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Apptio Cloudability vs IBM Kubecost comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 16, 2026

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

Apptio Cloudability
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
1st
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM Kubecost
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
23rd
Average Rating
9.4
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Cloud Cost Management category, the mindshare of Apptio Cloudability is 6.0%, down from 12.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Kubecost is 2.7%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Cost Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Apptio Cloudability6.0%
IBM Kubecost2.7%
Other91.3%
Cloud Cost Management
 

Featured Reviews

KW
Cloud Platform Engineer at Treasury Wine Estates
Finops platform has uncovered waste, supports right-sizing, and improves contract negotiations
I think Apptio Cloudability is a really very good platform for costing. I do understand it can be cost-prohibitive to buy the license to use Apptio Cloudability because of the way it charges. If you are not a big enough company, I can understand that. Apptio Cloudability might want to look at costing models for smaller businesses that cannot afford Apptio Cloudability or Apptio Cloudability Premium. I believe Premium is about one hundred thousand dollars or so in US dollars, and Apptio Cloudability I believe is a little bit less than that. However, there are small businesses out there that will not be able to afford either option. I wonder if that is a market to target, to look at a smaller model of Apptio Cloudability or at least a smaller costing model that could help those businesses as well. The other thing is that there are just a few anomalies inside Apptio Cloudability that I think can definitely be improved. It seems a really small thing, but when you are using it, it can actually be quite a big thing. Since Turbonomic has been integrated with Apptio Cloudability, as good as that is to be able to get those different costing figures and larger savings, it does not give the ability to have an instant Jira ticket integration with the Turbonomic costings or the advanced costing, if you would call it, inside Apptio Cloudability Premium. In the basic costings, you can use Jira and you can open up a Jira ticket and you can have all this information straight from Apptio Cloudability straight in the Jira ticket, assign it to someone, and then someone is working on it. You cannot do that in Turbonomic at the moment. I am not really sure why. Obviously, there is some sort of development issue behind the scenes, I imagine, with the way that Turbonomic works compared to the basic costing. It would be a huge advantage to be able to do that, to just open a Jira ticket, have someone assigned to it, and then proceed forward. I definitely think they should look at that.
DIRK UYTTERHOEVEN - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Enterprise Architect at DV Consulting
Identifies and eliminates overprovisioning of expensive resources like storage, highly scalable and offers performance
I like the overall product because I can select what monitoring should be enabled and whatnot. In our case, we really focus on performance because it's clear that the price is related to most performance setups. So the more performance, the more expensive. So we look into the performance that the customer needs, and then based upon that feedback from the remote control, we change the parameters. And even the end user will not notice it is not using it, so we just make money without any impact on the end users.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We use the product to get a detailed level of transparency on the cloud strengths."
"Each user can have their own dashboard that they want to consume. Instead of having to share one dashboard for multiple users, you can create individual views for each user to view, and that view will contain only their own accounts, which allows for separation of data."
"We're able to see reports that can show us areas where compute costs can be lowered, where we're wasting money, etc. It gives us great visibility across our teams and processes."
"Transparency and visibility are the key features."
"The tool helps us to resize on AWS correctly."
"If you are looking for a seamless, simple to use, and in-depth cloud billing analysis tool, Cloudability serves all these purposes."
"Cloudability's customizable alerts help me maintain budgetary goals by providing recommendations and alerts on slot usages."
"It has already given us insight into how to optimize. So, we are now ramping up steadily its usage."
"I mostly like the dashboards."
"It offers a detailed examination of your cluster, including the types of instances utilized, allocated CPU and RAM, and resource distribution for specific applications."
"The price is reasonable, considering the value it delivers."
 

Cons

"More documentation with more use case scenarios would be nice."
"The API is not well-documented. It is not straightforward and difficult to use. This needs to be improved, as it is very difficult for our developers to develop automation around it."
"There is always room for improvement in education and training. We are not that mature in terms of our automation. It could help us identify where we could optimize in terms of build."
"Cloudability needs to improve on data collection from cloud sources."
"There are also some limitations with the dashboards and data representation in Cloudability."
"Right now, what we're doing is we are manually putting the data in it, which is something which we don't like about Cloudability."
"I would improve the integration, or the preparation of the integration, for a complex environment."
"The IAM feature is something that we struggle with using."
"The integration with other solutions could be improved."
"Faster monitoring could potentially improve overall stability in the production environment."
"There is a significant potential for enhancing it through the incorporation of advanced technologies like AI and generative AI."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"My team is one of the most expensive teams, and we look at it quite a bit. We have probably easily saved around $400,000 USD a year."
"The price of the license or the usage is a percentage of the top consumption. So it varies from year to year."
"It justifies the cost and is worth it."
"We have seen ROI with the reserved instances, and having the ability to predict what reserved instances you can get. We can save tens of thousands of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cases."
"Cloudability is a bit expensive."
"The cost is cheap. Kubecost has an open-source core."
"The cost of the tool may seem nominal compared to the potential savings in infrastructure expenses."
"The real savings come from using Kubecost features like autoscaling and serverless functions to optimize your resource usage. If you treat it like a data center migration without fine-tuning, it might cost more."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Retailer
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Construction Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Insurance Company
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise18
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudability?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was limited because it was done centrally by procurement.
What needs improvement with Cloudability?
Sometimes, I find the user interface of Apptio Cloudability a little complicated, as it has extra data and options that become difficult for visibility, but overall, it is good to have.
What is your primary use case for Cloudability?
My main use case for Apptio Cloudability is cost optimization, governance, and cost visibility across different clouds. A specific example of how I use Apptio Cloudability for cost optimization and...
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Also Known As

No data available
Kubecost - Amazon EKS cost monitoring
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Adobe, Uber, Pega, imgur, Pixable, Blackboard, Keboola, Avalara
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Apptio Cloudability vs. IBM Kubecost and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
916,956 professionals have used our research since 2012.