IBM Turbonomic vs Red Hat CloudForms comparison

IBM and Red Hat are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. IBM is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.6, while Red Hat is ranked #31. IBM holds a 5.2% mindshare in CM, compared to Red Hat’s 1.5% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 66% of Red Hat users who would recommend it.

IBM Turbonomic

Read 205 IBM Turbonomic reviews

5,682 Views
3,068 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Red Hat CloudForms

Read 10 Red Hat CloudForms reviews

653 Views
640 Comparison Views

66% willing to recommend

IBM Turbonomic

Red Hat CloudForms

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

IBM Turbonomic and Red Hat CloudForms compete in the IT infrastructure management category. IBM Turbonomic seems to have the upper hand due to its advanced automation and planning tools, leading to a notable ROI as cited by users.

Features: IBM Turbonomic offers advanced automation, workload placement, and resource optimization, with users valuing its capabilities in VM rightsizing and scenario planning. It also provides resource balancing and comprehensive reporting functions, instrumental in managing virtual environments efficiently. Red Hat CloudForms is recognized for its integration capabilities with open-source tools and managing diverse infrastructures. However, it lacks the automation depth seen in Turbonomic, making it less appealing in terms of automation capabilities.

Room for Improvement: IBM Turbonomic users want improved UI design and enhanced reporting functionalities, citing its current UI as complex and a desire for better third-party tool integration. Red Hat CloudForms users mention its configuration complexity, emphasizing a need for ease of use and more favorable pricing models. Compatibility issues with updates and a demand for more robust report customization options have been highlighted.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Turbonomic is noted for its ease of deployment across diverse environments like on-premises and private clouds. Users frequently praise its customer service and technical support for being responsive and knowledgeable. Red Hat CloudForms is seen as more complex to deploy, requiring extensive customization and programming. Although it offers attentive customer service, users face challenges with its technical support due to configuration complexities.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Turbonomic is perceived as competitively priced, offering flexible licensing options that contribute to quick ROI realization. Customers report significant operational savings and automation benefits, justifying its cost. Conversely, Red Hat CloudForms is regarded as expensive, especially concerning its subscription model and additional server license requirements. While some users report positive ROI, the higher upfront costs and complexity make it less attractive compared to the straightforward value proposition of IBM Turbonomic.

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

Buyer's Guide

IBM Turbonomic vs. Red Hat CloudForms

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

IBM Turbonomic

Ranking in Cloud Management

4th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

205

Ranking in other categories

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

Red Hat CloudForms

Ranking in Cloud Management

31st

Average Rating

6.4

Reviews Sentiment

5.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 5.2%, down from 5.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat CloudForms is 1.5%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

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.

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Ilhami Arikan

Cloud Services Automation Technologies Manager at Garanti Teknoloji

A stable solution that helps to provision servers

We use the solution to provision servers. I am impressed with the product's ability to create dynamic catalogs. The solution's provisioning engine needs to be improved. I would rate the solution's stability an eight out of ten. I would rate the product's scalability a seven out of ten and…

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The proactive monitoring of all our open enrollment applications has improved our organization. We have used it to size applications that we are moving to the cloud. Therefore, when we move them out there, we have them appropriately sized. We use it for reporting to current application owners, showing them where they are wasting money. There are easy things to find for an application, e.g., they decommissioned the server, but they never took care of the storage. Without a tool like this, that storage would just sit there forever, with us getting billed for it."

"We have seen a 30% performance improvement overall."

"Rightsizing is valuable. Its recommendations are pretty good."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"It is a good holistic platform that is easy to use. It works pretty well."

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

More IBM Turbonomic pros

"I am impressed with the product's ability to create dynamic catalogs."

"The solution is compatible and integrates with various infrastructures or providers."

"The stability of the solution is very good. We haven't had any issues with it."

"Red Hat CloudForms is a stable product. There is no issue with the stability."

"The multi-tenancy feature has been very helpful for our clients. It has been working fine and seamlessly for them. Its interface is also very simplified, and it is also an open and easy-to-scale solution."

"The most valuable features of Red Hat CloudForms are the benefit of the collective functionality."

"The optimization of the solution is quite interesting."

"I am impressed with the product's reports."

More Red Hat CloudForms pros

Cons

"It can be more agnostic in terms of the solutions that it provides. It can include some other cost-saving methods for the public cloud and SaaS applications as well."

"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."

