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IBM Turbonomic vs PerfectScale comparison

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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

IBM Turbonomic
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (2nd), Cloud Management (4th), Virtualization Management Tools (3rd), IT Financial Management (3rd), IT Operations Analytics (9th), Cloud Analytics (1st), AIOps (18th)
PerfectScale
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
23rd
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
1.7
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Cloud Cost Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 5.4%, down from 8.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PerfectScale is 1.9%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Cost Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Turbonomic5.4%
PerfectScale1.9%
Other92.7%
Cloud Cost Management
 

Featured Reviews

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.
reviewer2750058 - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps & FinOps Engineer at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees
Gain visibility into Kubernetes clusters and optimize resource allocation based on historical data
I think they should focus more on Kubernetes features that allow on-the-fly resource allocation without the need to restart services. They should implement this in their autoscaler to make it more useful in scenarios that require immediate scaling up or down. They should also offer more options for visualizing graphs in different ways, such as tabular views.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Turbonomic is the best for two main reasons: Simplicity and accuracy."
"Helps us rightsize workloads, highlight bottlenecks and effectively plan for capacity."
"Visibility of all workloads, whether on-premise or Azure environments."
"This is an overall great and easy to use product and has been very helpful in our organization, definitely recommend it!"
"We see increased speed in our environment as VM's are moved based on needs and requirements."
"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."
"We have VM placement in Automated mode and currently have all other metrics in Recommend mode."
"Helps us get the most out of the hardware we have in place."
"PerfectScale made our Kubernetes optimization effortless; it found wasted resources, lowered our cloud costs, and improved performance almost instantly."
"Automated resource optimization using different policies based on the environment enabled the organization to achieve infrastructure cost savings."
"The cluster and workload autoscaler gives us the ability to have control over all the workloads' resources instead of managing them one by one."
 

Cons

"There are charts and graphs in the dashboard that are confusing to read and understand."
"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."
"We did have an issue certain build causing the database to fill up however technical support was very helpful in getting updated to a newer version to correct this issue."
"It sometimes does get false positives. Sometimes, it will move something when it really wasn't a performance metric."
"Would like some better canned reports allowing for average utilization of VMs in the environment during a defined range of hours."
"When upgrading prior versions, I sometimes lost prior performance data. Even support was not able to retrieve it."
"Personally, I find the interface, especially for a new user, to be less than user friendly."
"The way dashboards are accessed with a pop-up can sometimes get in the way."
"At the beginning, the support was not very impressive."
"With their in-place optimisations, stateful set optimisation would be a great addition."
"I think they should focus more on Kubernetes features that allow on-the-fly resource allocation without the need to restart services."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 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."
"In the last year, Turbonomic has reduced our cloud costs by $94,000."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
7%
Computer Software Company
7%
Insurance Company
28%
Construction Company
24%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business42
Midsize Enterprise57
Large Enterprise147
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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What needs improvement with PerfectScale?
With their in-place optimisations, stateful set optimisation would be a great addition.
 

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
No data available
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
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Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Turbonomic vs. PerfectScale and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
920,574 professionals have used our research since 2012.