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IBM Turbonomic vs VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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
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), Virtualization Management Tools (2nd), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (4th), Cloud Analytics (1st), AIOps (4th)
VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth
Ranking in Cloud Management
21st
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
5th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 5.4%, down from 6.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth is 2.0%, down from 2.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Dan Ambrose - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Steve Staten - PeerSpot reviewer
The solution has excellent scalability, great dashboards, and is stable
I use the solution daily, multiple hours a day to identify possible savings by analyzing the various displays as well as the policies for possible cost savings for our customers CloudHelth has helped our organization with trying to right-size virtual machines based on current utilization and…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We have VM placement in Automated mode and currently have all other metrics in Recommend mode."
"The primary features we have focused on are reporting and optimization."
"The most important feature to us is an objective measurement of VM headroom per cluster. In addition, the ability to check for the right-sizing of VMs."
"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."
"On-premises, one advantage I find particularly appealing is the ability to create policies for automatic CPU and memory scaling based on demand."
"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."
"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."
"Rightsizing is valuable. Its recommendations are pretty good."
"The product is easy to use in terms of monitoring all the environments. It works for multiple clouds."
"The pricing is rather competitive right now."
"It's stable. For report presentation, it's been fast."
"This solution is fast and very easy to understand, even if you are not a technician."
"The solution is useful for cloud transparency and visibility in reports and dashboards that I have generated, especially the pre-populated dashboards."
"The most valuable thing I have found is the cost saving recommendations"
"We use dashboards quite heavily, but one of the features that have really stood out is some of the policies we've created to alert us of particular situations."
"We are able to create an internal price of the product that we can then sell to clients. We get the cost plan at a good discount and then resell it with a mark up to our enterprise-level clients. This flexibility in pricing is one of the solution's best features."
 

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."
"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."
"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 planning and costing areas could be a little bit more detailed. When you have more than 2,000 machines, the reports don't work properly. They need to fix it so that the reports work when you use that many virtual machines."
"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 sometimes does get false positives. Sometimes, it'll move something when it really wasn't a performance metric. I've seen it do that, but it's pretty much an automated tool for performance. We've only got about 500 virtual machines, so lots of times, I'm able to manage it physically, but it's definitely a nice tool for a larger enterprise that might be managing 2,000 or 3,000 virtual machines."
"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."
"The old interface was not the clearest UI in some areas, and could be quite intimidating when first using the tool."
"The solution doesn't offer the best functionality, unfortunately. Some features just simply aren't on offer. The solution needs to offer more product milestones."
"CloudHealth needs to start building out Turbonomics-types of features that help the customers who are using CloudHealth really understand everything down to the server level, the virtual machine level."
"The Perspectives feature could be better."
"They should provide information or tools to tune the cloud resources according to the environment size."
"If you are working with the OS you need help and other connectors to get more information."
"It would be helpful to have a mobile version or a tablet version, especially for people who are outside of the office."
"The export features regarding CSV files and specifically around identifying savings plans have room for improvement, as well as the drill-down features for reservation utilization."
"I would like to see better integration from CloudHealth to create easier setup and implementation."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"What I can advise is to trial the product, taking advantage of the Turbonomic pre-sales implemention support and kickstart training."
"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."
"Licensing is per socket, so load up on the cores rather than a lot of lower core CPUs."
"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."
"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."
"The pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."
"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'm not involved in any of the billing, but my understanding is that is fairly expensive."
"There could be flexibility in pricing for the product."
"The pricing is competitive and while other products are good they are considerably more expensive."
"CloudHealth has a subscription-based model."
"I give the cost of the solution an eight out of ten."
"The licensing fees depend on how big the company is. If you are a larger company then you have a better contract with a better price. The price is different for a small company."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Educational Organization
11%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

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 ...
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 do you like most about CloudHealth?
The product is easy to use in terms of monitoring all the environments. It works for multiple clouds.
What needs improvement with CloudHealth?
There could be flexibility in pricing for the product. They should provide information or tools to tune the cloud resources according to the environment size. It will help us get the right cost. Ad...
What advice do you have for others considering CloudHealth?
I rate VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth an eight out of ten.
 

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth, CloudHealth
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
Pinterest, Dow Jones, RhythmOne, Ziff Davis, Acquia, Mentor Graphics, Lookout, Veracode, SwiftKey, Amtrak, Shi, Imgur, SumoLogic, NewsUK, Cloudera, Canvas
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Turbonomic vs. VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
861,524 professionals have used our research since 2012.