North Cloud Reviews

My main use case for North Cloud is cloud cost management, which is basically used for cloud cost monitoring and reporting, FinOps operations, cloud financial operations, budget tracking, and alerting.

I use North Cloud for cost monitoring and reporting by tracking the budget and alerting, optimizing resources through the UI screen, and utilizing the real-time cloud spending dashboard, which provides a breakdown by service, team, project, and/or environment, offering visibility on cloud usage, cost allocation, forecasting, and optimization recommendations to reduce waste and improve financial governance of cloud infrastructure.

I basically use North Cloud for budget tracking and alerting, and cloud cost monitoring and reporting.

The best features North Cloud offers are cost visibility and budget management, cost optimization, multi-cloud support, report analyzing, and forecasting.

Out of those features, I find myself relying on budget management the most because I can set budgets per team or project and get alerts when thresholds are exceeded.

Additionally, I would like North Cloud to provide a report and analytics feature, a custom dashboard, trend analysis, and tracking of daily, weekly, and monthly spend.

North Cloud has positively impacted my organization by delivering a strong ROI through reducing unnecessary cloud spending and achieving 10 to 30% in cloud cost savings by optimizing the environment, reducing idle resource wastage, improving budgeting accuracy, enabling faster identification of cost spikes, and fostering better financial accountability across teams. North Cloud's scalability is fantastic as I have seen from the beginning; it features faster dashboard loading for large enterprises and is optimized for multi-accounts and multi-cloud environments, with a better caching mechanism for frequent queries.

For North Cloud's improvement, I would suggest enhancing its AI capabilities, adding advanced AI/ML features, improving real-time cost tracking to reduce the delay between cloud usage and dashboard updates, enhancing custom reporting with a more flexible report builder, drag-and-drop functionality, SQL support, and the ability to create custom KPIs per unit, as well as deeper cloud integrations beyond Azure, AWS, and GCP to Kubernetes cost tracking, improving tagging governance, and providing automatic detection of missing and incorrect cloud tags, plus AI-based tagging recommendations and a better user experience with more modern and interactive dashboards for easier navigation for non-technical users.

For needed improvements, I would add that there should be easier navigation for non-technical users for the financial team and a simplified onboarding for new users, along with advanced alerting systems, smart alert thresholds using historical trends, predictive alerts, and multi-channel notifications via Slack, Teams, email, and PagerDuty.

I have been working in my current field for five years.

North Cloud is stable.

The output of North Cloud is very efficient and reliable, providing appropriate answers with high accuracy in cost reporting and billing source-based reliability, although minor delays are possible in real-time cost updates due to cloud billing synchronization. It is generally reliable for cost tracking and reporting, as it depends on direct billing data from the cloud providers.

North Cloud's scalability is fantastic as I have seen from the beginning; it features faster dashboard loading for large enterprises and is optimized for multi-accounts and multi-cloud environments, with a better caching mechanism for frequent queries.

I choose a 9 out of 10 because of its scalability; it is highly scalable across enterprise cloud environments, supports multiple cloud accounts and business units, and handles large-scale enterprise billing data, making it suitable for organizations with high cloud consumption.

Customer support for North Cloud is really good, as I receive responses within a timely manner.

I have not used any other solution in the past as I have been using North Cloud from the beginning.

Regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing for North Cloud, it involves a SaaS subscription-based pricing model that typically depends on cloud spend volume, number of accounts and projects, and features enabled such as advanced analytics and forecasting. The setup cost is low with minimal infrastructure efforts needed, as it is fully cloud-based and requires cloud account integrations, such as AWS, Azure, GCP, billing access setup, and roles and permission configurations. The setup is generally quick.

I have seen a return on investment through time saved and achieving 10 to 30% cloud cost savings by optimizing my environment and reducing idle resource wastage, which significantly helps our workforce and saves time.

Regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing for North Cloud, it involves a SaaS subscription-based pricing model that typically depends on cloud spend volume, number of accounts and projects, and features enabled such as advanced analytics and forecasting. The setup cost is low with minimal infrastructure efforts needed, as it is fully cloud-based and requires cloud account integrations, such as AWS, Azure, GCP, billing access setup, and roles and permission configurations. The setup is generally quick.

