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Apptio Cloudability vs Zesty 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
3rd
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Zesty
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
15th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (17th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Cloud Cost Management category, the mindshare of Apptio Cloudability is 5.7%, down from 13.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zesty is 1.7%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Cost Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Apptio Cloudability5.7%
Zesty1.7%
Other92.6%
Cloud Cost Management
 

Featured Reviews

KW
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.
Srinivas Rayudu  - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at Zensa Technologies
Managing complex onboarding has been challenging but automated cost optimization delivers strong savings
Zesty is a good solution; however, the learning curve can be complex for new users without a solid tech background, posing a challenge in training and the initial setup process. I would deduct one point for this aspect since everything else is fine. A specific example of where the learning curve caused issues is when we introduced Zesty to our new development team, which struggled to understand the platform while working on a project related to AI and ML. Our system architects explained how Zesty works, but I believe a more proactive approach to training and foundational data could help teams be more self-sufficient and less reliant on internal support.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"If you are looking for a seamless, simple to use, and in-depth cloud billing analysis tool, Cloudability serves all these purposes."
"We have probably easily saved around $400,000 USD a year."
"The support from IBM is fantastic"
"Cloudability's customizable alerts help me maintain budgetary goals by providing recommendations and alerts on slot usages."
"The most crucial feature in reducing my cloud costs has been the rightsizing recommendations, along with the dashboards that track reserved instance spending coverage and utilization. As for Cloudability's integration with our existing cloud infrastructure, it's not integrated directly into our AWS infrastructure but rather reads and pulls data from it, providing valuable insights and analysis for cost management."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its ability to create reports and dashboards."
"All the tagging and mapping, which helps to create some virtual tags are useful features."
"Transparency and visibility are the key features."
"I think Zesty is a really useful tool, it is really quick, it is really powerful, they are always improving it, and the customer service is flawless."
"The turnkey aspect of Zesty is very valuable."
"From a metrics perspective, Zesty reduced our Kubernetes infrastructure spend by about 24% in the first six months, we also cut wasted storage costs by roughly 18% and improved saving plan utilization by around 12%, and on the operational side, we saved roughly 40 to 50 hours a month in manual cloud cost tuning."
"One of the reasons we decided to onboard Zesty was that it started supporting Windows instances."
"Zesty has positively impacted our organization by providing a good return on investment, with a total reported percentage of savings around 40 to 50%."
 

Cons

"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."
"The IAM feature is something that we struggle with using."
"More documentation with more use case scenarios would be nice."
"I would improve the integration, or the preparation of the integration, for a complex environment."
"The dashboard needs to include more graphs per team to show what individual teams are spending in a given time period."
"I find that Apptio Cloudability is one of those things where I just poke around until I have what I am looking for. I would not say it is the most user-friendly system; there is a lot to it, so it can take some getting used to."
"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 are also some limitations with the dashboards and data representation in Cloudability."
"Zesty is a good solution; however, the learning curve can be complex for new users without a solid tech background, posing a challenge in training and the initial setup process."
"The biggest area for improvement is still reporting depth."
"It would be really useful if Zesty had more code snippets that were easy to use, an easier library instead of their documentation, and something that provided an automated finish to insert code so it could give you code hints."
"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

"The price of the license or the usage is a percentage of the top consumption. So it varies from year to year."
"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."
"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."
"It justifies the cost and is worth it."
"Cloudability is a bit expensive."
"The solution’s pricing is reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
22%
Retailer
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Comms Service Provider
5%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Insurance Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise16
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudability?
Pricing and setup cost for Cloudability are good. Compared to the rest of the industry, they may be a little more expensive than some other FinOps tools, but that's to be expected because they have...
What needs improvement with Cloudability?
The IAM feature is something that we struggle with using. IBM, the company that runs Cloudability, released the Groups feature back in the summer of 2025. While Groups can be used in some parts of ...
What is your primary use case for Cloudability?
I use Cloudability to track costs across a multi-cloud infrastructure estate, including Google Cloud, AWS Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Everything from reports and dashboards to anomaly alerts and ri...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zesty?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was great, as we had a great account manager that we did not have to query too much about it. The free one was nearly good enough to start with...
What needs improvement with Zesty?
I find myself using the online editor the most often, and what would be better is if you could have multiple windows open to work in, something like an actual program rather than having to shift be...
What is your primary use case for Zesty?
My main use case for Zesty is the CMS. For our corporate website, my team uses Zesty's CMS to allow users from any point in the company to upload content, add posts, add pages, and promote the comp...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Adobe, Uber, Pega, imgur, Pixable, Blackboard, Keboola, Avalara
Walkme, Wiz, Gong, Grubhub, Singular
Find out what your peers are saying about Apptio Cloudability vs. Zesty and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
911,549 professionals have used our research since 2012.