Apptio One vs IBM Turbonomic comparison

Apptio and IBM are both solutions in the IT Financial Management category. Apptio is ranked #2, while IBM is ranked #1 with an average rating of 9.1. Apptio holds a 39.6% mindshare in IFM, compared to IBM’s 18.8% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Apptio users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Apptio One

Read 3 Apptio One reviews

1,081 Views
195 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

IBM Turbonomic

Read 205 IBM Turbonomic reviews

7,181 Views
215 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Apptio One

IBM Turbonomic

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 2, 2025

Apptio One and IBM Turbonomic compete in IT financial management and operations. Apptio One has an advantage with its intuitive pricing model and strong support, whereas IBM Turbonomic appears superior due to its powerful features justifying its cost.

Features: Apptio One provides cost transparency, decision support, and comprehensive financial insights into IT investments. IBM Turbonomic focuses on resource optimization, application performance, and offers dynamic automated resource management, enhancing efficiency.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Apptio One has a straightforward deployment process and responsive customer support, simplifying its integration. IBM Turbonomic is recognized for diverse adaptable deployment models supporting various IT environments, despite a more complex setup.

Pricing and ROI: Apptio One offers a clear pricing structure with a moderate initial setup cost, generating ROI through better financial management and cost reductions. IBM Turbonomic requires a higher initial investment, promising ROI via resource efficiency and operational improvements.

To learn more, read our detailed Apptio One vs. IBM Turbonomic Report (Updated: January 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Apptio One vs. IBM Turbonomic

January 2026

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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

Apptio One

Ranking in IT Financial Management

2nd

Ranking in Cloud Cost Management

9th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

IBM Turbonomic

Ranking in IT Financial Management

1st

Ranking in Cloud Cost Management

1st

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

205

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Migration (3rd), Cloud Management (4th), Virtualization Management Tools (4th), IT Operations Analytics (5th), Cloud Analytics (1st), AIOps (11th)

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the IT Financial Management category, the mindshare of Apptio One is 39.6%, down from 45.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 18.8%, down from 37.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

IT Financial Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
IBM Turbonomic	18.8%
Apptio One	39.6%
Other	41.599999999999994%

IT Financial Management

Featured Reviews

Neil Anson

Global IT Financial Architect at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

A highly stable and scalable solution that provides good out-of-the-box reporting

I am using the latest version of Apptio One. Apptio One is deployed on-cloud in our organization. Apptio One's maintenance involves validating the model and the monthly data loads. I would recommend Apptio One to other users. Before choosing Apptio One, users should ensure they align their use cases to achieve specific and measurable targets. Overall, I rate Apptio One ten out of ten.

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Dan Ambrose

Infrastructure Engineer 4 at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

Helps visibility, bridges the data gap, and frees up time

We use IBM Turbonomic in a hybrid cloud environment. Although it supports multi-cloud capabilities, we currently operate in a single-cloud setting. Turbonomic offers visibility into our environment's performance, spanning across applications, underlying infrastructure, and protection resources. The visibility and analytics help to bridge the data gap between disparate IT teams such as applications and infrastructure. This is important for awareness collaboration, cost saving, and helping to design and improve our application. Enhanced visibility and data analytics have contributed to a significant reduction in our mean time to resolve. Tools like Turbonomic provide crucial visualization and insights, empowering us to make data-driven decisions instead of relying on assumptions as we did before. This newfound transparency translates to a massive improvement, going from complete darkness to having a clear 100 percent view of the situation. Although our applications are not optimized for the cloud we have seen some improvement in response time. IBM Turbonomic empowers us to achieve more with fewer people thanks to automation. Previously, customers frequently contacted us requesting resource increases to resolve issues. Now, we have a tool that allows us to objectively assess their needs, leading to a deeper understanding of our applications. This solution also generates significant cost savings in the cloud and optimizes hardware utilization within our data centers. Its AI algorithm intelligently allocates servers on hosts, maximizing efficiency without compromising performance. By fine-tuning resource allocation without causing performance bottlenecks, Turbonomic extends the lifespan of existing hardware, postponing the need for new purchases. This effectively stretches our capital expenditure budget. We started to see the benefits of IBM Turbonomic within the first 60 days. IBM is a fantastic partner. Their tech support has been outstanding, and the product itself is excellent - a very solid offering. By automating resource management with Turbonomic, our engineers are freed up to focus on more strategic initiatives like innovation and ongoing organizational projects. Previously, manually adding resources was a time-consuming process that interrupted workflows. Now, automation handles scaling efficiently, saving us thousands of man-hours and significant costs. It has illuminated the need for SetOps. It has highlighted areas of overspending, and the actions we've taken have demonstrated significant cost savings. IBM Turbonomic has positively impacted our overall application performance. IBM Turbonomic has helped reduce both CAPEX and OPEX. It has also significantly reduced cloud build times.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"With Apptio One, the advantage lies in its no-code approach, eliminating the need to write scripts for data retrieval."

"The TBM model and the out-of-the-box reporting are the most valuable features of Apptio One."

"Its most significant value lies in its ease of use which extends to both configuration and the subsequent deployment of additional components."

