Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

BMC Helix Continuous Optimization vs IBM Turbonomic comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 1, 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

BMC Helix Continuous Optimi...
Ranking in IT Operations Analytics
26th
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
37th
Average Rating
10.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure Capacity Planning (1st)
IBM Turbonomic
Ranking in IT Operations Analytics
4th
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), Cloud Analytics (1st), AIOps (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the IT Operations Analytics category, the mindshare of BMC Helix Continuous Optimization is 0.6%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 1.1%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Operations Analytics Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM Turbonomic1.1%
BMC Helix Continuous Optimization0.6%
Other98.3%
IT Operations Analytics
 

Featured Reviews

Appperf677 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enables us to right-size systems to free up resources, and identify performance problems down to the process level
Since I already have a sneak peek into the next releases, I'm very happy about what's going to be included. I would like to see continued support for the legacy parts of the tool, the old, seasoned parts that are very valuable to me. That is a message I continue to give to BMC: All the new stuff's great, but don't take away this really important stuff. That's my biggest fear, that I might lose some of my old functionality that is still extremely valuable. I want to make sure we don't lose any functionality, and that they just still keep delivering on what they're doing. I don't have anything more to ask than what they're offering.
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 most interesting feature is certainly the simulation of the load using different servers or different KPI parameters of the business."
"Workload characterization is super important because it lets us figure things out. Many people know, for example, that with Microsoft Word, Word.exe is the executable. Everybody knows their executable, but they don't always know what it does. It also launches other things. This tool has the ability and insight to track those things, and to know: "Oh, you wanted this executable, but this one started this, so you must want this, too." And it tells you what it had to add, what it was using or was spawning."
"We ingest a ton of business data. We are an insurance company and we have business data, like how many quotes are done an hour, and how many policies are sold per hour. The correlation engine in the new TrueSight Capacity Optimization components are wonderful. We can do correlation analysis over months of data, and then we run models to tell our business: 'If you do 1,000 more quotes an hour, we're going to have to upgrade, and we're going to need this much more hardware.'"
"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."
"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."
"We have VM placement in Automated mode and currently have all other metrics in Recommend mode."
"We can manage multiple environments using a single pane of glass, which is something that I really like."
"Before implementing Turbonomic, we had difficulty reaching a consensus about VM placement and sizing. Everybody's opinion was wrong, including mine. The application developers, implementers, and infrastructure team could never decide the appropriate size of a virtual machine. I always made the machines small, and they always made them too big. We were both probably wrong."
"I only deal with the infrastructure side, so I really couldn't speak to more than load balancing as the most valuable feature for me. It provides specific actions that prevent resource starvation. It always keeps things in perfect balance."
"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."
"The biggest value I'm getting out of VMTurbo right now is the complete hands-off management of equalizing the usage in my data center."
 

Cons

"The memory management of Java application servers should be implemented to be able to size GC and footprint."
"Some of the data management is painful. Some of the new features haven't been implemented in quite the way I would like to get to levels of detail. For example, Visualizer parser doesn't take everything it should out of the Visualizer files. We've had to put in a work-around, but the work-around is not as accurate as what's in the file."
"If they would educate their customers to understand the latest updates, that would help customers... Also, there are a lot of features that are not available in Turbonomic. For example, PaaS component optimization and automation are still in the development phase."
"I would love to see Turbonomic analyze backup data. We have had people in the past put servers into daily full backups with seven-year retention and where the disk size is two terabytes. So, every single day, there is a two terabyte snapshot put into a Blob somewhere. I would love to see Turbonomic say, "Here are all your backups along with the age of them," to help us manage the savings by not having us spend so much on the storage in Azure. That would be huge."
"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."
"They could add a few more reports. They could also be a bit more granular. While they have reports, sometimes it is hard to figure out what you are looking for just by looking at the date."
"Additional interfaces would be helpful."
"The way it handles updates needs to be improved."
"We don't use Turbonomic for FinOps and part of the reason is its cost reporting. The reporting could be much more robust and, if that were the case, I could pitch it for FinOps."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Right now, the licensing structure is by server. Everybody is licensed somewhat differently, depending on how big they are, how many licenses they have."
"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly 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."
"You should understand the cost of your physical servers and how much time and money you are spending year over year on expanding your virtual farm."
"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."
"I'm not involved in any of the billing, but my understanding is that is fairly expensive."
"It's worth the time and money investment if you can afford it."
"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."
"Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which IT Operations Analytics solutions are best for your needs.
870,623 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
25%
Energy/Utilities Company
13%
Computer Software Company
13%
Media Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
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

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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

BMC Capacity Optimization, TrueSight Capacity Optimization, BMC Helix Optimize, BMC Helix Continuous Optimization
Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Dilliard's
IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC Helix Continuous Optimization vs. IBM Turbonomic and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
870,623 professionals have used our research since 2012.