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Apptio One vs IBM Turbonomic comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 2, 2025

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
10th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
4.9
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM Turbonomic
Ranking in IT Financial Management
1st
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (2nd), Cloud Management (4th), Virtualization Management Tools (3rd), IT Operations Analytics (10th), Cloud Analytics (1st), AIOps (17th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 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 31.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Financial Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Turbonomic18.8%
Apptio One39.6%
Other41.599999999999994%
IT Financial Management
 

Featured Reviews

Jerry J - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at IBM
Cost transparency has improved and finance and IT now share detailed TCO insights
I am mostly concerned about the development side. The development side is very user-friendly, so I would not say there are major factors that the product needs improvement in. However, sometimes with the number of users using the system, there might be a lag in system performance. There might be some slowness for the report to load. If a more significant number of users are consolidating on a single report and that single report has not been promoted to production yet, there is a possibility that it could take some time to load. That is the only challenge I have experienced as a developer.
reviewer1446966 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
The solution reduced our operational expenditures and is able to identify points before we even noticed them
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. When I change the resolution to 1080, I only see half of what I would on my big 4K monitor. It would be annoying to have to scroll to see the flow chart. They have a flow chart that goes top to bottom like a tree. On a lower resolution, it might be nice if that scrolls horizontally because it's long, narrow, and tall. It's only three icons wide, but it's 15 icons tall. I think it would be helpful to have the ability to change that for a smaller screen and customize the widget.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The TBM model and the out-of-the-box reporting are the most valuable features of Apptio One."
"In short, it helps finance, business, and IT people speak in a common language."
"Its most significant value lies in its ease of use which extends to both configuration and the subsequent deployment of additional components."
"The auto resource leveling on my hyper-v cluster saves my staff so much time on monitoring and performance tuning."
"We keep it because we see ROI."
"It has allowed our IT organization to keep investments in hardware flat for a projected three year period, and we have seen a 30% performance improvement overall."
"We have saved more from cost avoidance on a recent expansion than the product will cost over three years."
"It allows our small team manage a larger infrastructure because we can focus our efforts in other areas."
"The direct impact is that we decided to expand our platform and I needed specific numbers to see how a specific node would impact our environment, we were able to get specific reporting."
"Cost effective solution that works."
"Using this product helps us to reduce performance risk because it shows us where resources are needed but not yet allocated."
 

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, sometimes with the number of users using the system, there might be a lag in system performance."
"The solution's reporting layer, advanced conditional formatting, and reporting features could be improved."
"We were affected by a bug in a release. This did result in unplanned downtime for us."
"The arithmetic for optimizing the resource of VMs based on the workload. Some of workload are by a monthly basis. Need to consider the month-end or Q-end workload."
"Due to the planner feature's breadth of scenarios it can be a little confusing to get the right result for the scenario you need."
"We have no ROI so far."
"The only areas of improvement that I could think of at this moment in time is to just give it a fresh look, their new UI is currently in Beta but it looks very promising."
"Email alerts could be more comprehensive."
"Turbonomic doesn't do storage placement how I would prefer. We use multiple shared storage volumes on VMware, so I don't have one big disk. I have lots of disks that I can place VMs on, and that consumes IOPS from the disk subsystem. We were getting recommendations to provision a new volume."
"Licensing is easy to understand when you have an existing environment but determining growth or greenfield implementations may be difficult to get the right amount of licensing."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It comes with a considerable cost."
"Apptio One is an expensive solution."
"The pricing and licensing are fair. We purchase based on benchmark pricing, which we have been able to get. There are no surprise charges nor hidden fees."
"What I can advise is to trial the product, taking advantage of the Turbonomic pre-sales implemention support and kickstart training."
"I have not seen Turbonomic's new pricing since IBM purchased it. When we were looking at it in my previous company before IBM's purchase, it was compatible with other tools."
"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."
"When we have expanded our licensing, it has always been easy to make an ROI-based decision. So, it's reasonably priced. We would like to have it cheaper, but we get more benefit from it than we pay for it. At the end of the day, that's all you can hope for."
"Everybody tells me the pricing is high. But the ROIs are great."
"It was an annual buy-in. You basically purchase it based on your host type stuff. The buy-in was about 20K, and the annual maintenance is about $3,000 a year."
"I consider the pricing to be high."
report
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business41
Midsize Enterprise57
Large Enterprise147
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Apptio One?
I am mostly concerned about the development side. The development side is very user-friendly, so I would not say there are major factors that the product needs improvement in. However, sometimes wi...
What is your primary use case for Apptio One?
With Apptio One, we provide IT cost transparency to the end users. We source different data from various sources and maintain them in backend tables. We then perform transformations to align the da...
What advice do you have for others considering Apptio One?
We have different metrics created, and when taking a cost model, it primarily follows TBM Taxonomy, which is based upon the ATUM structure. TBM Taxonomy has several layers. For example, how the cos...
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 ...
What needs improvement with Turbonomic?
The implementation could be enhanced.
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...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

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.
Find out what your peers are saying about Apptio One vs. IBM Turbonomic and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.