My advice to others looking into using North Cloud is that it is used for cloud cost monitoring, reporting, budget tracking alerts, and if anyone is looking to manage budgets, alerts, tracking, cost visibility, and cost optimization, plus multi-cloud support and report analytics based on data, I would recommend this software for new users.

As I have mentioned, North Cloud is very good; it is highly scalable across enterprise cloud environments, capable of handling large-scale enterprise billing data, supporting multiple cloud accounts, and effectively tracking revenue and costs.

I would rate North Cloud a 9 out of 10.

My main use case for North Cloud is to cut costs on cloud tools and maintain accurate billing. I integrate North Cloud into Google Cloud, and it shows me exactly how I use the cloud and how the billing actually breaks down. North Cloud provides excellent forecasting to predict my usage for upcoming months. The tool also helps me identify unnecessary cloud tools that I do not need and eliminate them, which results in accurate billing.

North Cloud has positively impacted our organization by helping us save time. Our engineers are able to save considerable time using North Cloud because they do not need to log into Google Cloud to see exactly what is working and what is not working. North Cloud has also helped us cut costs by 21 percent because we only pay for what we use and receive recommendations from the platform.

I measured the 21 percent cost reduction by comparing our previous cloud tool costs to our current costs after implementing North Cloud. The difference between these two periods showed us exactly how much we were able to save.

The best features North Cloud offers are the integration into AWS and Google Cloud, which is very straightforward. The user interface is clean, and I can see real-time analytics of Google Cloud usage and any alerts or notifications triggered from Google Cloud displayed in the North Cloud dashboard.

The unique aspect of the real-time analytics feature is that instead of logging into Google Cloud Platform, I can log into North Cloud and see exactly how the usage breaks down across CPU, RAM, storage, and network components.

I find the alerting and notification system in North Cloud very helpful as it allows us to catch issues early and improve our workflow. The tool helps us fix important issues before they escalate. For example, if my billing is going to be higher next month in GCP, North Cloud alerts me beforehand so I can prepare accordingly.

North Cloud helps us optimize resource allocation and reduce waste in our cloud environment by providing exactly what we need to use. The tool conducts assessments that tell us exactly what we are building, the traffic we expect to receive, and what instances we may have. This enables us to achieve optimized resource allocations and reduces waste in our cloud environment through early assessment.

North Cloud has helped my team collaborate and share insights about cloud usage and costs depending on user role. The admin is able to generate report insights and share them with the team, allowing everyone to collaborate in real time.

Support needs improvement as it is very limited to one language. They natively speak English, and this is very challenging when you are a user who does not speak English fluently.

Additionally, the user interface should be improved for smaller screens as I find it difficult to navigate features easily. North Cloud does not have a global search function, so I would prefer to search for a feature I want to access instead of navigating through the standard navigation structure.

I have been working in my current field for four and a half years. I have been using North Cloud for three years.

North Cloud is stable as we have not experienced any downtime or issues. The solution is stable and scalable.

North Cloud's scalability is excellent, as it handles growth and changes in our cloud environment well.

I had a very positive experience with customer support. We reached out during onboarding, and they were very responsive and technically helpful.

Integrating North Cloud with our existing systems and workflows was straightforward. I received a token that allowed me to log into my North Cloud dashboard and connect the cloud provider I use, such as Google Cloud, AWS, or DigitalOcean. I only had to enable the authentication, and the integration was completed.

I have seen a return on investment as I have saved considerable time, around 15 percent. I have saved a lot of money, around 17 percent. I did not need more employees and was able to reduce headcount by a ratio of one to three because North Cloud performs the work that other engineers would do.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been positive. The pricing is affordable, and you do not need to pay for extended periods like annual payments. The month-to-month option was a very good experience for my organization.

My advice to others looking into North Cloud is that it is a good tool if you want to cut costs on cloud platforms and do not want to go into heavy integrations. I would recommend North Cloud to any tech business that needs to use cloud services and wants to save on cloud management and reduce waste management in the cloud.

In the next year or two, I hope to see North Cloud evolving with improved user interface features and perhaps a mobile application so that anyone can use it on a mobile device. That would be a winning solution for both consumers and the tool provider. I rate this product 9 out of 10.

