Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

AWS Cost Explorer vs Cloudability comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 16, 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

AWS Cost Explorer
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
11th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Financial Data Analysis Platforms (3rd)
Cloudability
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
3rd
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Cloud Cost Management category, the mindshare of AWS Cost Explorer is 2.7%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cloudability is 6.7%, down from 12.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Cost Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Cloudability6.7%
AWS Cost Explorer2.7%
Other90.6%
Cloud Cost Management
 

Featured Reviews

Andrea-Carella - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps Engineer at GFT Group
Has provided valuable cost insights but could improve in filtering options
AWS Cost Explorer is used to visualize, analyze, and manage spending on the cloud. It can also make a forecast on how much you will spend and gives you information about past costs you had in the cloud in various regions for various different tools. For example, you can see how much it will cost to use a specific product in the future. You can also set a timeline for how much you will use that product to see the effective amount of money you are going to spend. You can compare various tools in order to see which are the most suited tools for your needs and which are the most expensive. You can filter by region and by specific product in order to see which costs are the most important in your organization and cloud environment. You can identify what is not necessary and what you can reduce. It has many good features that you can use with best practices. You can integrate AWS Cost Explorer, and it gives you a better overview of all the related aspects to the costing part of your infrastructure. AWS Cost Explorer is beneficial because you can access a simple interface where you can get an overview of all the costs you have in the cloud environment. You can see which costs you can reduce and how you can move from a specific product to another product in order to reduce costs and improve other aspects. It depends on the specific needs of the organization, but the most important advantage AWS Cost Explorer gives you is the ability to have a clear understanding of your cloud spending.
reviewer2795433 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Cloud Operations Lead at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Gained multi-cloud cost visibility and have optimized spend with detailed reports and rightsizing
The IAM feature is something that we struggle with using. IBM, the company that runs Cloudability, released the Groups feature back in the summer of 2025. While Groups can be used in some parts of the tool, it can't be used across the entire tool. I've found that Groups is basically unusable because if it can't be used everywhere, you would have to run both group-based access control and direct user-based access control at the same time, which doesn't make any sense. The Groups feature has improved over time, but it's still not something we feel we can use on an everyday basis, so the IAM section remains an issue right now. Most of the tool is very well-functioning and developed, and that's the only real improvement area that we've seen.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I find the forecasting feature particularly valuable as it helps predict future expenses."
"AWS Cost Explorer is beneficial because you can access a simple interface where you can get an overview of all the costs you have in the cloud environment."
"Cloudability positively impacts my organization by allowing for greater cost observability, which then drives better spending decisions and reduces costs."
"The tool helps us to resize on AWS correctly."
"Cloudability's customizable alerts help me maintain budgetary goals by providing recommendations and alerts on slot usages."
"Transparency and visibility are the key features."
"Cloudability has positively impacted my organization as it helps us understand cost utilization, make corrections, and understand the forecasting of the cost."
"It provides us visibility, then we can turn around and can give the leadership team more information, which we could not previously give them."
"Cloudability takes care of identifying and managing the cloud."
"All the tagging and mapping, which helps to create some virtual tags are useful features."
 

Cons

"While there is always room for improvement, any needs for enhancement depend on specific requirements at the time. Currently, I cannot pinpoint any specific improvements needed."
"One disadvantage of AWS Cost Explorer is that you cannot filter too much. You cannot filter data by more than one variable."
"The IAM feature is something that we struggle with using."
"We would like them to have a linear regression, so we can be predictive for budgets, allocations, and the year's follow ups. We also want to have a longer window of analytics with better certainty that our workload will fit the model, not just in a two week window."
"We have dealt with a few technical support people where we ask for one thing and they might not deliver straightaway. It seems like they are a stretched across multiple customers."
"There is always room for improvement in education and training. We are not that mature in terms of our automation. It could help us identify where we could optimize in terms of build."
"The API is not well-documented. It is not straightforward and difficult to use. This needs to be improved, as it is very difficult for our developers to develop automation around it."
"In general, I feel Cloudability wasn't able to support many resources."
"My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was adequate, but it could be made better."
"There are also some limitations with the dashboards and data representation in Cloudability."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"It justifies the cost and is worth it."
"We have seen ROI with the reserved instances, and having the ability to predict what reserved instances you can get. We can save tens of thousands of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cases."
"Cloudability is a bit expensive."
"My team is one of the most expensive teams, and we look at it quite a bit. We have probably easily saved around $400,000 USD a year."
"The price of the license or the usage is a percentage of the top consumption. So it varies from year to year."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Cost Management solutions are best for your needs.
881,665 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
9%
Retailer
7%
Energy/Utilities Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise13
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with AWS Cost Explorer?
One disadvantage of AWS Cost Explorer is that you cannot filter too much. You cannot filter data by more than one variable. It depends on the specific permissions you assign to the group that will ...
What is your primary use case for AWS Cost Explorer?
We have been handling all of the AWS infrastructure for the customer for maybe two years.
What do you like most about Cloudability?
The most crucial feature in reducing my cloud costs has been the rightsizing recommendations, along with the dashboards that track reserved instance spending coverage and utilization. As for Clouda...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudability?
Pricing and setup cost for Cloudability are good. Compared to the rest of the industry, they may be a little more expensive than some other FinOps tools, but that's to be expected because they have...
What needs improvement with Cloudability?
The IAM feature is something that we struggle with using. IBM, the company that runs Cloudability, released the Groups feature back in the summer of 2025. While Groups can be used in some parts of ...
 

Also Known As

Reserved Instance Reporting
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Adobe, Uber, Pega, imgur, Pixable, Blackboard, Keboola, Avalara
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Cost Explorer vs. Cloudability and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,665 professionals have used our research since 2012.