"The automation area could be improved, and the generic reports are poor. We want more details in the analysis report from the application layer. The reports from the infrastructure layer are satisfactory, but Turbonomic won't provide much information if we dig down further than the application layer."

"The old interface was not the clearest UI in some areas, and could be quite intimidating when first using the tool."

"There is room for improvement [with] upgrades. We have deployed the newer version, version 8 of Turbonomic. The problem is that there is no way to upgrade between major Turbonomic versions. You can upgrade minor versions without a problem, but when you go from version 6 to version 7, or version 7 to version 8, you basically have to deploy it new and let it start gathering data again. That is a problem because all of the data, all of the savings calculations that had been done on the old version, are gone. There's no way to keep track of your lifetime savings across versions."

"Some features are only available via changes to the deployment YAML, and it would be better to have them in the UI."

"We're still evaluating the solution, so I don't know enough about what I don't know. They've done a lot over the years. I used Turbonomics six or seven years ago before IBM bought them. They've matured a lot since then."

"I would love to see Turbonomic analyze backup data. We have had people in the past put servers into daily full backups with seven-year retention and where the disk size is two terabytes. So, every single day, there is a two terabyte snapshot put into a Blob somewhere. I would love to see Turbonomic say, "Here are all your backups along with the age of them," to help us manage the savings by not having us spend so much on the storage in Azure. That would be huge."

More IBM Turbonomic cons

"All of the areas of Red Hat CloudForms could improve. It doesn't do half of the things that it says it can do out of the box. It takes configuration to make any of it work, which is not uncommon for solutions similar to this. However, it is frustrating."

"The complexity of the solution is a bit high in comparison to VMware."

"I have issues with the solution's permissions. Unlike VMware, the product doesn't allow folder-type permissions."

"Red Hat CloudForms could improve by allowing more customization of reports. We have to do a lot of coding to accomplish what we want. Additionally, the compatibility with the multi-cloud could improve. The latter versions of the solution removed Google support and the cost comparison between other clouds was high."

"The solution is still quite immature."

"Because the solution needs to integrate with other products that surround it, there is a lot of configuration required, and this can be quite complex. It's not as easy as it is with, for example, VMware."

"It is difficult to create a complete dashboard that includes all the needed features or catalogs."

"The solution's provisioning engine needs to be improved."

More Red Hat CloudForms cons

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."

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

"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 consider the pricing to be high."

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

"The pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."

"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."

"Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

"The price of Red Hat CloudForms was not competitive, it was expensive."

"It is definitely cheaper than VMware. Everything is included. There is no challenge there."

"Red Hat CloudForms is a bit expensive."

"Red Hat CloudForms has a subscript-based pricing model. The cost is approximately $20,000 annually which allows you to use as many users as you want."

"The product's licensing is based on the number of servers."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

20%

Manufacturing Company

15%

Government

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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 ...

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What needs improvement with Turbonomic?

The implementation could be enhanced.

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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...

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Comparisons

VMware Aria Operations vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 15% of the time

Azure Cost Management vs IBM Turbonomic

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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VMware Cloud Director vs Red Hat CloudForms

Compared 25% of the time

Morpheus vs Red Hat CloudForms

Compared 24% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Red Hat CloudForms

Compared 19% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs Red Hat CloudForms

Compared 18% of the time

OpenNebula vs Red Hat CloudForms

Compared 14% of the time

More Red Hat CloudForms Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Turbonomic

August 2025

Download IBM Turbonomic product report

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat CloudForms

August 2025

Download Red Hat CloudForms product report

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager

No data available

Interactive Demo

IBM

Demo not available

Red Hat

Overview

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

Manage container, virtual, private, and public cloud infrastructures

Managing a complex, hybrid IT environment can require multiple management tools, redundant policy implementations, and extra staff to handle the operations. Red Hat® CloudForms simplifies IT, providing unified management and operations in a hybrid environment.

As your IT infrastructure progresses from traditional virtualization toward an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model, CloudForms evolves, protecting your investments and providing consistent user experience and functionality.

Red Hat

Sample Customers

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

Cox Automotive, Penn State, FICO, G-ABLE, Seneca College, ITandTEL, The Paris Lodron University of Salzburg (PLUS), MyRepublic, Macquarie, The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, CBTS, Network Data Solutions (NDS)

Buyer's Guide

IBM Turbonomic vs. Red Hat CloudForms

July 2025

Free Report: IBM Turbonomic vs. Red Hat CloudForms

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