Cloudify vs IBM Turbonomic comparison

Cloudify and IBM are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. Cloudify is ranked #29, while IBM is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.5. Cloudify holds a 1.9% mindshare in CM, compared to IBM’s 5.2% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Cloudify users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Cloudify

Read 12 Cloudify reviews

886 Views
824 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

IBM Turbonomic

Read 205 IBM Turbonomic reviews

5,775 Views
3,119 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Cloudify

IBM Turbonomic

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

IBM Turbonomic and Cloudify compete in enterprise application management. Cloudify has an advantage in flexibility with comprehensive orchestration, while IBM Turbonomic leads in scalability.

Features: IBM Turbonomic provides robust resource optimization, real-time analytics, and automation for performance efficiency. Cloudify offers strong orchestration, automation capabilities, and management across hybrid cloud environments.

Room for Improvement: IBM Turbonomic can enhance its multi-cloud management and automation extensibility. It should have more flexible deployment options. Cloudify needs to improve its scalability features and streamline deployment processes. Enhancing customer support response times could also benefit users.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Turbonomic boasts a streamlined deployment with robust support, suitable for large-scale enterprises. Cloudify provides a customizable deployment model that can be time-consuming, catering to specific business needs with flexibility.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Turbonomic involves a significant initial investment but offers a strong ROI by optimizing resources and reducing operational costs. Cloudify appeals to those seeking multi-cloud orchestration with a lower setup cost, aligning with cost-effective cloud management goals.

To learn more, read our detailed Cloudify vs. IBM Turbonomic Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cloudify vs. IBM Turbonomic

July 2025

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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

Cloudify

Ranking in Cloud Management

29th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

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 (4th), Virtualization Management Tools (3rd), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (4th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (4th)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of Cloudify is 1.9%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 5.2%, down from 5.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

Mark Wittling

Cloud Architect at Cox communications

Works very well for advanced service chaining requirements and has extremely advanced engineers for support

We had a manager who thought that Cloudify could be used as a replacement for Horizon in OpenStack, but we found that Cloudify lacked the user interface or GUI for doing multitenancy and basic platform management tasks. Cloudify was really good at launching, for example, firewalls and configuring them and doing service chaining and rather advanced things like that, but it didn't meet the requirements for a basic platform management solution. It is something that seems to work better as a bolt-on or an augmented solution. It is a bit mis-marketed as a Cloud Management solution. It is not that. It is more of a service orchestration and automation tool. It is very good at doing that, but it fails to meet basic platform management requirements. Once you have it running, you can't really do anything with it without writing code and scripts. It requires a full-time DevOps person to use it. We deployed a Palo Alto firewall with it. That's basically what the project was for us, and it worked flawlessly once we got it finished, but it took another 12 weeks to get all of the automation and everything else coded, tested, and working. There is certainly a place for this technology, but when we got rid of OpenStack and moved to VMware, we either had to go with the vRealize Automation Suite to do this kind of automation, or we had to find an alternative solution to manage the private cloud. So, we put Cloudify in, but we really couldn't find it useful for basic platform administration tasks.

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Dan Ambrose

Infrastructure Engineer 4 at Hyland

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Extensible internal functions and plugins. Can implement custom plugins to fit your scenario. Python based plugins."

"The solution includes the option to run background scripts and processes from a connected API."

"Cloudify works in cases where you have very advanced service chaining requirements. It really works well there, and it fits the best. They have a standardized markup that's based on TOSCA, which is a standard. I like the fact that they're standards-based. Their solution works extremely well if you have the talent and the manpower to write TOSCA descriptors to deploy and interchange services or to automate the configuration and turn up of services."

"You can use only what you need. You can remove certain Cloudify functions from the framework to create a "minified" version of what you need. This might only consist of the messaging delivery system, and the orchestration functions."

"TOSCA model allows modeling the application rather than the automation. It is a machine-readable representation of the application and its infrastructure, which can be used for other things too, not just for the orchestration (e.g. enterprise architecture big picture, who connects to whom)."

"It enables a single platform to communicate with the entire infrastructure."

"Has great extendability which means you can build your own custom logic."