I use North Cloud to optimize AWS costs and to receive alerts when costs become too high, and also to integrate it with FinOps, which helps me catch costs across the clouds I use.

For example, we had been getting overcharged for instances and EC2s that we do not use, which made our costs too high. North Cloud has been able to filter our usage patterns and then optimize to tell us exactly what is causing higher costs. Essentially, this is the challenge that North Cloud has been able to solve recently.

I also use North Cloud to receive alerts. For example, there are days when we experience a high peak, and North Cloud provides us an alert about the spike. This allows us to be very prepared for the incoming budget so that we do not get overcharged unexpectedly.

I appreciate that North Cloud's FinOps integration is straightforward. Even when you do not have basic knowledge, you can really integrate it, and it integrates with GCP and AWS. You do not have to hire a technical person; you just need to have an AWS account and a GCP account, and then you can connect and start optimizing costs.

What made the integration with North Cloud easy was that you only need to log in with AWS and log in with GCP, and then all the integration is going to work smoothly. Additionally, the clear documentation and guides are helpful; when you encounter a setback that might slow things down, you can reference the documentation and get things moving forward.

Another feature I would mention regarding North Cloud is the user interface. It has dashboards that show analytics in real time, so if I want to check the CPUs that I use in AWS or in GCP, instead of logging into AWS, I log into North Cloud, and it pulls the analytics in real time. I know exactly the resource usage, the CPU, and everything in one place, and the dashboard can be customized. I have the option of customizing what I want to see first and what I want to see last. Overall, the UI is very modern.

North Cloud has positively impacted our organization because we are aware of what we will incur in terms of the cost of using AWS or GCP. It has really helped us to save more, which was not happening in the past. Since using North Cloud, we have been able to save around 25% in costs, and in terms of time, it has saved us around 15% as well. Instead of logging into GCP and then into AWS, I log into North Cloud and pull all the data and analytics.

I think North Cloud can be improved by enhancing what we call client support. Currently, when you need to chat with an agent, you have to go through the chatbot, which sometimes tries to solve your problems, sometimes fails, and takes a lot of time to route you to a human agent. When you do reach a human agent, they are not responsive enough, so if they can fix the customer support, everything will be smooth.

North Cloud is accurate and provides good responses, but it often lacks what we call memory. Sometimes when you have a session or conversation and then log out, you realize that the AI is going to forget exactly where you were. The accuracy is adequate as far as how responses are generated, but the memory is something they need to improve.

North Cloud is stable. I have not seen any downtime in the tool.

North Cloud is scalable in a way that when you are growing your enterprise, it grows with you. It does not have to change pricing, and it does not have those surprise pricing increases that happen every day, so it is more scalable.

Customer support for North Cloud is great; they are friendly. Apart from what I reported earlier that they take a long time to respond, they are friendly people.

We have not used a different solution; we started with North Cloud, and we are still using it.

We have seen a return on investment of around 25%, which I was able to share previously as well.

Pricing for North Cloud is acceptable at $99 per month, which is affordable. I did not encounter any issue or challenge with pricing.

My advice to others looking into using North Cloud is that if you have the budget and you want to optimize the cost of AWS and Google Cloud and need a tool that does not require technical knowledge to set up, then North Cloud is the right tool for you. I would recommend it because it is affordable, it is scalable, and it is stable, backed with customer support that is very friendly. I would rate this product a 9 out of 10.

My main use case for North Cloud is to reduce AWS spend. A quick specific example of how I use North Cloud to reduce AWS spend is through discounted EC2 instances.

North Cloud has positively impacted my organization by reducing our AWS bill by 15%. This 15% reduction in my AWS bill has allowed us to increase our runway. I cannot share more about how increasing our runway has affected our business or operations.

I have found the integration very seamless and easy. The best features North Cloud offers are easy onboarding integration and a non-invasive business model.

I find the easy onboarding integration and non-invasive business model to be the best features because we were able to reduce spend on our AWS bill without using any internal employee hours and without worrying about any complicated account changes.

I think North Cloud could be improved with additional savings for more AWS services. I would like to see additional savings for RDS and data transfer, as that would help my organization.

