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AWS Cost Management [EOL] vs IBM Turbonomic comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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 Management [EOL]
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM Turbonomic
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), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (11th)
 

Featured Reviews

RANJAN KUMAR - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps Engineer at ZoomOps Technology
Helps to set cost thresholds and receive alerts if the actual cost exceeds them
We regularly check the status of services to identify any unnecessary or unexpected costs. We utilize the billing dashboard in AWS to monitor daily costs and assess any significant increases. For instance, if our daily AWS expenses usually amount to $1,000 for running a hundred instances, and suddenly it spikes to $1,500, we investigate the reasons behind the increase. We scrutinize detailed reports, identify the areas and services contributing to the rise, and inform our manager. The dashboard overview in AWS Cost Explorer provides a high-level summary of our expenses, covering databases. This includes total costs, daily costs, and a breakdown by services. AWS Cost Explorer offers visualization tools like line charts, bar charts, and pie charts. These visualizations assist us in quickly understanding expenditures, enabling us to pinpoint areas that might need attention. The tool allows the creation of custom reports by selecting and configuring filtering and grouping options. Custom reports include a data range selector, making it easy to analyze expenses for specific periods such as daily, monthly, or custom durations. The budget feature is client-dependent. Before creating any services, we engage with our client to understand their requirements, such as the number of instances, CPU, and memory needed. Subsequently, we create a budgeting tool in servers based on these specifications. Our team configures custom notifications to alert us when actual costs or usage exceed predefined thresholds. These alerts can be sent via email or integrated with Simple Notification Service. I rate the overall product a ten out of ten.
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

"The initial setup wasn't complex at all."
"AWS Cost Management is good for providing in-depth information in one place."
"With the cost management tool, clients can optimize fine tuning their consumption."
"All of the reporting features are very good, as they allow us to track monthly expenses and send relevant emails."
"The product provides the ability to set cost limits and budgets for a set of resources on the network."
"The initial setup was straightforward. It's not complex at all."
"I like the recommendation we get from AWS Cost Management to use a particular image or VM type."
"The budgeting tool of AWS Cost Management is the most valuable feature."
"It helps us get a consolidated view of all customer spending into a single dashboard, allowing us to identify opportunities to improve their current spending."
"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."
"Rightsizing is valuable. Its recommendations are pretty good."
"I like the analytics that help us optimize compatibility. Whereas Azure Advisor tells us what we have to do, Turbonomic has automation which actually does those things. That means we don't have to be present to get them done and simplifies our IT engineers' jobs."
"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 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."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"AWS could improve the compatibility with other products."
"I would like to see AWS Cost Management be more precise in their calculations."
"AWS Cost Management has fewer features compared to Azure Cost Management."
"We need finer-grained control over the roles and policies for users, specifying their permissions as to what they can look at."
"I would like to see the forecasting models improved with AWS Cost Management."
"The solution needs to have its own dashboard for seeing details on it. It should be customizable as well so I have the ability to pull up the information I need to see and have it in one place for my reference. I should just be able to click and see everything I need in one step."
"This program is not very scalable."
"Data transfer between S3 buckets within AWS incurs costs, especially when moving data from one bucket to another or downloading data."
"I would like Turbonomic to add more services, especially in the cloud area. I have already told them this. They can add Azure NetApp Files. They can add Azure Blob storage. They have already added Azure App service, but they can do more."
"They could add a few more reports. They could also be a bit more granular. While they have reports, sometimes it is hard to figure out what you are looking for just by looking at the date."
"The implementation could be enhanced."
"While the product is fairly intuitive and easy to use once you learn it, it can be quite daunting until you have undergone a bit of training."
"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 GUI and policy creation have room for improvement. There should be a better view of some of the numbers that are provided and easier to access. And policy creation should have it easier to identify groups."
"There are a few things that we did notice. It does kind of seem to run away from itself a little bit. It does seem to have a mind of its own sometimes. It goes out there and just kind of goes crazy. There needs to be something that kind of throttles things back a little bit. I have personally seen where we've been working on things, then pulled servers out of the VMware cluster and found that Turbonomic was still trying to ship resources to and from that node. So, there has to be some kind of throttling or ability for it to not be so buggy in that area. Because we've pulled nodes out of a cluster into maintenance mode, then brought it back up, and it tried to put workloads on that outside of a cluster. There may be something that is available for this, but it seems very kludgy to me."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's pricing depends on our services."
"We get AWS Cost Management for free because we use AWS services."
"The product is affordable."
"AWS Cost Management is free to use."
"We have signed a long-term contract with AWS. There are different service levels that will determine the level of support you have."
"In the last year, Turbonomic has reduced our cloud costs by $94,000."
"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."
"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."
"You should understand the cost of your physical servers and how much time and money you are spending year over year on expanding your virtual farm."
"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."
"The pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."
"I consider the pricing to be high."
"We see ROI in extended support agreements (ESA) for old software. Migration activities seem to be where Turbonomic has really benefited us the most. It's one click and done. We have new machines ready to go with Turbonomic, which are properly sized instead of somebody sitting there with a spreadsheet and guessing. So, my return on investment would certainly be on currency, from a software and hardware perspective."
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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
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business41
Midsize Enterprise57
Large Enterprise147
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about AWS Cost Management?
The tool's cost management feature provides a comprehensive view of AWS costs, allowing us to plan and make cost-effective decisions. With AWS Cost Explorer, we can perform cost planning, generate ...
What needs improvement with AWS Cost Management?
Data transfer between S3 buckets within AWS incurs costs, especially when moving data from one bucket to another or downloading data.
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

Amazon Cost Management
Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Hess, Expedia, Kelloggs, Philips, HyperTrack
IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM, Nutanix, Apptio and others in Cloud Cost Management. Updated: December 2025.
881,114 professionals have used our research since 2012.