"Valuable features are auto-scaling and load balancing."

More Cloudify pros

"The automated memory balancing, where it looks at whether it's being used in the most efficient way and adds or takes away memory, is the best part. If it didn't do that, it would be something that I would have to do. We have too many machines for one person to do that. The automation helps me in that it is done in a really efficient way and a balanced way because of the policies. It really helps."

"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."

"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."

"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.'"

"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."

"We can manage multiple environments using a single pane of glass, which is something that I really like."

"Rightsizing is valuable. Its recommendations are pretty good."

"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."

More IBM Turbonomic pros

Cons

"It lacked the user interface for multitenancy and basic platform management tasks. It is a leader in the niche area that they like to perform in, but it only does about 30% of top-tier advanced functions of platform management. It doesn't meet about 70% of what you need to manage a private cloud platform."

"Install of the product itself could be improved and I would like to see better event monitoring."

"Certainly the UI could use some intensive work, but nevertheless, overall, it’s a complete product with its 3.4 version and much better features are available with 4.0."

"The solution is a bit of a headache because mistakes happen in the blueprint every time we deploy and they require modifications."

"The upgrading process could be simplified."

"Unlike the Docker environment, Cloudify takes time for configuration and its learning curve."

"Error handling could be improved; GUI is lacking with respect to user privileges and connectivity."

"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."

"Turbonomic doesn't do storage placement how I would prefer. We use multiple shared storage volumes on VMware, so I don't have one big disk. I have lots of disks that I can place VMs on, and that consumes IOPS from the disk subsystem. We were getting recommendations to provision a new volume."

"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."

"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."

"While the product is fairly intuitive and easy to use once you learn it, it can be quite daunting until you have undergone a bit of training."

"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."

"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."

More IBM Turbonomic cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I wasn't involved in the pricing of it because we were just doing prototype work with it, but I was told by the upper management team that it was quite expensive. That was another reason we switched to Morpheus."

"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."

"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."

"I know there have been some issues with the billing, when the numbers were first proposed, as to how much we would save. There was a huge miscommunication on our part. Turbonomic was led to believe that we could optimize our AWS footprint, because we didn't know we couldn't. So, we were promised savings of $750,000. Then, when we came to implement Turbonomic, the developers in AWS said, "Absolutely not. You're not putting that in our environment. We can't scale down anything because they coded it." Our AWS environment is a legacy environment. It has all these old applications, where all the developers who have made it are no longer with the company. Those applications generate a ton of money for us. So, if one breaks, we are really in trouble and they didn't want to have to deal with an environment that was changing and couldn't be supported. That number went from $750,000 to about $450,000. However, that wasn't Turbonomic's fault."

"Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced."

"In the last year, Turbonomic has reduced our cloud costs by $94,000."

"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."

"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."

"It's worth the time and money investment if you can afford it."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Retailer

Educational Organization

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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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 ...

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What needs improvement with Turbonomic?

The implementation could be enhanced.

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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...

See all answers

Comparisons

Morpheus vs Cloudify

Compared 40% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs Cloudify

Compared 28% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs Cloudify

Compared 16% of the time

More Cloudify Competitors

VMware Aria Operations vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 15% of the time

Azure Cost Management vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 10% of the time

VMware vSphere vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 7% of the time

Cloudability vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 6% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 5% of the time

More IBM Turbonomic Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudify

July 2025

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Buyer's Guide

IBM Turbonomic

July 2025

Download IBM Turbonomic product report

Also Known As

No data available

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

Cloudify

IBM

Overview

Cloudify is an open-source orchestration-first cloud management platform. The solution allows applications to efficiently run across multiple cloud or data center platforms for premium multi-cloud infrastructure automation and orchestration. It provides infrastructure automation using environment as a service (EaaS) technology to deploy and continuously manage any cloud, private data center, or Kubernetes service from one central point while leveraging existing toolchains.

