AWS Cost Explorer vs IBM Turbonomic comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM are both solutions in the Cloud Cost Management category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #12 with an average rating of 10.0, while IBM is ranked #1 with an average rating of 9.0. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 2.6% mindshare in CCM, compared to IBM’s 9.8% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of IBM users who would recommend it.

AWS Cost Explorer

Read 1 AWS Cost Explorer review

269 Views
253 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

IBM Turbonomic

Read 205 IBM Turbonomic reviews

5,574 Views
2,230 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

AWS Cost Explorer

IBM Turbonomic

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 13, 2025

IBM Turbonomic and AWS Cost Explorer compete in cloud cost management and optimization. IBM Turbonomic has an advantage due to its automation capabilities, while AWS Cost Explorer excels in integration with AWS environments and cost tracking.

Features: IBM Turbonomic actively optimizes application performance, enhances resource utilization, and supports various cloud and on-prem environments. AWS Cost Explorer provides detailed billing data, effective forecasting, and useful visualizations for tracking spending within AWS services.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Turbonomic supports multiple environments and offers highly responsive customer support for troubleshooting and customization. AWS Cost Explorer integrates seamlessly with the AWS ecosystem, ensuring smooth deployment. Its documentation aids in effective customer support, although integration outside AWS may pose challenges.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Turbonomic involves higher initial setup costs but delivers significant ROI through its automation and optimization across platforms. AWS Cost Explorer is integrated for free with AWS accounts, proving valuable for monitoring AWS spending without additional costs. However, it may lack cost-saving potential outside AWS expenditures, affecting overall ROI for non-AWS assets.

To learn more, read our detailed Cloud Cost Management Report (Updated: October 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Cost Management

October 2025

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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

12th

Average Rating

10.0

Reviews Sentiment

8.3

Number of Reviews

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 (7th), Cloud Management (5th), Virtualization Management Tools (4th), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (4th), Cloud Analytics (1st), AIOps (7th)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Cloud Cost Management category, the mindshare of AWS Cost Explorer is 2.6%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 9.8%, down from 15.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Cost Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
IBM Turbonomic	9.8%
AWS Cost Explorer	2.6%
Other	87.6%

Cloud Cost Management

Featured Reviews

Clint Mitchell

Mgr Cloud Operations at freelancer

Maximized budget efficiency with accurate cost forecasting and responsive support

Primarily, I use AWS Cost Explorer to maintain cost and current budget constraints. Our FinOps team provides us with a budget for the month, and we track our spending to identify where funds are allocated. We have billing alerts set up to notify us when our infrastructure exceeds a certain amount…

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Dan Ambrose

Infrastructure Engineer 4 at Hyland

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.

Read full review

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."

"The ability to monitor and automate both the right-sizing of VMs as well as to automate the vMotion of VMs across ESXi hosts."

"It became obvious to us that there was a lot more being offered in the product that we could leverage to ensure our VMware environment was running efficiently."

"The system automatically sizes and moves resources based on the needs of the applications."

"On-premises, one advantage I find particularly appealing is the ability to create policies for automatic CPU and memory scaling based on demand."

"The notifications saying, "This is a corrective action," even though some of them can be automated, are always welcome to see. They summarize your entire infrastructure and how you can better utilize it. That is the biggest feature."

"We have seen a 30% performance improvement overall."

"It is a good holistic platform that is easy to use. It works pretty well."

"Using this product helps us to reduce performance risk because it shows us where resources are needed but not yet allocated."

More IBM Turbonomic pros

Cons

"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."

"It would be good for Turbonomic, on their side, to integrate with other companies like AppDynamics or SolarWinds or other monitoring softwares. I feel that the actual monitoring of applications, mixed in with their abilities, would help. That would be the case wherever Turbonomic lacks the ability to monitor an application or in cases where applications are so customized that it's not going to be able to handle them. There is monitoring that you can do with scripting that you may not be able to do with Turbonomic."

"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."

"Before IBM bought it, the support was fantastic. After IBM bought it, the support became very disappointing."

"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."

"While the product is fairly intuitive and easy to use once you learn it, it can be quite daunting until you have undergone a bit of training."

"The reporting needs to be improved. It's important for us to know and be able to look back on what happened and why certain decisions were made, and we want to use a custom report for this."

"Recovering resources when they're not needed is not as optimized as it could be."

"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."

More IBM Turbonomic cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"I consider the pricing to be high."

"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."

"It's worth the time and money investment if you can afford it."

"It was an annual buy-in. You basically purchase it based on your host type stuff. The buy-in was about 20K, and the annual maintenance is about $3,000 a year."

"The pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."