I have been using North Cloud for two years.

North Cloud is stable.

North Cloud's scalability is great.

The customer support is great.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Deploying North Cloud in my environment was easy. My experience with the configuration process took five minutes. The procurement process was easy.

My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

I have seen a return on investment, but I cannot give you metrics.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was very easy, very fast, and simple.

Before choosing North Cloud, I did not evaluate other options.

North Cloud integrates very well with other AWS services I use. I do not have any thoughts about the metering and billing experience. I would advise others looking into using North Cloud that it is easy to get set up with, so they should give it a shot. I found this interview faster and have no suggestions for change. I gave this review a rating of 5.

Our primary use case for North Cloud was to take advantage of savings plans discounts from Amazon without being locked into long-term commitments or high upfront costs that would lower our velocity.

North Cloud was able to get us access to savings plans that cut approximately 20% from our monthly AWS costs. These savings plans were previously unavailable to us due to commitments that would lock us into specific server types for long periods of time. Due to changing load requirements, those savings plans were not viable for us with long-term commitments.

The most useful features have been the no-commitment savings plans access as well as the optimized environment impact interface. Getting an at-a-glance look at our carbon footprint from our AWS resources is a good addition to the main goal of the product, which is the no-commitment savings plans.

The only features missing from North Cloud that I believe would be helpful are ones that AWS themselves have yet to offer. For example, more expansive RDS / Database savings plans offerings. This isn't a limitation on the North side, as they were able to rapidly add support for the existing database savings plans offerings when they launched, but more of an AWS limitation.

We have been using the solution for 4 months.

We did not use a previous software tool for this functionality.

Leverage your AWS rep and convey to the North Team where your business is regarding stage and total engineering cost. They (North) will assist in making the plans work for your organization.

We evaluated a few other options, but their pricing structure and contract timings were not compatible with our organization.

The team is extremely helpful and communicative. Immediately upon working with them, they set up a Slack connect channel and give you a live line of communication with someone in their engineering team, sales team, and support team. Some organizations do this but then just mute the channel and ignore it. North Cloud is extremely reactive to any messages sent to this channel and even reaches out directly on Slack if something goes wrong with the savings plan, new features are launched, and to check how things are going. These are not worded or set up to sound like sales pitches but more like the organization and its individuals actually care about making sure you are being successful with their tool.

My main use case for North Cloud is that it really helps us with being a very lean team, being able to keep a handle and keep control of cost savings and make sure that we're leveraging those nice AWS cost savings related to compute savings plans, without us having to devote very valuable, actual hands-on-keyboard resource time to do all that.

North Cloud has positively impacted our organization with our MVP rollout; we're already seeing 10% shaved off of our monthly AWS bill, just by a few really quick and easy actions in North Cloud. It was really fast to get that set up, and it's really easy to verify it's in place. We don't have to worry about constantly revisiting a cost savings plan because we can see all that from North Cloud's dashboard, and we can trust that that is being handled well by them.

My team saves an immense amount of engineering time by not having to manually check cost savings plans or track spend; we're talking anywhere from maybe 10 hours a week that is just saved right there from not having to worry about that. It's huge for us as a lean team; North Cloud is super valuable in just allowing us to focus on where we add the most value to our organization and not have to worry about operational overhead such as cost savings plans.

North Cloud has changed the way we forecast or budget our AWS spending, and I feel more confident in our cloud financial planning now because we feel both more confident about future forecasting and also confident that we're allocating dollars where they should go. We can also find if dollars are allocated somewhere they shouldn't go, thanks to North Cloud.

The best features North Cloud offers include cost savings automation and handling all that, making it really great to have a cost savings expert in your corner when dealing with this. Even more than that, the dashboard they provide is an excellent resource for just getting bearings of spend across AWS accounts and across AWS services that sometimes can be difficult to extract with something such as Cost Explorer in AWS. We have actually found ourselves using North Cloud almost as much, if not more so, than Cost Explorer to review where cost is being accrued.

