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AWS Cost Explorer vs IBM Turbonomic 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
12th
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 (6th), Cloud Management (5th), Virtualization Management Tools (4th), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (5th), Cloud Analytics (1st), AIOps (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Cloud Cost Management category, the mindshare of AWS Cost Explorer is 2.5%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 6.2%, down from 14.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Cost Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM Turbonomic6.2%
AWS Cost Explorer2.5%
Other91.3%
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.
Dan Ambrose - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

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."
"The most important feature to us is an objective measurement of VM headroom per cluster. In addition, the ability to check for the right-sizing of VMs."
"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 biggest value I'm getting out of VMTurbo right now is the complete hands-off management of equalizing the usage in my data center."
"The most valuable features are the cluster utilization reports and the resource capacity planning. We can simulate how much capacity we can add to the current resources. The individual DM reports and VM-facing recommendations report are also helpful."
"We've saved hundreds of hours. Most of the time those hours would have to be after hours as well, which are more valuable to me as that's my personal time."
"We have seen a 30% performance improvement overall."
"The ability to monitor and automate both the right-sizing of VMs as well as to automate the vMotion of VMs across ESXi hosts."
"The notifications saying, "This is a corrective action," even though some of them can be automated, are always welcome to see. They summarize your entire infrastructure and how you can better utilize it. That is the biggest feature."
 

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."
"We don't use Turbonomic for FinOps and part of the reason is its cost reporting. The reporting could be much more robust and, if that were the case, I could pitch it for FinOps."
"Recovering resources when they're not needed is not as optimized as it could be."
"The old interface was not the clearest UI in some areas, and could be quite intimidating when first using the tool."
"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."
"I do not like Turbonomic's new licensing model. The previous model was pretty straightforward, whereas the new model incorporates what most of the vendors are doing now with cores and utilization. Our pricing under the new model will go up quite a bit. Before, it was pretty straightforward, easy to understand, and reasonable."
"In Azure, it's not what you're using. You purchase the whole 8 TB disk and you pay for it. It doesn't matter how much you're using. So something that I've asked for from Turbonomic is recommendations based on disk utilization. In the example of the 8 TB disk where only 200 GBs are being used, based on the history, there should be a recommendation like, "You can safely use a 500 GB disk." That would create a lot of savings."
"Remove the need for special in-house knowledge and development."
"I like the detail I get in the old user interface and will miss some of that in the new interface when we perform our planned upgrade soon."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"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."
"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."
"We felt the pricing was very fair for the product. It is in no way prohibitive for larger deployments, unlike other similar product on the market."
"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."
"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."
"Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance 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 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: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.