Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

AWS Control Tower vs CloudStack comparison

Sponsored
 

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
Sponsored
Ranking in Cloud Management
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (5th), Virtualization Management Tools (4th), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (4th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (5th)
AWS Control Tower
Ranking in Cloud Management
8th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
CloudStack
Ranking in Cloud Management
11th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
30
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 5.6%, down from 6.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Control Tower is 1.6%, down from 1.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CloudStack is 5.5%, down from 5.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Keldric Emery - PeerSpot reviewer
Saves time and costs while reducing performance degradation
It's been a very good solution. The reporting has been very, very valuable as, with a very large environment, it's very hard to get your hands on the environment. Turbonomic does that work for you and really shows you where some of the cost savings can be done. It also helps you with the reporting side. Me being able to see that this machine hasn't been used for a very long time, or seeing that a machine is overused and that it might need more RAM or CPU, et cetera, helps me understand my infrastructure. The cost savings are drastic in the cloud feature in Azure and in AWS. In some of those other areas, I'm able to see what we're using, what we're not using, and how we can change to better fit what we have. It gives us the ability for applications and teams to see the hardware and how it's being used versus how they've been told it's being used. The reporting really helps with that. It shows which application is really using how many resources or the least amount of resources. Some of the gaps between an infrastructure person like myself and an application are filled. It allows us to come to terms by seeing the raw data. This aspect is very important. In the past, it was me saying "I don't think that this application is using that many resources" or "I think this needs more resources." I now have concrete evidence as well as reporting and some different analytics that I can show. It gives me the evidence that I would need to show my application owners proof of what I'm talking about. In terms of the downtime, meantime, and resolution that Turbonomic has been able to show in reports, it has given me an idea of things before things happen. That is important as I would really like to see a machine that needs resources, and get resources to it before we have a problem where we have contention and aspects of that nature. It's been helpful in that regard. Turbonomic has helped us understand where performance risks exist. Turbonomic looks at my environment and at the servers and even at the different hosts and how they're handling traffic and the number of machines that are on them. I can analyze it and it can show me which server or which host needs resources, CPU, or RAM. Even in Azure, in the cloud, I'm able to see which resources are not being used to full capacity and understand where I could scale down some in order to save cost. It is very, very helpful in assessing performance risk by navigating underlying causes and actions. The reason why it's helpful is because if there's a machine that's overrunning the CPU, I can run reports every week to get an idea of machines that would need CPU, RAM, or additional resources. Those resources could be added by Turbonomic - not so much by me - on a scheduled basis. I personally don't have to do it. It actually gives me a little bit of my life back. It helps me to get resources added without me physically having to touch each and every resource myself. Turbonomic has helped to reduce performance degradation in the same way as it's able to see the resources and see what it needs and add them before a problem occurs. It follows the trends. It sees the trends of what's happening and it's able to add or take away those resources. For example, we discuss when we need to do certain disaster recovery tests. Over the years, Turbo will be able to see, for example, around this time of year that certain people ramp up certain resources in an environment, and then it will add the resources as required. Another time of year, it will realize these resources are not being used as much, and it takes those resources away. In this way, it saves money and time while letting us know where we are. We've saved a great deal of time using this product when I consider how I'd have to multiply myself and people like me who would have to add resources to devices or take resources away. 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. Those saved hours are across months, not years. I would consider the number of resources that Turbonomic is adding and taking away and the placement (if I had to do it all myself) would end up being hundreds of hours monthly that would be added without the help of Turbonomic. It helps us to meet SLAs mainly due to the fact that we're able to keep the servers going and to keep the servers in an environment, to keep them to where (if we need to add resources) we can add them at any given time. It will keep our SLAs where they need to be. If we were to have downtime due to the fact that we had to add resources or take resources away and it was an emergency, then that would prevent us from meeting our SLAs. We also use it to monitor Azure and to monitor our machines in terms of the resources that are out there and the cost involved. In a lot of cases, it does a better job of giving us cost information than Azure itself does. We're able to see the cost per machine. We're able to see the unattached volume and storage that we are paying for. It gives us a great level of insight. Turbonomic gives us the time to be able to focus on innovation and ongoing modernization. Some of the tasks that it does are tasks that I would not necessarily have to do. It's very helpful in that I know that the resources are there where they need to be and it gives me an idea of what changes need to be made or what suggestions it's making. Even if I don't take them, I'm able to get a good idea of some best practices through Turbonomic. One of the ways that Turbonomic does to help bring new resources to market is that we are now able to see the resources (or at least monitor the resources) before they get out to the general public within our environment. We saw immediate value from the product in the test environment. We set it up in a small test environment and we started with just placement and we could tell that the placement was being handled more efficiently than what VMware was doing. There was value for us in placement alone. Then, after we left the placement, we began to look at the resources and there were resources. We immediately began to see a change in the environment. It has made the application and performance better, mainly due to the fact that we are able to give resources and take resources away based on what the need is. Our expenses, definitely, have been in a better place based on the savings that we've been able to make in the cloud and on-prem. Turbonomic has been very helpful in that regard. We've been able to see the savings easily based on the reports in Turbonomic. That, and just seeing the machines that are not being used to capacity allows us to set everything up so it runs a bit more efficiently.
