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AWS Cost Explorer vs IBM Turbonomic comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 22, 2026

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)
IBM Turbonomic
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (5th), Cloud Management (4th), Virtualization Management Tools (5th), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (11th), Cloud Analytics (1st), AIOps (15th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Cloud Cost Management category, the mindshare of AWS Cost Explorer is 2.9%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 6.3%, down from 14.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Cost Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Turbonomic6.3%
AWS Cost Explorer2.9%
Other90.8%
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.
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

"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."
"I find the forecasting feature particularly valuable as it helps predict future expenses."
"It has automated a lot of things. We have saved 30 to 35 percent in human resource time and cost, which is pretty substantial. We don't have a big workforce here, so we have to use all the automation we can get."
"The biggest value I'm getting out of VMTurbo right now is the complete hands-off management of equalizing the usage in my data center."
"I only deal with the infrastructure side, so I really couldn't speak to more than load balancing as the most valuable feature for me. It provides specific actions that prevent resource starvation. It always keeps things in perfect balance."
"On-premises, one advantage I find particularly appealing is the ability to create policies for automatic CPU and memory scaling based on demand."
"It became obvious to us that there was a lot more being offered in the product that we could leverage to ensure our VMware environment was running efficiently."
"The recommendation of the family types is a huge help because it has saved us a lot of money. We use it primarily for that. Another thing that Turbonomic provides us with is a single platform that manages the full application stack and that's something I really like."
"It is a good holistic platform that is easy to use. It works pretty well."
"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."
 

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 implementation could be enhanced."
"The way it handles updates needs to be improved."
"Additional interfaces would be helpful."
"The one point is the reporting. We do have reports out of it, but they're not the level of graphical detail I would like."
"After running this solution in production for a year, we may want a more granular approach to how we utilize the product because we are planning to use some of its metrics to feed into our financial system."
"There is an opportunity for improvement with some of Turbonomic's permissions internally for role-based access control. We would like the ability to come up with some customized permissions or scope permissions a bit differently than the product provides."
"It can be more agnostic in terms of the solutions that it provides. It can include some other cost-saving methods for the public cloud and SaaS applications as well."
"Recovering resources when they're not needed is not as optimized as it could be."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"I don't know the current prices, but I like how the licensing is based on the number of instances instead of sockets, clusters, or cores. We have some VMs that are so heavy I can only fit four on one server. It's not cost-effective if we have to pay more for those. When I move around a VM SQL box with 30 cores and a half-terabyte of RAM, I'm not paying for an entire socket and cores where people assume you have at least 10 or 20 VMs on that socket for that pricing."
"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."
"I consider the pricing to be high."
"The product is fairly priced right now. Given its capabilities, it is excellently priced. We think that the product will become self-funding because we will be able to maximize our resources, which will help us from a capacity perspective. That should save us money in the long run."
"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."
"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."
"I'm not involved in any of the billing, but my understanding is that is fairly expensive."
"The pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Healthcare Company
11%
Insurance Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
6%
 

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 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 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

Reserved Instance Reporting
Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Cost Explorer vs. IBM Turbonomic and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.