Harness vs IBM Turbonomic comparison

Harness and IBM are both solutions in the Cloud Cost Management category. Harness is ranked #12 with an average rating of 7.8, while IBM is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.6. Harness holds a 2.3% mindshare in CCM, compared to IBM’s 11.3% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Harness users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Harness

Read 4 Harness reviews

2,431 Views
219 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

IBM Turbonomic

Read 205 IBM Turbonomic reviews

5,682 Views
2,330 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Harness

IBM Turbonomic

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 2, 2025

IBM Turbonomic and Harness compete in software optimization and application delivery. IBM Turbonomic has an edge in resource management, while Harness leads in integration and deployment.

Features: IBM Turbonomic is outstanding in resource optimization, making it suitable for cloud management and data centers. It focuses on cost efficiency and comprehensive resource control. Harness is notable for its pipeline management and automation, streamlining deployment. It enhances development processes and accelerates software release cycles.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Turbonomic involves a complex setup and a steeper learning curve. It provides thorough customer service, albeit slower. Harness is recognized for easy deployment and intuitive setup, offering responsive customer service for faster troubleshooting and integration.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Turbonomic requires a moderate initial cost with savings through resource optimization and reduced operational costs. Harness, with competitive pricing, offers a possibility for higher immediate return by reducing time-to-market, suiting organizations emphasizing deployment speed and agile approaches.

To learn more, read our detailed Harness vs. IBM Turbonomic Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Harness vs. IBM Turbonomic

July 2025

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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

Harness

Ranking in Cloud Cost Management

12th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Build Automation (10th), Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (27th)

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 (4th), Cloud Management (4th), Virtualization Management Tools (3rd), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (4th), Cloud Analytics (1st), AIOps (5th)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Cloud Cost Management category, the mindshare of Harness is 2.3%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 11.3%, down from 15.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Cost Management

Featured Reviews

Linwei Yuan

Software Engineer at Citi

Streamline microservices deployment with integrated execution pipelines and comprehensive monitoring

Harness integrates all functions like execution pipelines, environment checks, and log monitoring in one place. It is very convenient since we have many microservices, so having one platform for all of them is beneficial. The dashboard allows me to monitor all core services' deployment status in one place, making it easier to find bugs and check logs.

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Dan Ambrose

Infrastructure Engineer 4 at Hyland

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Harness starts integrating with organizations, making everything automated without the need for manual interruption."

"Harness integrates all functions like execution pipelines, environment checks, and log monitoring in one place."

"Harness integrates all functions like execution pipelines, environment checks, and log monitoring in one place, making it convenient."

"The features of Harness are valuable, supporting rolling deployments, basic deployments, and blue-green deployments with zero downtime."

"It's a highly customizable DevOps tool."

"The system automatically sizes and moves resources based on the needs of the applications."

"With over 2500 ESX VMs, including 1500+ XenDesktop VDI desktops, hosted over two datacentres and 80+ vSphere hosts, firefighting has become something of the past."

"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."

"Using this product helps us to reduce performance risk because it shows us where resources are needed but not yet allocated."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I like Turbonomic's built-in reporting. It provides a ton of information out of the box, so I don't have to build panels for the monthly summaries and other reports I need to present to management. We get better performance and bottleneck reporting from this than we do from our older EMC software."

More IBM Turbonomic pros

Cons

"When integrating Harness with more than twenty applications in one place, it becomes less stable, causing improvements to be necessary."

"I prefer the previous less compact UI version of Harness, which showed more details on the screen."

"Even with automation, there's a requirement for manual change requests for approvals."

"There's also room for improvement in debugging pipeline issues, which can sometimes become complex."

"When deploying multiple components to multiple environments, like production and BCP, failures sometimes occur. Improvements are needed when deploying one component to one environment."

"It would be good for Turbonomic, on their side, to integrate with other companies like AppDynamics or SolarWinds or other monitoring softwares. I feel that the actual monitoring of applications, mixed in with their abilities, would help. That would be the case wherever Turbonomic lacks the ability to monitor an application or in cases where applications are so customized that it's not going to be able to handle them. There is monitoring that you can do with scripting that you may not be able to do with Turbonomic."

"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."

