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CoreStack 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

CoreStack
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
17th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
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 (3rd), Cloud Management (4th), Virtualization Management Tools (4th), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (5th), Cloud Analytics (1st), AIOps (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Cloud Cost Management category, the mindshare of CoreStack is 1.1%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 6.3%, down from 14.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Cost Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM Turbonomic6.3%
CoreStack1.1%
Other92.6%
Cloud Cost Management
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2783919 - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Vice President at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Cost reports have driven accurate AWS workload optimization and continue to guide savings
I can suggest improvements for CoreStack, especially regarding reporting periods. I noticed that some of the cost optimization reports generated potential savings while considering systems that have only maximum utilization of 1% or 2%. The recommendations made in CoreStack to delete a machine have the potential to generate major cost savings, but such machines should not be listed for deletion if they have maximum CPU utilization of 1%. I have concerns about needed improvements primarily regarding AWS. If a customer is running ten virtual machines and one machine has a maximum of 1% utilization, it is considered as an idle instance in the report, which completely ignores that particular machine. This should not be the approach.
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

"My advice for others looking into using CoreStack is that anyone who is looking to optimize their workload cost for public cloud services should start using CoreStack because of the reports and granularity it produces to optimize cost, which will benefit them."
"Mainly through improved cost visibility and optimization with CoreStack, we have achieved a good ROI, and for some customers we were able to achieve more than forty percent cost savings by identifying unused and idle resources in their accounts, leading to significant cost savings after we completed the cleanup of those resources."
"My advice for others looking into using CoreStack is that anyone who is looking to optimize their workload cost for public cloud services should start using CoreStack because of the reports and granularity it produces to optimize cost, which will benefit them."
"Currently, I think CoreStack is the best FinOps tool available in the market, which is why we are using it."
"CoreStack has positively impacted my organization by saving hours of time for reporting—for example, the governance report which my employees used to take at least four hours for one customer, and since I'm sending out 20 reports every month, that equates to 80 hours, thus saving me two man-weeks every month and approximately $8,000 in pure savings if I estimate $100 an hour for my architect."
"The automation and orchestration components are definitely the best part, as you can tell it what it can do and when, and just let it be."
"With Turbonomic, we were able to reduce our ESX cluster size and save money on our maintenance and license renewals. It saved us around $75,000 per year but it's a one-time reduction in VMware licensing. We don't renew the support. The ongoing savings is probably $50,000 to $75,000 a year, but there was a one-time of $200,000 plus."
"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."
"We have a system where our developers automate machine builds, and that is constantly running out of resources. Turbonomic helps us with that, so I don't have to keep buying hardware. The developers always say, "They don't have enough. They don't have enough. They don't have enough," when they just configured it improperly. Therefore, Turbonomic helps us identify configuration issues on their side so it doesn't cost me money on the other end to buy resources that I don't really need."
"Turbonomic helps us right-size virtual machines to utilize the available infrastructure components available and suggest where resources should exist. We also use the predictive tool to forecast what will happen when we add additional compute-demanding virtual machines or something to the environment. It shows us how that would impact existing resources. All of that frees up time that would otherwise be spent on manual calculation."
"Using this product helps us to reduce performance risk because it shows us where resources are needed but not yet allocated."
"We have VM placement in Automated mode and currently have all other metrics in Recommend mode."
"The tool provides the ability to look at the consumption utilization over a period of time and determine if we need to change that resource allocation based on the actual workload consumption, as opposed to how IT has configured it. Therefore, we have come to realize that a lot of our workloads are overprovisioned, and we are spending more money in the public cloud than we need to."
 

Cons

"I noticed that some of the cost optimization reports generated potential savings while considering systems that have only maximum utilization of 1% or 2%. The recommendations made in CoreStack to delete a machine have the potential to generate major cost savings, but such machines should not be listed for deletion if they have maximum CPU utilization of 1%."
"I believe CoreStack already has very good features in the governance and security parts, but stability can definitely be improved."
"I noticed that some of the cost optimization reports generated potential savings while considering systems that have only maximum utilization of 1% or 2%. The recommendations made in CoreStack to delete a machine have the potential to generate major cost savings, but such machines should not be listed for deletion if they have maximum CPU utilization of 1%."
"I give it an eight because, as I mentioned, a few things from the billing operations need to be added, and we need more security features, particularly since the market is increasingly demanding better security tools for cloud management platforms, including cloud security posture assessments."
"The old interface was not the clearest UI in some areas, and could be quite intimidating when first using the tool."
"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."
"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."
"It would be nice for them to have a way to do something with physical machines, but I know that is not their strength Thankfully, the majority of our environment is virtual, but it would be nice to see this type of technology across some other platforms. It would be nice to have capacity planning across physical machines."
"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."
"If they would educate their customers to understand the latest updates, that would help customers... Also, there are a lot of features that are not available in Turbonomic. For example, PaaS component optimization and automation are still in the development phase."
"Some features are only available via changes to the deployment YAML, and it would be better to have them in the UI."
"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."
 

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 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 consider the pricing to be high."
"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."
"In the last year, Turbonomic has reduced our cloud costs by $94,000."
"Everybody tells me the pricing is high. But the ROIs are great."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CoreStack?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is pretty good because we received private pricing, which I cannot disclose. The setup was included as a one-time expense, and licensing is str...
What needs improvement with CoreStack?
At this time, we are exploring other options from CoreStack, but I do not think any specific improvements are needed. However, adding features to automate tasks at the operations level could help p...
What is your primary use case for CoreStack?
My main use case for CoreStack is cloud cost governance and FinOps maturity. We are using CoreStack for our operations team and we have multiple cloud customers from different hyperscalers. For a s...
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

CAMS
IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
Find out what your peers are saying about CoreStack vs. IBM Turbonomic and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,733 professionals have used our research since 2012.