IBM Turbonomic vs Zesty comparison

Read 2 Zesty reviews

433 Views
217 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

IBM Turbonomic

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

IBM Turbonomic and Zesty both compete in the cloud optimization space. IBM Turbonomic has an edge in feature offerings, while Zesty is more attractive in pricing.

Features: IBM Turbonomic provides advanced automation for cloud resources, optimizing costs using real-time analytics and performance monitoring. It offers a wide range of features appealing to businesses looking for comprehensive solutions. Zesty focuses on automatically adjusting cloud resources to reduce costs while maintaining performance, providing simplicity and automatic adjustments that are more suitable for those seeking a straightforward approach.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Turbonomic offers a robust deployment model with extensive customer support, ideal for complex environments. Zesty emphasizes quick integration and efficiency, offering a straightforward deployment process. IBM's tailored approach benefits larger enterprises, while Zesty suits businesses seeking fast implementation and minimal setup hassle.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Turbonomic requires higher initial setup costs but can provide significant ROI over time with its comprehensive solutions. Zesty's pricing is more flexible, offering immediate cost savings and quick returns, making it ideal for businesses needing immediate cloud cost optimization benefits.

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

Download the complete report

IBM Turbonomic vs. Zesty

September 2025

Helped 868,787 peers since 2012

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

5th

Ranking in Cloud Cost Management

1st

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

205

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Migration (7th), Virtualization Management Tools (4th), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (4th), Cloud Analytics (1st), AIOps (7th)

Zesty

Ranking in Cloud Management

22nd

Ranking in Cloud Cost Management

10th

Average Rating

9.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 4.8%, down from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zesty is 0.5%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
IBM Turbonomic	4.8%
Zesty	0.5%
Other	94.7%

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.

Read full review

Jeffery Smith

Vice President at Centro, Inc.

Effortless cost management with automated instance adjustment and helpful support

There are different resource types that we would like to leverage and get reserved instances for, such as RDS instances. Currently, no mechanism within Zesty allows this, but this may be due to AWS limitations. Another point is that Zesty needs to react to any changes AWS makes, but they have been proactive in their communication regarding material impacts.

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

"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 automated memory balancing, where it looks at whether it's being used in the most efficient way and adds or takes away memory, is the best part. If it didn't do that, it would be something that I would have to do. We have too many machines for one person to do that. The automation helps me in that it is done in a really efficient way and a balanced way because of the policies. It really helps."

"We can manage multiple environments using a single pane of glass, which is something that I really like."

"The primary features we have focused on are reporting and optimization."

"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."

"It has automated a lot of things. We have saved 30 to 35 percent in human resource time and cost, which is pretty substantial. We don't have a big workforce here, so we have to use all the automation we can get."

"I like Turbonomic's automation and AI machine learning features. It shows you what it can do, but it can also act on recommendations automatically. Integration with an APM system makes the AI/ML features truly effective. Understanding what the application is doing and the trends of application behavior can help you make real-world decisions and act on that information."

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

More IBM Turbonomic pros

"The turnkey aspect of Zesty is very valuable."

"One of the reasons we decided to onboard Zesty was that it started supporting Windows instances."

Cons

"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."

"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 way it handles updates needs to be improved."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"Before IBM bought it, the support was fantastic. After IBM bought it, the support became very disappointing."

More IBM Turbonomic cons

"There are different resource types that we would like to leverage and get reserved instances for, such as RDS instances."

"I would like to get RDS-reserved instances that I could buy and sell, but that's a limitation on AWS."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"Everybody tells me the pricing is high. But the ROIs are great."

"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 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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

"The solution’s pricing is reasonable."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Management solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

868,787 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

13%

Insurance Company

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	41
Midsize Enterprise	57
Large Enterprise	147

No data available

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 ...

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...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zesty?

Their pricing is brilliant. It is a percentage of what they save us by using reserved instances. If they save us $25,000, they might charge five percent of that, which is work we wouldn't do on our...

What needs improvement with Zesty?

What is your primary use case for Zesty?

We predominantly use Zesty to manage our spend in AWS, specifically around reserving instances for our compute workload. Our workload is dynamic, and it would be cumbersome and difficult for us to ...

VMware Aria Operations vs IBM Turbonomic

Comparisons

Compared 14% of the time

Azure Cost Management vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 7% of the time

Cloudability vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 6% of the time

Spot vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 6% of the time

VMware vSphere vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 6% of the time

More IBM Turbonomic Competitors

ProsperOps vs Zesty

Compared 52% of the time

Spot vs Zesty

Compared 48% of the time

More Zesty Competitors

Product Reports

Download IBM Turbonomic product report

IBM Turbonomic

September 2025

Download Zesty product report

Cloud Management

October 2025

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager

No data available

Interactive Demo

IBM

Demo not available

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

Zesty offers scalable solutions that empower businesses to optimize their digital presence efficiently. Designed for dynamic online environments, Zesty integrates seamlessly, enhancing digital content management with versatile tools.

Zesty focuses on providing an adaptive content management experience for professionals seeking optimization in web content publishing. Known for its intuitive interfaces and robust architecture, Zesty allows effortless website management, content personalization, and SEO enhancements. With Zesty, businesses can efficiently curate digital content, ensuring swift loading times and superior user engagement. Its extensible features enable integration across different platforms, ensuring streamlined workflow management and enhanced data-driven decision-making.

What are the key features of Zesty?

Content Management: Easy-to-navigate CMS for efficient content updates.
SEO Tools: Built-in SEO analytics to boost online visibility.
Personalization: Customizable options for tailored content delivery.
Integration Capabilities: Links seamlessly with third-party applications.

What benefits should users consider?

Improved Efficiency: Streamlined processes reduce time spent managing content.
Enhanced Visibility: Advanced SEO ensures greater reach.
Increased Engagement: Personalized content fosters user interaction.
Cost-Effectiveness: Optimizes resources resulting in reduced operational costs.

Industries such as eCommerce, healthcare, and media have successfully implemented Zesty to streamline digital operations. For eCommerce, Zesty facilitates rapid product content updates, while healthcare sectors utilize it for managing patient information and media outlets employ it for real-time news publishing.

Sample Customers

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

Walkme, Wiz, Gong, Grubhub, Singular