Cloudify Product Highlights

Fully customizable (white label, add, and modify widgets)
Create a custom view per business units, groups, user role
Easy integration with any 3rd-party/homegrown portal
Identify and eliminate task execution failures via a visual interface
Easy service composition that allows you to create new or update existing services
Switch between code and topology views
Import existing automation templates and scripts into Cloudify and automatically convert them into certified environments.
Intelligent and declarative engine that automates the entire lifecycle management
Intuitive UX and dashboards allowing complete visibility and control over usage, behavior, faults, and events of application/network services.

Cloudify Features

Cloudify has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Elastic caching
Post-deployment automation
Deployment monitoring
Service catalog
Real-time code validation
Plugins (Kubernetes, Ansible, AWS Cloud Formation, Azure ARM, Terraform)
Advanced Kubernetes management UI
Multi cluster action
Governance and compliance
Self-serve experience

Cloudify Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing Cloudify. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Operation agility: Cloudify gives your organization and DevOps teams the ability to react to resource needs, evolve, and adapt quickly over time.

Self-service: Cloudify provides a self-service catalog and portal framework for cloud automation and cloud orchestration to provide a helpful and intuitive experience for environments, apps, and services setup and management.

Real-time visibility: Cloudify enables you to visually track all task executions. By implementing Cloudify, you can monitor progress and status of each execution step on Cloudify’s cloud orchestration platform, identify and eliminate task execution failures via a visual interface, and you can also apply management actions, such as stop, correct, and resume, quickly.

Reduce design and configuration time: The Cloudify solution has a visual editor, allowing greater visibility into blueprint structure and dependencies, and drag-n-drop service composition that helps you leverage shared resources and components for ultimate open-source infrastructure and cloud orchestration.

Fast deployment: Another benefit of Cloudify is that it helps speed up deployments of your test/dev/production environments from your CI/CD.

Enables continuous updates: With Cloudify, you have continuous updates for your production environments. Cloudify enables your organization to monitor health, heal failures, update patches, and scale resources without any environment downtime.

Governance: By using the Cloudify solution, you can accommodate governance changes and can scale and update operations according to your certified architecture.

Easier to manage Kubernetes: Cloudify makes it simple for you to manage multi Kubernetes clusters via service orchestration, enabling you to manage the application service itself rather than just its infrastructure.

Cost optimization: With Cloudify, you can control costs by employing end-to-end modeling of the entire infrastructure. The solution offers cost-saving policies, which include the decommissioning of formerly complex services and resources.

Cloudify

IBM Turbonomic offers automation, planning, and right-sizing recommendations to streamline resource management, improve efficiencies, and optimize costs across virtualized environments and cloud platforms.

IBM Turbonomic is valued for its capability to optimize resource allocation and monitor virtual environments efficiently. It facilitates automated decision-making in VM sizing, load balancing, and cost optimization for both on-premises and cloud deployments. Users can leverage insights for workload placement, ensure peak performance assurance, and effectively right-size across VMware and Azure. The ongoing transition to HTML5 aims to improve visual and navigational ease, while expanded reporting features are anticipated. Opportunities for improved training, documentation, and integrations enhance platform usability and functionality.

What Are the Key Features?

Automation: Streamlines resource allocation and VM management.
Planning Tools: Supports capacity management and growth projections.
Right-Sizing: Optimizes VM configurations for efficient resource use.
Customizable Dashboards: Provides quick insights into environment health.
Reporting Capabilities: Offers valuable data for informed decision-making.
Cloud Integration: Ensures cost-effective resource utilization.

What Benefits Should Be Looked For?

Performance Enhancement: Improves application performance efficiency.
Cost Reduction: Minimizes operational expenses through optimizations.
Infrastructure Efficiency: Maximizes use of IT infrastructure resources.

In finance, IBM Turbonomic aids in maintaining platform efficiency during market fluctuations. Healthcare organizations leverage its capability for resource optimization during high-demand periods to enhance patient care support. Retailers use it for planning in peak seasons, ensuring resources align with fluctuating demand to maintain performance continuity.

IBM

Sample Customers

Proximus Partner Communications (Israel) VMware NTT Data Metaswitch Spirent Communications Lumina Networks Atos Fortinet

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.

Buyer's Guide

Cloudify vs. IBM Turbonomic

July 2025

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