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Cisco UCS Director vs IBM Turbonomic comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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

Cisco UCS Director
Ranking in Cloud Management
28th
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM Turbonomic
Ranking in Cloud Management
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (2nd), Virtualization Management Tools (3rd), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (9th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (3rd), AIOps (17th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS Director is 1.5%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 4.4%, down from 5.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Turbonomic4.4%
Cisco UCS Director1.5%
Other94.1%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

OR
Senior Telecommunications Engineer at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
Managing extensive VoIP services becomes efficient and seamless
We use Cisco UCS Director primarily for managing our VoIP service to maintain seamless service delivery. We operate in an enterprise government environment Cisco UCS Director is straightforward to use, which we greatly appreciate. It helps save time by making it quicker to roll out new call…
reviewer1446966 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
The solution reduced our operational expenditures and is able to identify points before we even noticed them
The management interface seems to be designed for high-resolution screens. Somebody with a smaller-resolution screen might not like the web interface. I run a 4K monitor on it, so everything fits on the screen. With a lower resolution like 1080, you need to scroll a lot. Everything is in smaller windows. It doesn't seem to be designed for smaller screens. When I change the resolution to 1080, I only see half of what I would on my big 4K monitor. It would be annoying to have to scroll to see the flow chart. They have a flow chart that goes top to bottom like a tree. On a lower resolution, it might be nice if that scrolls horizontally because it's long, narrow, and tall. It's only three icons wide, but it's 15 icons tall. I think it would be helpful to have the ability to change that for a smaller screen and customize the widget.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product is flexible and compact. It has a lot of features."
"The improvement for our organization has really been ease of use; we'd be a mess without the solution."
"Cisco's knowledge base is extensive."
"The main feature of this solution is the integration with all the Cisco solutions and other vendors."
"Feature-wise, the solution helps one to add multiple environments in one place...It is a scalable product."
"I can manage multiple workloads whether it's on AWS, Azure, or on-premises. They can be managed by using the UCS Director."
"As usual, the technical support from Cisco is amazing."
"This is a user-friendly solution that is very good and easy to use."
"Working with Turbonomic is incredible."
"I think people will be shocked at how easy this is to get going and how much information you can get from it."
"One of the most valuable features for us was the automation aspect."
"Whether you have a single, specific virtualization technology or a multi-platform environment, you need this software if you want to see end to end in your environment."
"Helped to “right size” productions server environment. We now can do more with less."
"I like the dashboard; I don't have to search around or create reports for issues or items I should be looking at, as it all just comes to the front."
"Licensing cost is relatively cost effective."
"Customer Service: Excellent. They have teams dedicated to helping their customers get the most from the product."
 

Cons

"The user interface could use improvement."
"There are a lot of bugs in the solution. This is an area in the solution that can be improved."
"The tool should be a lot more intuitive and make it easy for us to understand and migrate."
"The scalability of this solution needs to be improved because as it is now, you cannot scale the storage alone. Rather, you have to scale the storage and the compute together."
"I would like to see more flexibility when it comes to managing other stacks, like VMware virtualization."
"There could be an improvement with the integration with the newest solutions from other vendors' technologies."
"The solution could be improved is including a feature where I could do things programmatically versus having to create workarounds to get what I want to get done."
"It is not easy to add or expand the product."
"There is an area where new workloads can be created and placed. I've had trouble with that feature and find it easier to create new machines directly in vCenter and let it get the address by Turbonomic after the fact."
"Decrease the cost."
"We did have an issue certain build causing the database to fill up however technical support was very helpful in getting updated to a newer version to correct this issue."
"The way dashboards are accessed with a pop-up can sometimes get in the way."
"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."
"Could be more user friendly, but the provided training provided the needed clarity."
"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."
"Regular upgrades and patching requires a period of getting used to the new environment before getting hands-on with the tool."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cisco UCS Director is expensive...I rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten."
"The budget doesn’t work for the state and local governments."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price and ten is a high price, I rate the pricing around five to six out of ten."
"I would rate the product's pricing an eight out of ten."
"I rate Cisco UCS Director's price a three out of ten. Cisco UCS Director is not an affordable product. With Cisco UCS Director, there is a need to pay an overall price, which consists of the product, software, and support."
"The cost of this solution is significant."
"In the last year, Turbonomic has reduced our cloud costs by $94,000."
"Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced."
"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."
"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."
"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 is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."
"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."
"Licensing is per socket, so load up on the cores rather than a lot of lower core CPUs."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Construction Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business42
Midsize Enterprise57
Large Enterprise147
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco UCS Director?
While the pricing might be seen as expensive, it provides value for money due to reliable service and excellent technical support.
What needs improvement with Cisco UCS Director?
It should be more of a cloud-based architecture for Cisco UCS Director, and it should be affordable to small customers as well because the pricing is a major challenge when we talk about Cisco UCS ...
What is your primary use case for Cisco UCS Director?
Mainly in my region and country, large data center customers are using Cisco UCS Director, not the SMB or mid-market customers. More of the on-premise customers are utilizing Cisco UCS Director. Th...
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Also Known As

No data available
Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
 

Interactive Demo

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Entel, Data#3, Cegal, NESIC, LightEdge
IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco UCS Director vs. IBM Turbonomic and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
914,322 professionals have used our research since 2012.