"In our organization, optimizing application performance is a continuous process that is beyond human scale. We would not be able to do the number of actions that Turbonomic takes on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. It is humanly impossible with the little micro adjustments that it can make. That is a huge differentiator. If you just figure each action could take anywhere very conservatively from five to 10 minutes to act upon, then you multiply that out by thousands of actions every month, it is easily something where you could say, "I am saving a couple of FTEs.""

"We like that Turbonomic shows application metrics and estimates the impact of taking a suggested action. It provides us a map of resource utilization as part of its recommendation. We evaluate and compare that to what we think would be appropriate from a human perspective to that what Turbonomic is doing, then take the best action going forward."

"Turbonomic helps us right-size virtual machines to utilize the available infrastructure components available and suggest where resources should exist. We also use the predictive tool to forecast what will happen when we add additional compute-demanding virtual machines or something to the environment. It shows us how that would impact existing resources. All of that frees up time that would otherwise be spent on manual calculation."

"My favorite part of the solution is the automation scheduling. Being able to choose when actions happen, and how they happen..."

"Rightsizing is valuable. Its recommendations are pretty good."

"I have the ability to automate things similar to the Orchestrator stuff. I do have the ability to have it do some balancing, and if it sees some different performance metrics that I've set not being met, it'll actually move some of my virtual machines from, let's say, one host to another. It is sort of an automation tool that helps me. Basically, I specify the metric, and if I get a certain host or something being over-utilized, it'll automatically move the virtual machines around for me. It basically has to snap into my vCenter and then it can make adjustments and move my virtual machines around. It also has some very nice reporting tools built around virtual machines. It tells you how much storage, memory, or CPU is being used monthly, and then it gives you a very nice way to be able to send out billing structure to your end users who use servers within your environment."

"The proactive monitoring of all our open enrollment applications has improved our organization. We have used it to size applications that we are moving to the cloud. Therefore, when we move them out there, we have them appropriately sized. We use it for reporting to current application owners, showing them where they are wasting money. There are easy things to find for an application, e.g., they decommissioned the server, but they never took care of the storage. Without a tool like this, that storage would just sit there forever, with us getting billed for it."

"The tool provides the ability to look at the consumption utilization over a period of time and determine if we need to change that resource allocation based on the actual workload consumption, as opposed to how IT has configured it. Therefore, we have come to realize that a lot of our workloads are overprovisioned, and we are spending more money in the public cloud than we need to."

More IBM Turbonomic pros

Cons

"Encouraging or providing more out-of-the-box solutions that cater to a wider audience could enhance the overall effectiveness of the application."

"However, a notable challenge is the requirement to obtain consistent raw data, especially when operating in multiple regions with varying data sets. Each region may have distinct field names or data setups, necessitating the standardization of data before loading it into Apptio One. In Apptio One, there are areas for improvement, particularly in addressing potential bugs. An instance of this is observed when transitioning changes from the development region to the staging or production region. In instances with larger datasets, the calculation process may experience delays. Once the calculation concludes, the process proceeds to the subsequent region, whether it be staging or production."

"The solution's reporting layer, advanced conditional formatting, and reporting features could be improved."

"Before IBM bought it, the support was fantastic. After IBM bought it, the support became very disappointing."

"The management interface seems to be designed for high-resolution screens. Somebody with a smaller-resolution screen might not like the web interface. I run a 4K monitor on it, so everything fits on the screen. With a lower resolution like 1080, you need to scroll a lot. Everything is in smaller windows. It doesn't seem to be designed for smaller screens."

"The implementation could be enhanced."

"The issue for us with the automation is we are considering starting to do the hot adds, but there are some problems with Windows Server 2019 and hot adds. It is a little buggy. So, if we turn that on with a cluster that has a lot of Windows 2019 Servers, then we would see a blue screen along with a lot of applications as well. Depending on what you are adding, cores or memory, it doesn't necessarily even take advantage of that at that moment. A reboot may be required, and we can't do that until later. So, that decreases the benefit of the real-time. For us, there is a lot of risk with real-time."

"There is room for improvement [with] upgrades. We have deployed the newer version, version 8 of Turbonomic. The problem is that there is no way to upgrade between major Turbonomic versions. You can upgrade minor versions without a problem, but when you go from version 6 to version 7, or version 7 to version 8, you basically have to deploy it new and let it start gathering data again. That is a problem because all of the data, all of the savings calculations that had been done on the old version, are gone. There's no way to keep track of your lifetime savings across versions."

"The reporting needs to be improved. It's important for us to know and be able to look back on what happened and why certain decisions were made, and we want to use a custom report for this."

"The old interface was not the clearest UI in some areas, and could be quite intimidating when first using the tool."

"It would be good for Turbonomic, on their side, to integrate with other companies like AppDynamics or SolarWinds or other monitoring softwares. I feel that the actual monitoring of applications, mixed in with their abilities, would help. That would be the case wherever Turbonomic lacks the ability to monitor an application or in cases where applications are so customized that it's not going to be able to handle them. There is monitoring that you can do with scripting that you may not be able to do with Turbonomic."

