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AWS Cost Explorer vs IBM Turbonomic comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 22, 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

AWS Cost Explorer
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
10th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Financial Data Analysis Platforms (3rd)
IBM Turbonomic
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (5th), Cloud Management (4th), Virtualization Management Tools (5th), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (11th), Cloud Analytics (1st), AIOps (15th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Cloud Cost Management category, the mindshare of AWS Cost Explorer is 2.8%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 6.3%, down from 14.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Cost Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Turbonomic6.3%
AWS Cost Explorer2.8%
Other90.9%
Cloud Cost Management
 

Featured Reviews

Andrea-Carella - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps Engineer at GFT Group
Has provided valuable cost insights but could improve in filtering options
AWS Cost Explorer is used to visualize, analyze, and manage spending on the cloud. It can also make a forecast on how much you will spend and gives you information about past costs you had in the cloud in various regions for various different tools. For example, you can see how much it will cost to use a specific product in the future. You can also set a timeline for how much you will use that product to see the effective amount of money you are going to spend. You can compare various tools in order to see which are the most suited tools for your needs and which are the most expensive. You can filter by region and by specific product in order to see which costs are the most important in your organization and cloud environment. You can identify what is not necessary and what you can reduce. It has many good features that you can use with best practices. You can integrate AWS Cost Explorer, and it gives you a better overview of all the related aspects to the costing part of your infrastructure. AWS Cost Explorer is beneficial because you can access a simple interface where you can get an overview of all the costs you have in the cloud environment. You can see which costs you can reduce and how you can move from a specific product to another product in order to reduce costs and improve other aspects. It depends on the specific needs of the organization, but the most important advantage AWS Cost Explorer gives you is the ability to have a clear understanding of your cloud spending.
reviewer1446966 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
The solution reduced our operational expenditures and is able to identify points before we even noticed them
The management interface seems to be designed for high-resolution screens. Somebody with a smaller-resolution screen might not like the web interface. I run a 4K monitor on it, so everything fits on the screen. With a lower resolution like 1080, you need to scroll a lot. Everything is in smaller windows. It doesn't seem to be designed for smaller screens. When I change the resolution to 1080, I only see half of what I would on my big 4K monitor. It would be annoying to have to scroll to see the flow chart. They have a flow chart that goes top to bottom like a tree. On a lower resolution, it might be nice if that scrolls horizontally because it's long, narrow, and tall. It's only three icons wide, but it's 15 icons tall. I think it would be helpful to have the ability to change that for a smaller screen and customize the widget.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I find the forecasting feature particularly valuable as it helps predict future expenses."
"AWS Cost Explorer is beneficial because you can access a simple interface where you can get an overview of all the costs you have in the cloud environment."
"On-premises, one advantage I find particularly appealing is the ability to create policies for automatic CPU and memory scaling based on demand."
"Turbonomic has helped optimize cloud operations and reduced our cloud costs significantly. Overall, we are at about 40 percent savings, and we spend about three million a year just in Azure. It reduces the size of the VMs, putting them into the right template for usage. People don't realize that you don't have to future-proof a virtual machine in Azure. You just need to build it for today. As the business or service grows, you can scale up or out. About 90 percent of all the costs that we've reduced has been from sizing machines appropriately."
"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."
"Using this product helps us to reduce performance risk because it shows us where resources are needed but not yet allocated."
"The proactive monitoring of all our open enrollment applications has improved our organization. We have used it to size applications that we are moving to the cloud. Therefore, when we move them out there, we have them appropriately sized. We use it for reporting to current application owners, showing them where they are wasting money. There are easy things to find for an application, e.g., they decommissioned the server, but they never took care of the storage. Without a tool like this, that storage would just sit there forever, with us getting billed for it."
"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.""
"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."
"I like Turbonomic's built-in reporting. It provides a ton of information out of the box, so I don't have to build panels for the monthly summaries and other reports I need to present to management. We get better performance and bottleneck reporting from this than we do from our older EMC software."
 

Cons

"One disadvantage of AWS Cost Explorer is that you cannot filter too much. You cannot filter data by more than one variable."
"While there is always room for improvement, any needs for enhancement depend on specific requirements at the time. Currently, I cannot pinpoint any specific improvements needed."
"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."
"Remove the need for special in-house knowledge and development."
"The deployment process is a little tricky. It wasn't hard for me because I have pretty in-depth knowledge of Kubernetes, and their software runs on Kubernetes. To deploy it or upgrade it, you have to be able to follow steps and use the Kubernetes command line, or you'll need someone to come in and do it for you."
"I would like Turbonomic to add more services, especially in the cloud area. I have already told them this. They can add Azure NetApp Files. They can add Azure Blob storage. They have already added Azure App service, but they can do more."
"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."
"Since the introduction of a HTML 5 based interface, our main - but minor - criticism of a less than intuitive operation managers' GUI would be the area of improvement."
"The GUI and policy creation have room for improvement. There should be a better view of some of the numbers that are provided and easier to access. And policy creation should have it easier to identify groups."
"Before IBM bought it, the support was fantastic. After IBM bought it, the support became very disappointing."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I know there have been some issues with the billing, when the numbers were first proposed, as to how much we would save. There was a huge miscommunication on our part. Turbonomic was led to believe that we could optimize our AWS footprint, because we didn't know we couldn't. So, we were promised savings of $750,000. Then, when we came to implement Turbonomic, the developers in AWS said, "Absolutely not. You're not putting that in our environment. We can't scale down anything because they coded it." Our AWS environment is a legacy environment. It has all these old applications, where all the developers who have made it are no longer with the company. Those applications generate a ton of money for us. So, if one breaks, we are really in trouble and they didn't want to have to deal with an environment that was changing and couldn't be supported. That number went from $750,000 to about $450,000. However, that wasn't Turbonomic's fault."
"What I can advise is to trial the product, taking advantage of the Turbonomic pre-sales implemention support and kickstart training."
"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."
"Everybody tells me the pricing is high. But the ROIs are great."
"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Healthcare Company
12%
Insurance Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business41
Midsize Enterprise57
Large Enterprise147
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with AWS Cost Explorer?
One disadvantage of AWS Cost Explorer is that you cannot filter too much. You cannot filter data by more than one variable. It depends on the specific permissions you assign to the group that will ...
What is your primary use case for AWS Cost Explorer?
We have been handling all of the AWS infrastructure for the customer for maybe two years.
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...
 

Also Known As

Reserved Instance Reporting
Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Cost Explorer vs. IBM Turbonomic and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
883,692 professionals have used our research since 2012.