MuhammadAzhar Khan - PeerSpot reviewer
Unified security management ensures comprehensive compliance for account safety
Control Tower offers many valuable features for managing all account security. I can manage user security and user IAM, firewall, and other security-related tasks via Control Tower. The unified security management is a crucial aspect, and whenever an AWS organization is used, Control Tower is typically included to ensure comprehensive compliance fulfillment.
Wido Den Hollander - PeerSpot reviewer
A solution that strikes a balance between user-friendliness, scalability, and stability
The market keeps changing, and so does technology. I think that container technology in CloudStack is an area that needs to be improved. Regarding container technology, Kubernetes is something many people want to use and something which, as of now, many are using currently. However, there is still room for improvement in Kubernetes, particularly with networking functionality and network virtualization. When it comes to what needs to be improved in CloudStack, I would say that it should stay the way it is currently. It should continue being a stable product that people can rely on since many may be inclined to follow the latest trends and hype, which is not always good for a solution's stability. It is crucial to prioritize stability, which is a key factor that companies seek. In my view, the platform could benefit from adding more metrics. More metrics would offer more insights and data on the platform's performance, utilization, and usage. Overall, I believe that having more metrics available would be highly desirable.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The tool provides the ability to look at the consumption utilization over a period of time and determine if we need to change that resource allocation based on the actual workload consumption, as opposed to how IT has configured it. Therefore, we have come to realize that a lot of our workloads are overprovisioned, and we are spending more money in the public cloud than we need to."
"Turbonomic can show us if we're not using some of our storage volumes efficiently in AWS. For example, if we've over-provisioned one of our virtual machines to have dedicated IOPs that it doesn't need, Turbonomic will detect that and tell us."
"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."
"It also brings up a list of machines and if something is under-provisioned and needs more compute power it will tell you, 'This server needs more compute power, and we suggest you raise it up to this level.' It will even automatically do it for you. In Azure, you don't have to actually go into the cloud provider to resize. You can just say, 'Apply these resizes,' and Turbonomic uses some back-end APIs to make the changes for you."
"We can manage multiple environments using a single pane of glass, which is something that I really like."
"I only deal with the infrastructure side, so I really couldn't speak to more than load balancing as the most valuable feature for me. It provides specific actions that prevent resource starvation. It always keeps things in perfect balance."
"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."
"In our organization, optimizing application performance is a continuous process that is beyond human scale. We would not be able to do the number of actions that Turbonomic takes on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. It is humanly impossible with the little micro adjustments that it can make. That is a huge differentiator. If you just figure each action could take anywhere very conservatively from five to 10 minutes to act upon, then you multiply that out by thousands of actions every month, it is easily something where you could say, "I am saving a couple of FTEs.""
"One of the standout advantages is the fine-grained control it offers in terms of permissions and privileges."
"AWS Control Tower helps to save a lot of work and manage multiple accounts."
"The most significant benefit of Control Tower is its capability to align with our organization's standards."
"I would rate the solution a 10 out of 10."
"Compliance is the most valuable feature."
"Security is the most valuable feature of Control Tower."
"The solution's initial setup was easy for me."
"It provides centralized solutions for all AWS accounts in one place, customized to meet the organization's specific needs."
"We had a relevant reduction of bureaucracy tasks."
"You can use a single API to get things done, rather than multiple APIs on multiple modules."
"You can manage infrastructure with a few people, since product is monolithic. We had three engineers (storage, virtual, Linux admins) only. Also, CS supports different flavours of hypervisors."
"The product gives us the ability to orchestrate large virtual environments and is flexible enough to allow us to configure it for what we need. We value the flexibility of the networking feature set as well as the ability to build virtual private clouds."
"The API with CloudStack made integration into various external facing web applications simple enough."
"The structuring of the components and isolated environments helped us when using parts of the framework at different levels of product development."
"CloudStack’s private gateway networking feature is what enables us to offer utmost security and confidentially to our customers and partners, by enabling them to connect to their virtual data centers via dedicated, encrypted, private fiber lines that never touch the public internet space. Ease of setup and management are certainly important additional benefits for us on the engineering team."
"Over the years, we have valued CloudStack for its stability."
 

