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AWS Cost Management [EOL] vs IBM Turbonomic comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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 Management [EOL]
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM Turbonomic
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), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (8th)
 

Featured Reviews

RANJAN KUMAR - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps to set cost thresholds and receive alerts if the actual cost exceeds them
We regularly check the status of services to identify any unnecessary or unexpected costs. We utilize the billing dashboard in AWS to monitor daily costs and assess any significant increases. For instance, if our daily AWS expenses usually amount to $1,000 for running a hundred instances, and suddenly it spikes to $1,500, we investigate the reasons behind the increase. We scrutinize detailed reports, identify the areas and services contributing to the rise, and inform our manager. The dashboard overview in AWS Cost Explorer provides a high-level summary of our expenses, covering databases. This includes total costs, daily costs, and a breakdown by services. AWS Cost Explorer offers visualization tools like line charts, bar charts, and pie charts. These visualizations assist us in quickly understanding expenditures, enabling us to pinpoint areas that might need attention. The tool allows the creation of custom reports by selecting and configuring filtering and grouping options. Custom reports include a data range selector, making it easy to analyze expenses for specific periods such as daily, monthly, or custom durations. The budget feature is client-dependent. Before creating any services, we engage with our client to understand their requirements, such as the number of instances, CPU, and memory needed. Subsequently, we create a budgeting tool in servers based on these specifications. Our team configures custom notifications to alert us when actual costs or usage exceed predefined thresholds. These alerts can be sent via email or integrated with Simple Notification Service. I rate the overall product a ten out of ten.
Dan Ambrose - PeerSpot reviewer
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

"The product provides the ability to set cost limits and budgets for a set of resources on the network."
"The initial setup wasn't complex at all."
"The budgeting tool of AWS Cost Management is the most valuable feature."
"With the cost management tool, clients can optimize fine tuning their consumption."
"All of the reporting features are very good, as they allow us to track monthly expenses and send relevant emails."
"The initial setup was straightforward. It's not complex at all."
"I like the recommendation we get from AWS Cost Management to use a particular image or VM type."
"AWS Cost Management is good for providing in-depth information in one place."
"I like the analytics that help us optimize compatibility. Whereas Azure Advisor tells us what we have to do, Turbonomic has automation which actually does those things. That means we don't have to be present to get them done and simplifies our IT engineers' jobs."
"Rightsizing is valuable. Its recommendations are pretty good."
"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."
"Using this product helps us to reduce performance risk because it shows us where resources are needed but not yet allocated."
"The ability to monitor and automate both the right-sizing of VMs as well as to automate the vMotion of VMs across ESXi hosts."
"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."
"My favorite part of the solution is the automation scheduling. Being able to choose when actions happen, and how they happen..."
"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."
 

Cons

"The solution needs to improve the communication mechanism available to the stakeholders."
"AWS Cost Management has fewer features compared to Azure Cost Management."
"The solution needs to have its own dashboard for seeing details on it. It should be customizable as well so I have the ability to pull up the information I need to see and have it in one place for my reference. I should just be able to click and see everything I need in one step."
"This program is not very scalable."
"AWS could improve the compatibility with other products."
"There could be an option to build custom dashboards for the platform."
"I would like to see the forecasting models improved with AWS Cost Management."
"We need finer-grained control over the roles and policies for users, specifying their permissions as to what they can look at."
"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."
"The implementation could be enhanced."
"In Azure, it's not what you're using. You purchase the whole 8 TB disk and you pay for it. It doesn't matter how much you're using. So something that I've asked for from Turbonomic is recommendations based on disk utilization. In the example of the 8 TB disk where only 200 GBs are being used, based on the history, there should be a recommendation like, "You can safely use a 500 GB disk." That would create a lot of savings."
"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 would be nice for them to have a way to do something with physical machines, but I know that is not their strength Thankfully, the majority of our environment is virtual, but it would be nice to see this type of technology across some other platforms. It would be nice to have capacity planning across physical machines."
"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."
"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."
"The old interface was not the clearest UI in some areas, and could be quite intimidating when first using the tool."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have signed a long-term contract with AWS. There are different service levels that will determine the level of support you have."
"The tool's pricing depends on our services."
"AWS Cost Management is free to use."
"The product is affordable."
"We get AWS Cost Management for free because we use AWS services."
"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."
"Contact the Turbonomic sales team, explain your needs and what you're looking to monitor. They will get a pre-sales SE on the phone and together work up a very accurate quote."
"I don't know the current prices, but I like how the licensing is based on the number of instances instead of sockets, clusters, or cores. We have some VMs that are so heavy I can only fit four on one server. It's not cost-effective if we have to pay more for those. When I move around a VM SQL box with 30 cores and a half-terabyte of RAM, I'm not paying for an entire socket and cores where people assume you have at least 10 or 20 VMs on that socket for that pricing."
"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."
"Everybody tells me the pricing is high. But the ROIs are great."
"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."
"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 pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business41
Midsize Enterprise57
Large Enterprise147
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about AWS Cost Management?
The tool's cost management feature provides a comprehensive view of AWS costs, allowing us to plan and make cost-effective decisions. With AWS Cost Explorer, we can perform cost planning, generate ...
What needs improvement with AWS Cost Management?
Data transfer between S3 buckets within AWS incurs costs, especially when moving data from one bucket to another or downloading data.
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...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Amazon Cost Management
Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Hess, Expedia, Kelloggs, Philips, HyperTrack
IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM, Nutanix, Microsoft and others in Cloud Cost Management. Updated: September 2025.
867,370 professionals have used our research since 2012.