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AWS Cost Explorer vs IBM Turbonomic comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 16, 2025

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
11th
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 (6th), Cloud Management (5th), Virtualization Management Tools (4th), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (4th), Cloud Analytics (1st), AIOps (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2025, in the Cloud Cost Management category, the mindshare of AWS Cost Explorer is 2.6%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 7.2%, down from 15.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Cost Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM Turbonomic7.2%
AWS Cost Explorer2.6%
Other90.2%
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.
Dan Ambrose - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Engineer 4 at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"I find the forecasting feature particularly valuable as it helps predict future expenses."
"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."
"Rightsizing is valuable. Its recommendations are pretty good."
"We have a system where our developers automate machine builds, and that is constantly running out of resources. Turbonomic helps us with that, so I don't have to keep buying hardware. The developers always say, "They don't have enough. They don't have enough. They don't have enough," when they just configured it improperly. Therefore, Turbonomic helps us identify configuration issues on their side so it doesn't cost me money on the other end to buy resources that I don't really need."
"It has automated a lot of things. We have saved 30 to 35 percent in human resource time and cost, which is pretty substantial. We don't have a big workforce here, so we have to use all the automation we can get."
"My favorite part of the solution is the automation scheduling. Being able to choose when actions happen, and how they happen..."
"The feature for optimizing VMs is the most valuable because a number of the agencies have workloads or VMs that are not really being used. Turbonomic enables us to say, 'If you combine these, or if you decide to go with a reserve instance, you will save this much.'"
"The primary features we have focused on are reporting and optimization."
"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.""
 

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."
"One disadvantage of AWS Cost Explorer is that you cannot filter too much. You cannot filter data by more than one variable."
"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 one point is the reporting. We do have reports out of it, but they're not the level of graphical detail I would like."
"It can be more agnostic in terms of the solutions that it provides. It can include some other cost-saving methods for the public cloud and SaaS applications as well."
"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."
"The old interface was not the clearest UI in some areas, and could be quite intimidating when first using the tool."
"Turbonomic can modernize the look and feel, making it more user-friendly to access and obtain information."
"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."
"I like the detail I get in the old user interface and will miss some of that in the new interface when we perform our planned upgrade soon."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Licensing is per socket, so load up on the cores rather than a lot of lower core CPUs."
"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."
"It's worth the time and money investment if you can afford it."
"In the last year, Turbonomic has reduced our cloud costs by $94,000."
"We see ROI in extended support agreements (ESA) for old software. Migration activities seem to be where Turbonomic has really benefited us the most. It's one click and done. We have new machines ready to go with Turbonomic, which are properly sized instead of somebody sitting there with a spreadsheet and guessing. So, my return on investment would certainly be on currency, from a software and hardware perspective."
"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."
"IBM Turbonomic is an investment that we believe will deliver positive returns."
"Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
7%
 

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: December 2025.
879,310 professionals have used our research since 2012.