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."
"The old interface was not the clearest UI in some areas, and could be quite intimidating when first using the tool."
"The implementation could be enhanced."
"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."
"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."
"Additional interfaces would be helpful."
"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."
"We don't use Turbonomic for FinOps and part of the reason is its cost reporting. The reporting could be much more robust and, if that were the case, I could pitch it for FinOps."
"The solution's stability could be improved."
"By making APIs and organizational units more centralized, it would be simpler to pinpoint the source of issues in case of a breach and would ultimately benefit everyone involved."
"It is essential to clarify that this isn't necessarily a drawback of the service, but having a clear and concise set of predefined guidelines from AWS for moving existing accounts under AWS Control Tower would be highly beneficial as it would simplify the process and make it more user-friendly."
"There should be more automation security tools in the Control Tower."
"There aren't any additional features that I feel are missing. However, it's worth noting that Control Tower seems to function as a layer utilizing standard AWS products in the background. Occasionally, the interface may appear less streamlined, with changes in layout based on the underlying products being used. While this doesn't impact functionality, having a more standardized user interface, irrespective of the background products, could enhance the user experience."
"The sole drawback is its restriction to enable only one Control Tower."
"The product's affordability depends on the value it brings to specific organizations."
"While using the solution recently, it broke a certain activity. So, AWS Control Tower needs to consider making the solution better."
"My teammates have complained about the upgrade. The source code had massive files that had to be merged with our own development to upgrade to the latest version of CloudStack. It was quite painful for them. CloudStack could add some cost management tools to give me some control over the costs associated with the number of users of my services."
"I would like to see support for native VLAN, and fault-tolerance."
"It's really hard to delete zones, clusters, datacenters. You need to follow strict rules, which were not properly documented at the time."
"Accounts, domains, and user accounts are set up with public cloud in mind, not private."
"A technology upgrade is one item which could be improved upon a lot."
"It is not widely used so Google does not help very much when you are troubleshooting, and the CloudStack forum is not very active."
"​The user can't upload SSH keys from the UI. We have to use the API for this, and it is not always convenient."
"The Windows hosts do not get their hostnames from cloud-init."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If you're a super-small business, it may be a little bit pricey for you... But in large, enterprise companies where money is, maybe, less of an issue, Turbonomic is not that expensive. I can't imagine why any big company would not buy it, for what it does."
"The product is fairly priced right now. Given its capabilities, it is excellently priced. We think that the product will become self-funding because we will be able to maximize our resources, which will help us from a capacity perspective. That should save us money in the long run."
"The pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."
"I'm not involved in any of the billing, but my understanding is that is fairly expensive."
"The pricing and licensing are fair. We purchase based on benchmark pricing, which we have been able to get. There are no surprise charges nor hidden fees."
"You should understand the cost of your physical servers and how much time and money you are spending year over year on expanding your virtual farm."
"In the last year, Turbonomic has reduced our cloud costs by $94,000."
"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."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price and ten is a high price, I rate the pricing an eight."
"I believe it's free of charge or comes at a very low cost. It's an additional feature. Even if there is a fee, it's minimal. AWS seems to assist customers in gaining a comprehensive view of their security setups within AWS. Using Control Tower is highly recommended, especially as your company grows and involves Active Directory, various departments, and different architectural aspects. It becomes more advisable to leverage Control Tower rather than managing these aspects manually, especially for larger organizations."
"It is expensive but it is an investment in my opinion."
"AWS Control Tower is not really that expensive."
"It operates on a pay-as-you-go model, meaning we are charged only for the services we actively use within it."
"The solution is free."
"The pricing structure is closely intertwined with the specifics of your environment and the billing strategy you employ."
"The cost is reasonable, but there are opportunities for improvement in terms of pricing for larger enterprises."
"The solution is open-source and free."
"CloudStack is an open-source product."
"The Apache CloudStack is open source, so you do not have licenses to purchase."
"​Give an effort to planning. If possible, contract a specialized consultant company for the initial setup and knowledge transfer.​​"
"CloudStack is an open source solution, so you don't need to pay anything for it. When our company develops something specially for CloudStack, it is donated to the Apache Software Foundation and provided to anyone that wants to use it."
"As far as I know, CS is still free of charge. If you want to pay some money, Citrix Cloud Platform is based on CS, I think. As for hypervisors – everything as usual, you need to pay for VMware and vCenter. As for XenServer, recently they changed the free feature list, so you may need to pay some money to get useful features like XenMotion."
"It is a 100% open-source solution needing just an Apache license. Also, there are no hidden fees to be paid."
"There is no license, so the product is free unless you are buying professional technical support services."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Management solutions are best for your needs.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
7%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
21%
Educational Organization
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
University
8%
 

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...
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...
What do you like most about AWS Control Tower?
The most intriguing feature is the automatic generation of user accounts. Leveraging Active Directory and global comp...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS Control Tower?
Control Tower within the AWS Organization does not have a charge. It is free and does not incur additional charges.
What needs improvement with AWS Control Tower?
There is a sync issue within the organization. It is important that the system syncs automatically instead of requiri...
What do you like most about CloudStack?
The initial implementation process was quite good.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CloudStack?
CloudStack is an open-source product without any inherent costs. Service and support are available through various ve...
What needs improvement with CloudStack?
The product could improve by embracing newer technologies like GPU virtualization.
 

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
No data available
Vmops, Cloud.com
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
GreenQloud, Exoscale, TomTom, ASG, PC Extreme, ISWest, Grid'5000
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Control Tower vs. CloudStack and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.