"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."

"Licensing is per socket, so load up on the cores rather than a lot of lower core CPUs."

"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."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	41
Midsize Enterprise	57
Large Enterprise	147

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS Cost Explorer?

AWS Cost Explorer is part of the AWS package, so the cost is not directly associated with it. If you are using AWS services, you are already included in the cost structure.

See all answers

What needs improvement with AWS Cost Explorer?

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.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for AWS Cost Explorer?

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Turbonomic?

The implementation could be enhanced.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 27% of the time

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Compared 25% of the time

Pump.co vs AWS Cost Explorer

Compared 25% of the time

VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth vs AWS Cost Explorer

Compared 22% of the time

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VMware Aria Operations vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 14% of the time

Azure Cost Management vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 7% of the time

Cloudability vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 6% of the time

Spot vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 6% of the time

VMware vSphere vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 5% of the time

More IBM Turbonomic Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Cost Management

October 2025

Download AWS Cost Explorer product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Turbonomic

October 2025

Download IBM Turbonomic product report

Also Known As

Reserved Instance Reporting

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

IBM

Overview

AWS Cost Explorer provides a detailed view of your cloud expenses, helping you manage and optimize costs. Its analytics tools deliver insights vital for financial planning and operational efficiency.

AWS Cost Explorer offers powerful cost management features crucial for modern businesses leveraging cloud resources. Its advanced analytics tools facilitate the identification of spending patterns, contributing significantly to efficient financial management. The intuitive interface ensures easy navigation through detailed reports and forecasts, aiding in comprehensive cost analysis. API capabilities allow seamless integration with internal systems, enhancing overall financial oversight. Subscriptions to AWS Cost Explorer provide robust support for budget planning and cost savings by enabling cost allocation down to the resource level, assisting organizations in maintaining their financial goals while agilely utilizing the cloud.

What are the important features of AWS Cost Explorer?

Cost Forecasting: Predict future cloud expenses to plan budgets effectively.
Granular Reporting: Break down costs by service or resource for detailed analysis.
Usage Analytics: Monitor and analyze cloud usage trends over time.
Budget Alerts: Receive notifications to manage spending within predefined limits.
API Integration: Connect with internal systems for streamlined financial management.

What benefits and ROI should users expect from AWS Cost Explorer?

Enhanced Financial Planning: Improve budget accuracy with detailed insights into cloud expenses.
Cost Efficiency: Identify and reduce unnecessary spending, optimizing resource use.
Operational Agility: Quickly adapt to changes in demand with real-time expense monitoring.
Improved Resource Allocation: Allocate costs effectively across departments or projects.
Scalability: Support growth with scalable cost management capabilities.

In industries such as finance and healthcare, AWS Cost Explorer is instrumental in adhering to budgetary constraints while scaling operations. Financial institutions leverage its predictive analytics for better cost estimates, while healthcare providers use its budget alerts to ensure financial efficiency. By integrating AWS Cost Explorer, these industries achieve a balance between financial prudence and technological advancement, maintaining profitability without sacrificing service quality.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

IBM Turbonomic offers automation, planning, and right-sizing recommendations to streamline resource management, improve efficiencies, and optimize costs across virtualized environments and cloud platforms.

IBM Turbonomic is valued for its capability to optimize resource allocation and monitor virtual environments efficiently. It facilitates automated decision-making in VM sizing, load balancing, and cost optimization for both on-premises and cloud deployments. Users can leverage insights for workload placement, ensure peak performance assurance, and effectively right-size across VMware and Azure. The ongoing transition to HTML5 aims to improve visual and navigational ease, while expanded reporting features are anticipated. Opportunities for improved training, documentation, and integrations enhance platform usability and functionality.

What Are the Key Features?

Automation: Streamlines resource allocation and VM management.
Planning Tools: Supports capacity management and growth projections.
Right-Sizing: Optimizes VM configurations for efficient resource use.
Customizable Dashboards: Provides quick insights into environment health.
Reporting Capabilities: Offers valuable data for informed decision-making.
Cloud Integration: Ensures cost-effective resource utilization.

What Benefits Should Be Looked For?

Performance Enhancement: Improves application performance efficiency.
Cost Reduction: Minimizes operational expenses through optimizations.
Infrastructure Efficiency: Maximizes use of IT infrastructure resources.

In finance, IBM Turbonomic aids in maintaining platform efficiency during market fluctuations. Healthcare organizations leverage its capability for resource optimization during high-demand periods to enhance patient care support. Retailers use it for planning in peak seasons, ensuring resources align with fluctuating demand to maintain performance continuity.

IBM

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Cost Management

October 2025

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