The dashboard in North Cloud is especially helpful because the drill-down into spend over time is a lot more intuitive. It can be kind of difficult in AWS; there's a 14-day window on resource-based dimension scoping for Cost Explorer graphs. There have been historic limitations, and with North Cloud, it's a lot easier to get those resource-level, deep-dive metrics. For example, if I need to see breakdowns of per-Lambda function, which Lambda functions are accruing the most spend, I can do that in Cost Explorer, but in North Cloud, it just feels a lot more intuitive and easier to get that data.

The way we use North Cloud in our workflow is we'll review the dashboard, which has a lot of really good insights into our total AWS spend for our linked accounts, but then also cost savings opportunities that North Cloud can support. We go through the dashboard, and to actually set up the savings plans is really simple. There could be some cases where maybe a cost spike pops up out of nowhere, and we actually want to address it; North Cloud's really good for that, too. I believe they also have an auto feature that lets them actually do all the cost savings automatically, but we like to have that just last verification check on our end to review cost savings.

I'm not really sure how North Cloud can be improved, but if I had to pick something, maybe some integrations with Slack or something, because it can be a bit difficult to jump around different panels. Working with a very lean team, we have to jump into multiple panels for logging, cloud, patching, and things like that. More integrations for a single-pane-of-glass-type plug-in for existing channels would be nice.

I don't think the improvements I mentioned would factor into my decision to not go with North Cloud; it would just be something where, if this was in place, it would be easier for me and my team to more proactively adopt the platform. It's already really easy to adopt, and it's very low-friction to get it all set up; we would just prefer to plug this into our existing monitoring channels.

I've been using North Cloud for about six to eight months now.

North Cloud seems pretty scalable; I haven't noticed any issues with downtime or not being able to access cost savings plans or anything. It's pretty stable.

I would rate the customer support from North Cloud a 10; they have very active support and it's very easy to talk to someone when something needs to be looked at or some question arises.

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution before choosing North Cloud.

It was very easy to deploy North Cloud in my environment; extremely easy.

My experience with the configuration process was that it was well-documented, supporting a variety of different deployment and configuration approaches such as Terraform and CloudFormation. I think there were even a couple of others, maybe such as a Chef playbook. I really appreciate how they offered multiple different approaches, and everything was automated, making it a lot easier to configure and deploy North Cloud.

Based on their unique billing approach of the percentage-of-money-saved-for-us billing approach, we saw an immediate ROI because it didn't take a whole lot of effort or engineering time to set it up. It was pretty straightforward and low friction, and we were able to see an immediate return pretty quickly.

My experience with the procurement process was very easy, from getting compliance-related documents to satisfy our own compliance requirements for vendor onboarding, to explanation of the pricing and the pricing itself, to just the sales team, their support, and active communication throughout the process. The experience was very good.

My thoughts about the metering and billing experience are that it was very straightforward; it was a big plus that it's not a fixed cost but based on how much they save you. I really appreciate that skin-in-the-game commitment of if they don't save you money, you don't have to really spend money. The more we save, the more they make, which shows a bigger incentive to save us more money, and we love that.

My advice to others looking into using North Cloud is that it's worth the shot because it's really easy to set up, and the billing is very agreeable. It's very low commitment, and with everything I've seen with North Cloud, it can only go good, so I would say dive in. I gave North Cloud an overall rating of 5 out of 5 stars.

We use North Cloud to identify cost savings that can be applied to our AWS account.

North Cloud has been a great partner in helping us navigate cloud cost savings.

The dashboard is really helpful in showing an overview snapshot of how our account is performing and the areas where we can take advantage of additional savings.

We have been using this solution for 8 months.

With our North Cloud account, we can take advantage of cost savings without committing to a contract, which makes it flexible for seasons when usage fluctuates.

The North Cloud team is very helpful and responsive when we have questions, and they do a great job at proactively reaching out to let us know of cost-saving opportunities.

The use case is Cost Management.

North has been an excellent partner in managing our AWS costs.

North Cloud procures Compute Savings Plans on our behalf, guided by a dashboard that highlights savings opportunities.

When we have oversubscribed on CSPs in one area, they proactively reach out with suggestions for reallocating those plans where they can do the most good.

North recently added support for database reservations, which would have been next on my wish list.

I look forward to their menu expanding as AWS adds additional savings vehicles.

I have used the solution for 18 months.

This is our first cost management platform.