More IBM Turbonomic cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Apptio One is an expensive solution."

"Regarding the pricing structure for various products within Apptio, such as APE One or APE One Plus, the cost is intricately tied to the selected license. There are two distinct types of licenses available. Opting for the basic license provides access to APT1, while an alternative license, known as APL One Plus, encompasses additional features like Cloudability and other components. The specific features accessible depend on the chosen license."

"It comes with a considerable cost."

"Everybody tells me the pricing is high. But the ROIs are great."

"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."

"Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced."

"Licensing is per socket, so load up on the cores rather than a lot of lower core CPUs."

"What I can advise is to trial the product, taking advantage of the Turbonomic pre-sales implemention support and kickstart training."

"It's worth the time and money investment if you can afford it."

"I know there have been some issues with the billing, when the numbers were first proposed, as to how much we would save. There was a huge miscommunication on our part. Turbonomic was led to believe that we could optimize our AWS footprint, because we didn't know we couldn't. So, we were promised savings of $750,000. Then, when we came to implement Turbonomic, the developers in AWS said, "Absolutely not. You're not putting that in our environment. We can't scale down anything because they coded it." Our AWS environment is a legacy environment. It has all these old applications, where all the developers who have made it are no longer with the company. Those applications generate a ton of money for us. So, if one breaks, we are really in trouble and they didn't want to have to deal with an environment that was changing and couldn't be supported. That number went from $750,000 to about $450,000. However, that wasn't Turbonomic's fault."

"If you're a super-small business, it may be a little bit pricey for you... But in large, enterprise companies where money is, maybe, less of an issue, Turbonomic is not that expensive. I can't imagine why any big company would not buy it, for what it does."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

10%

Government

University

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	41
Midsize Enterprise	57
Large Enterprise	147

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Turbonomic?

It offers different scenarios. It provides more capabilities than many other tools available. Typically, its price is set as a percentage of the consumption of some of our customers' services. The ...

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What needs improvement with Turbonomic?

The implementation could be enhanced.

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What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?

We use IBM Turbonomic to automate our cloud operations, including monitoring, consolidating dashboards, and reporting. This helps us get a consolidated view of all customer spending into a single d...

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Compared 7% of the time

PerfectScale vs Apptio One

Compared 6% of the time

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Compared 6% of the time

Spot by Flexera vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 5% of the time

IBM Kubecost vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 4% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 3% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Apptio One vs. IBM Turbonomic

January 2026

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Buyer's Guide

IBM Turbonomic

January 2026

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Also Known As

No data available

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

Apptio

IBM

Overview

ApptioOne unifies financial and operational data into a unified model built on the industry-standard taxonomy of cost categorization. Utilizing sophisticated allocation rules along with focused metrics and KPIs, we enable organizations to answer the most strategic questions about investments and accelerate budgeting and forecasting processes. By explaining investments and variance to plan more quickly to constituencies and executive management, organizations can uncover opportunities to optimize cost structures, reduce risk, and accelerate growth.

Apptio

IBM Turbonomic enhances IT efficiency with automation, capacity planning, and reporting features, enabling organizations to optimize resource utilization and improve performance through advanced workload management and scenario analysis.

IBM Turbonomic equips organizations with robust capabilities for dynamic resource allocation and informed decision-making. Its planning module provides scenario analysis, right-sizing recommendations, and a customizable dashboard for tailored insights. Automation features improve workload placements and resource efficiency, while forecasting capabilities enhance performance. Simulation of environments helps in decision-making, leading to significant savings in cloud and hardware management. There is a need for a more intuitive interface, enhanced navigation, and improved customization in reporting with integration potential with third-party applications. Transition to the HTML5 interface and stronger training resources are among anticipated improvements.

What are the key features of IBM Turbonomic?

Automation: Automates workload placement and dynamic resource allocation to boost efficiency.
Capacity Planning: Provides scenario analysis and right-sizing for optimal resource use.
Customizable Dashboard: Offers tailored insights for organization needs.
Forecasting: Enhances decision-making through resource-use predictions.
Simulation Capabilities: Aids in assessing savings and performance gains.

What benefits and ROI should be evaluated?

Cost Optimization: Reduces spending on cloud and hardware resources.
Enhanced Performance: Promotes consistent application performance and resource efficiency.
Improved Decision-Making: Supports informed choices with scenario simulation.
Flexibility and Scalability: Assists with workload migrations and resource management across environments.

IBMTurbonomic is implemented across industries such as cloud management and virtualization, helping organizations balance clusters, optimize virtual machine performance, and manage Azure configurations. In resource-monitored environments like VMware and XenServer, its features facilitate load balancing, VM rightsizing, and automation shutoffs. Industries can rely on its insights for cost-saving measures, ensuring efficient resource allocation for hybrid and cloud environments.

IBM

Sample Customers

Nationwide Building Society, State of Washington, Nationwide Building Society, DIRECTV, CME Group, Swiss Re, Cox Automotive

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.

Buyer's Guide

Apptio One vs. IBM Turbonomic

January 2026

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