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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
DevOps Engineer at ZoomOps Technology
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
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

"The budgeting tool of AWS Cost Management is the most valuable feature."
"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."
"With the cost management tool, clients can optimize fine tuning their consumption."
"The product provides the ability to set cost limits and budgets for a set of resources on the network."
"AWS Cost Management is good for providing in-depth information in one place."
"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 recommendations, and provide clients with suggestions for resizing. This feature includes data filtering and protection, offering users insights into spending patterns through AWS spending patterns and planning tools. The product is easy to learn."
"All of the reporting features are very good, as they allow us to track monthly expenses and send relevant emails."
"We like that Turbonomic shows application metrics and estimates the impact of taking a suggested action. It provides us a map of resource utilization as part of its recommendation. We evaluate and compare that to what we think would be appropriate from a human perspective to that what Turbonomic is doing, then take the best action going forward."
"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."
"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."
"The ability to monitor and automate both the right-sizing of VMs as well as to automate the vMotion of VMs across ESXi hosts."
"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."
"The automation and orchestration components are definitely the best part, as you can tell it what it can do and when, and just let it be."
"With over 2500 ESX VMs, including 1500+ XenDesktop VDI desktops, hosted over two datacentres and 80+ vSphere hosts, firefighting has become something of the past."
"The recommendation of the family types is a huge help because it has saved us a lot of money. We use it primarily for that. Another thing that Turbonomic provides us with is a single platform that manages the full application stack and that's something I really like."
 

Cons

"Data transfer between S3 buckets within AWS incurs costs, especially when moving data from one bucket to another or downloading data."
"We need finer-grained control over the roles and policies for users, specifying their permissions as to what they can look at."
"There could be an option to build custom dashboards for the platform."
"The solution needs to improve the communication mechanism available to the stakeholders."
"I would like to see AWS Cost Management be more precise in their calculations."
"This program is not very scalable."
"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."
"AWS could improve the compatibility with other products."
"The issue for us with the automation is we are considering starting to do the hot adds, but there are some problems with Windows Server 2019 and hot adds. It is a little buggy. So, if we turn that on with a cluster that has a lot of Windows 2019 Servers, then we would see a blue screen along with a lot of applications as well. Depending on what you are adding, cores or memory, it doesn't necessarily even take advantage of that at that moment. A reboot may be required, and we can't do that until later. So, that decreases the benefit of the real-time. For us, there is a lot of risk with real-time."
"Some features are only available via changes to the deployment YAML, and it would be better to have them in the UI."
"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."
"They have a long road map when we ask for certain things that will make the product better. It takes time, but that's understandable because there are other things that are higher on the priority list."
"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."
"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."
"After running this solution in production for a year, we may want a more granular approach to how we utilize the product because we are planning to use some of its metrics to feed into our financial system."
"The way it handles updates needs to be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's pricing depends on our services."
"The product is affordable."
"We get AWS Cost Management for free because we use AWS services."
"We have signed a long-term contract with AWS. There are different service levels that will determine the level of support you have."
"AWS Cost Management is free to use."
"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."
"I'm not involved in any of the billing, but my understanding is that is fairly expensive."
"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."
"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."
"The pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."
"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."
"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."
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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
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

No data available
 

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, Apptio and others in Cloud Cost Management. Updated: December 2025.
879,310 professionals have used our research since 2012.