company to understand the impact of project spend on the overall IT projects to show value.

I would add that budget forecasting reports, data ingestion, and time series data are also important features.

Apptio Costing has impacted my organization positively because everything with Apptio Costing has been positive, and one thing is that it is very easy to use.

I think Apptio Costing could be improved, particularly the user interface.

The UI should be more user-friendly and intuitive, as drilling down into budget line items in planning takes time and multiple clicks.

I think there is room for improvement in Apptio Costing with creating custom report views.

I have been using Apptio Costing for about nine years, even in my previous organization.

Apptio Costing is very stable, and I have not experienced any downtime or lagging.

I would say Apptio Costing is scalable because it has handled my organization's growth efficiently.

The customer support is very responsive and helpful.

I would rate the customer support an eight out of ten.

I previously used a different solution, and some of the alternatives were SAP Cloud ERP and Microsoft Project Server.

I switched from SAP Cloud ERP and Microsoft Project Server to Apptio Costing because planning is very versatile and works in many scenarios due to it being simple and easy to adapt.

My company has a business relationship with the vendor as customers.

A specific outcome or metric resulting from using Apptio Costing is that it has enabled a great relationship between IT, finance, and the business units, giving the business units and the SSUs much better visibility into what their technology costs are, making decisions behind tech investments easier with the budgeting tool Apptio Costing provides.

Before choosing Apptio Costing, I evaluated other options, including the ServiceNow platform.

My advice for others looking into using Apptio Costing is that it is easy to do the recharge we require, which was completely manual before Apptio Costing. Budget creation was in Excel with many issues and bugs, but now it has been streamlined by Apptio Costing, saving a lot of time and reducing error. It is a great tool for IT budgeting and cost transparency, so it is a highly recommendable tool.

Since we started using this tool, we have good reports to see the variances, and the tool has been great because there has been a lot of positive impact on delivering cost transparency or a sub-ledger to our tech spend.

I think Apptio Costing is a great tool for cost optimization as budgets are clear and business units are aware of costs. I am giving this review a rating of nine out of ten.

Apptio Costing has made our lives much easier by allowing us to easily adjust the budget and incorporate changes on the fly, showing management the immediate effect of business changes. This capability has proven to be very useful.

Apptio Costing is deployed in my organization using a public cloud, and I purchased it through the AWS Marketplace.

Some of the best features Apptio Costing offers include supporting frequent updates that add new integrations, features, and tools to further enhance our marketing and capabilities.

Apptio Costing positively impacts my organization as it is a good financial accounting system that was perfectly designed for multi-user LAN environments, with improved integration with financial applications.

Apptio Costing provides IT leaders with operational details tied to the financials, indicating how much we are spending on projects versus what we think we are spending.

Improvements have been seen in procedures, particularly in our forecast system, which improved from almost four weeks to an estimated total of five days. I have seen a return on investment with Apptio Costing, as it provides a seamless way of managing our cloud costs, and having all data organized in one place facilitates significant financial transparency and planning.

The user interface should be improved to be more user-friendly, easy to navigate, and customizable.

Negative

I use Apptio Costing in two different ways: one, to optimize the costs of cloud tools like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud; and then alongside, I also use the solution to understand what is really happening, for example, to get alerts from those cloud tools right from Apptio Costing.

I integrate with AWS and then I integrate with Google Cloud; Apptio Costing is going to read how we use the cloud and then it is going to let us know exactly the features we do not need anymore and then the features we need more. The features we do not need anymore, we refuse to use them and that saves us more costs.

The best features Apptio Costing offers for me include what we call the user interface, which is really professional, helping our team to get a lot of things from one dashboard, for example, the total spend, and then the visual charts that show how analytics goes, and secondly, I also love the support team; they are really very supportive, responding to technical questions on time and they are available 24/7.

I find the cards more interesting in the user interface; for example, you can see exactly the total amount you always spend, where you always spend more, for example, the Opex, the Capex, so you get more insight to know exactly where you spend more in a visual.

Apptio Costing has impacted us positively by reducing the costs; we have reduced the cost by 31% because we no longer use every feature we find; we only use the features that are more important to our business.

It is over a specific period that I measured that 31% reduction; before using this solution, Apptio Costing, we were using more costs on clouds but using Apptio Costing has helped us to exactly extract what features we need to use and how to, and really that has saved us more costs because we no longer pay for what we do not use.

I think Apptio Costing can be improved in a few areas; the first one is the analysis because it takes a lot of time to automate and ingest what we call the financial and operational projections, and sometimes the given value is invalid, so that one needs more improvement so that the projection analysis is always accurate and that is going to save more people a lot of time and being aware of what the cost is going to be; another thing would be support language, for example, they only offer support in the English language, which sometimes can be hard for non-English speakers.

I think the second would be integration; currently, Apptio Costing supports a few tools like Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud, yet there are other more tools like Digital Ocean, so they can consider adding more cloud tools like Digital Ocean in the platform or Akamai in the platform so that they can be able to use it.

I have been using Apptio Costing for three years.

Apptio Costing is very stable, with no downtime.

Apptio Costing is scalable; it grows with you when your product grows and they do not hike prices.

Customer support for Apptio Costing is very awesome and very responsive.

This is our first solution to use because Apptio Costing met what we were looking for; we did not change or look for any other solution to use.