"Remove the need for special in-house knowledge and development."

"Enhanced executive reporting standard with the tool beyond the reports that can be created today. Something that can easily be used with upper management on a monthly or quarterly basis to show the impact to our environment."

"Since the introduction of a HTML 5 based interface, our main - but minor - criticism of a less than intuitive operation managers' GUI would be the area of improvement."

"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 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."

"Turbonomic doesn't do storage placement how I would prefer. We use multiple shared storage volumes on VMware, so I don't have one big disk. I have lots of disks that I can place VMs on, and that consumes IOPS from the disk subsystem. We were getting recommendations to provision a new volume."

More IBM Turbonomic cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"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."

"I consider the pricing to be high."

"Licensing is per socket, so load up on the cores rather than a lot of lower core CPUs."

"Contact the Turbonomic sales team, explain your needs and what you're looking to monitor. They will get a pre-sales SE on the phone and together work up a very accurate quote."

"What I can advise is to trial the product, taking advantage of the Turbonomic pre-sales implemention support and kickstart training."

"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 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."

"I'm not involved in any of the billing, but my understanding is that is fairly expensive."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

32%

Computer Software Company

11%

Government

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Harness?

It's a highly customizable DevOps tool.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Harness?

When deploying multiple components to multiple environments, like production and BCP, failures sometimes occur. Improvements are needed when deploying one component to one environment.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Harness?

Our primary use case for Harness ( /products/harness-reviews ) is as a deployment tool. Although I am not a DevOps engineer, my team uses Harness ( /products/harness-reviews ) for deployment purpos...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Turbonomic?

The implementation could be enhanced.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 18% of the time

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Compared 18% of the time

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Compared 11% of the time

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Compared 10% of the time

Codefresh vs Harness

Compared 2% of the time

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Compared 15% of the time

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Compared 10% of the time

VMware vSphere vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 6% of the time

Cloudability vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 6% of the time

Apptio One vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Build Automation

July 2025

Download Harness product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Turbonomic

August 2025

Download IBM Turbonomic product report

Also Known As

Armory

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

Harness

IBM

Overview

Harness offers a comprehensive toolset for automating deployment processes and enhancing software update efficiency. It's lauded for its CI/CD capabilities, feature flagging, and real-time deployment monitoring. Key features include an intuitive UI, secret management, and robust rollback functionalities, all contributing to improved productivity and reduced errors in DevOps environments.

Harness

IBM Turbonomic offers automation, planning, and right-sizing recommendations to streamline resource management, improve efficiencies, and optimize costs across virtualized environments and cloud platforms.

IBM Turbonomic is valued for its capability to optimize resource allocation and monitor virtual environments efficiently. It facilitates automated decision-making in VM sizing, load balancing, and cost optimization for both on-premises and cloud deployments. Users can leverage insights for workload placement, ensure peak performance assurance, and effectively right-size across VMware and Azure. The ongoing transition to HTML5 aims to improve visual and navigational ease, while expanded reporting features are anticipated. Opportunities for improved training, documentation, and integrations enhance platform usability and functionality.

What Are the Key Features?

Automation: Streamlines resource allocation and VM management.
Planning Tools: Supports capacity management and growth projections.
Right-Sizing: Optimizes VM configurations for efficient resource use.
Customizable Dashboards: Provides quick insights into environment health.
Reporting Capabilities: Offers valuable data for informed decision-making.
Cloud Integration: Ensures cost-effective resource utilization.

What Benefits Should Be Looked For?

Performance Enhancement: Improves application performance efficiency.
Cost Reduction: Minimizes operational expenses through optimizations.
Infrastructure Efficiency: Maximizes use of IT infrastructure resources.

In finance, IBM Turbonomic aids in maintaining platform efficiency during market fluctuations. Healthcare organizations leverage its capability for resource optimization during high-demand periods to enhance patient care support. Retailers use it for planning in peak seasons, ensuring resources align with fluctuating demand to maintain performance continuity.

IBM

Sample Customers

Linedata, Openbank, Home Depot, Advanced

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.

Buyer's Guide

Harness vs. IBM Turbonomic

July 2025

Free Report: Harness vs. IBM Turbonomic

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