Pricing is okay; the lady that onboarded us was really more helpful in telling us what features we were looking for, so the cost is okay, the pricing is okay, the setup is okay, and the licensing is okay, very affordable, with no long-term commitments.

I have seen a 32% ROI as what we have seen as an increase.

I did not evaluate other options before choosing Apptio Costing.

For anyone looking for cloud management, to know exactly what features they need to use and how long it is going to cost them, Apptio Costing is really the right tool, and if you are going into a longer term, they can even offer a discount, so that would be my advice and recommendation. I gave this review a rating of 10.

My main use case for Apptio Costing is for budget forecasting and cost analysis because it is somewhat complicated in our company, particularly in our database operation area.

Currently, we use Apptio Costing for cost analysis and budget forecasting in our database operations by leveraging AWS tags to identify the resources that we own and manage. However, the resources are currently spending across different database accounts, and we extract and transfer the cost data from AWS Explorer to Apptio. We leverage Apptio Costing to track the overall monthly, daily, and yearly budget against the real cost. We calculate the trending to see if we are going to be on budget or if we will be within budget in the coming months, quarters, or years. If we foresee any risk that the cost will go over budget, we look back and dive into different roles, dimensions, services, or cost types to identify any abnormalities or opportunities for optimization.

Regarding the UI and user experience, in my opinion, some of the features do not appear very professional, easy to use, or flexible.

I believe one of the best features Apptio Costing offers is the trending line.

Apptio Costing has positively impacted our organization by providing us with a consistent view and a centralized place. Having that consistent, centralized view has helped my team and organization by allowing us to control our budget in 2025. We are also trying to calculate and control the cost this year. With the help of Apptio Costing, different teams currently see a very consistent view, and the overall budget in the organization matches exactly the summarized sum amount by different organizations and sub-organizations. Before we used Apptio Costing, the final sum number usually had a very big difference when compared to the sub-organizations' numbers.

I believe Apptio Costing can be improved on the website by providing flexible features that allow us to define variables that we can change directly on the site by creating a widget based on the variable. Whether it is a predefined list or a number, integer, float number, or timing, that would make it easier for us to use. Sometimes we need to change the tag number or view team, or some dimensions, but we want all the widgets on the existing pages to remain unchanged; just the logic should change.

I have been using Apptio Costing for around three years.

Apptio Costing is stable.

I do not consider Apptio Costing's scalability to be a concern for our organization; I do not believe we need that capability on a daily basis.

I do not have experience with customer support, as we resolve problems by ourselves.

We previously used a different solution that was homegrown; we built it ourselves as a customized solution. The reason we migrated to Apptio Costing is that it is out-of-the-box to use and more powerful and flexible.

I do not have specific metrics for a return on investment, but overall, it did help us, so I do not have a concrete number to share.

I do not have experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing; I only use the product.

I did not evaluate other options before choosing Apptio Costing; I have no idea what others were considered. The company purchased it, and we use it.

My advice for others looking into using Apptio Costing is that they must have a clear design for identifying resources according to the owner of the cost. Otherwise, even though you have Apptio Costing, it is still very hard to control and calculate the cost. I would rate my overall experience with Apptio Costing as an 8 out of 10.

I use Apptio Costing to maximize IT efficiency by reducing higher costs that we were previously using, and I also use it to simplify and analyze our automation of financial operations and data.

We use Apptio Costing to analyze how we spend on cloud services, for example, Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services, and it provides us a report on how we can reduce our spending, making it easier to align our financial needs towards those tools.

I appreciate the easy-to-use costing framework of Apptio Costing where you can easily understand the costs that you incur on cloud tools, and it provides a very good report on how you can optimize it, so the reports generated by the tool are very user-friendly.

What makes the reports of Apptio Costing more friendly is that they provide integration with AWS and GCP, and then it provides a report on how our bills are, what features we do not use that keep making our costs too high, and those reports can be shared with the team to ensure that we can optimize and plan efficiently towards our IT financial strategies.

Apptio Costing has helped us to save costs because we know exactly what takes more and what we don't use, so we end up saving a lot of money.

I think the user interface of Apptio Costing needs to be improved because when you are accessing the tool on a very small screen, you find that the user interface is very nested, so you cannot easily find the feature you want to use because they are nested together.

I have used Apptio Costing for two years.

Apptio Costing is stable; we have not seen any downtime.

Apptio Costing is scalable.

Customer support for Apptio Costing is great; they are very responsive, respond to questions on time, and provide solutions.

Pricing for Apptio Costing is fair; they even give a free trial to test the tool if it meets your needs, so I would say pricing is fair, and the onboarding process was smooth, with the customer team making sure you understand exactly what you are purchasing before you can go into acquisition.

We have seen cost reduction by 25% since using Apptio Costing, so we no longer spend more money on the features and the cloud instances that we do not use.

Because we have detailed visibility and can monitor and report matters faster, we have seen a return on investment by 30%.

We purchased Apptio Costing directly from them.

Apptio Costing is secure, and we have not seen any issues, so the generated content of the AI is really very secure, it is very accurate, and aligns with our goals.

Apptio Costing is very accurate and reliable; we always get timely responses and timely recommendations that are of a high standard.

I would say Apptio Costing is good, especially for teams that are handling complex cloud environments because it helps me to see exactly which resource and which part of the cloud is using or eating up my budget and how to optimize, so I would recommend it. I give this review a rating of 5 out of 5.