CloudStack vs IBM Turbonomic comparison

Apache and IBM are both solutions in the Cloud Management category. Apache is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.0, while IBM is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.6. Apache holds a 4.7% mindshare in CM, compared to IBM’s 5.2% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Apache users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of IBM users who would recommend it.

CloudStack

Read 32 CloudStack reviews

2,031 Views
1,848 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

IBM Turbonomic

Read 205 IBM Turbonomic reviews

5,682 Views
3,068 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

CloudStack

IBM Turbonomic

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

CloudStack and IBM Turbonomic compete in the cloud infrastructure management and optimization category. IBM Turbonomic appears to have the upper hand due to its advanced optimization features, making it an attractive investment for organizations seeking extensive capabilities.

Features: CloudStack provides a comprehensive suite of features for managing large-scale cloud deployments, supporting diverse hypervisors, offering wide compatibility, and a strong API. IBM Turbonomic prioritizes real-time analytics, intelligent workload placement, and automation to improve application performance and resource utilization.

Room for Improvement: CloudStack could enhance its real-time analytics and automation capabilities, offer smoother integration with third-party tools, and extend its reporting features. IBM Turbonomic could improve its deployment process, simplify user interfaces, and offer more cost-effective pricing models to appeal to budget-conscious users.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: CloudStack offers a straightforward deployment process with strong community support and comprehensive documentation facilitating setup. IBM Turbonomic requires a detailed deployment process with professional support, offering personalized assistance to enhance implementation but necessitating more initial input.

Pricing and ROI: CloudStack's lower setup costs appeal to budget-conscious organizations seeking an effective solution with promising ROI. IBM Turbonomic may require higher upfront expenses but delivers significant ROI through performance optimization and automated resource management, justifying the cost with long-term benefits.

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

Buyer's Guide

CloudStack vs. IBM Turbonomic

July 2025

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Helped 865,384 peers since 2012

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

CloudStack

Ranking in Cloud Management

10th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

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 (5th)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of CloudStack is 4.7%, down from 6.0% 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

Nelson Marcos

Engineer Manager at Globo.com

It's easier to provision VMs than other solutions and you can customize it to integrate with load balancers

My teammates have complained about the upgrade. The source code had massive files that had to be merged with our own development to upgrade to the latest version of CloudStack. It was quite painful for them. CloudStack could add some cost management tools to give me some control over the costs associated with the number of users of my services.

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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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature from my point of view is access to environment via console through separate browser window."

"It works, and pretty much always has. Reliability and support for enterprise features, with a multi-tenant interface, makes CloudStack a very compelling solution."

"I liked the separation of the isolated network versus the shared network."

"CloudStack supports every operating system that supports hypervisors, which makes the product more attractive, compared to vCloud Director or Azure."

"Valuable features include that it is a user-friendly portal, VPN P2S and S2S possibilities, and it's easy to manage accounts and limits."

"You can use a single API to get things done, rather than multiple APIs on multiple modules."

"Key features include stability, centralized management design that scales well, and transparent interoperability with different hypervisors and manufacturers.."

"CloudStack, by default, gives us a zone-based setup which makes it easier to manage datacenters located in different geographical areas."

More CloudStack pros

"We have seen a 30% performance improvement overall."

"It is a good holistic platform that is easy to use. It works pretty well."

"It became obvious to us that there was a lot more being offered in the product that we could leverage to ensure our VMware environment was running efficiently."

"My favorite part of the solution is the automation scheduling. Being able to choose when actions happen, and how they happen..."

"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."

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

"The most valuable features are the cluster utilization reports and the resource capacity planning. We can simulate how much capacity we can add to the current resources. The individual DM reports and VM-facing recommendations report are also helpful."

"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."

More IBM Turbonomic pros

Cons

"The main reason why we started looking for another solution: backups, replication, HA, and dependency on secondary storage. CS is quite sensitive for infrastructure, and any kind of network disruption between CS and secondary storage leads to VM hanging."

"It would be a good to have more specific error messages within administration processes (e.g. problem with creating new instance)."

"I think that container technology in CloudStack is an area that needs to be improved."

"We did encounter issues with stability, and the main issue was secondary storage. When it is not available, XenServers and hypervisors are affected. And CS doesn’t do anything to reboot, or fix. Come to think of it, maybe it shouldn’t, considering their approach – CS just orchestrates everything else on the hypervisor and storage level."

"The area of Apache CloudStack that could stand the most improvement is the functionality/features around the virtual routers. They can be somewhat cumbersome to deal with at times and are the least stable piece of the product."

"It's really hard to delete zones, clusters, datacenters. You need to follow strict rules, which were not properly documented at the time."

"My teammates have complained about the upgrade. The source code had massive files that had to be merged with our own development to upgrade to the latest version of CloudStack. It was quite painful for them. CloudStack could add some cost management tools to give me some control over the costs associated with the number of users of my services."

"A technology upgrade is one item which could be improved upon a lot."

More CloudStack cons

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"Remove the need for special in-house knowledge and development."

"We're still evaluating the solution, so I don't know enough about what I don't know. They've done a lot over the years. I used Turbonomics six or seven years ago before IBM bought them. They've matured a lot since then."

"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."

"I like the detail I get in the old user interface and will miss some of that in the new interface when we perform our planned upgrade soon."

More IBM Turbonomic cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"As far as I know, CS is still free of charge. If you want to pay some money, Citrix Cloud Platform is based on CS, I think. As for hypervisors – everything as usual, you need to pay for VMware and vCenter. As for XenServer, recently they changed the free feature list, so you may need to pay some money to get useful features like XenMotion."

"The Apache CloudStack is open source, so you do not have licenses to purchase."

"CloudStack is an open-source product."

"It is a 100% open-source solution needing just an Apache license. Also, there are no hidden fees to be paid."

"The solution is open-source and free."

"CloudStack is an open source solution, so you don't need to pay anything for it. When our company develops something specially for CloudStack, it is donated to the Apache Software Foundation and provided to anyone that wants to use it."

"Give an effort to planning. If possible, contract a specialized consultant company for the initial setup and knowledge transfer."

"There is no license, so the product is free unless you are buying professional technical support services."

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

"Everybody tells me the pricing is high. But the ROIs are great."

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

"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."

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

"We see ROI in extended support agreements (ESA) for old software. Migration activities seem to be where Turbonomic has really benefited us the most. It's one click and done. We have new machines ready to go with Turbonomic, which are properly sized instead of somebody sitting there with a spreadsheet and guessing. So, my return on investment would certainly be on currency, from a software and hardware perspective."

"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."

"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."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

19%

Educational Organization

12%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about CloudStack?

The initial implementation process was quite good.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CloudStack?

CloudStack is open-source, so there is no cost apart from learning. Billing solutions, if outsourced, come at a moderate cost.

See all answers

What needs improvement with CloudStack?

CloudStack lacks a billing solution which would complete it as a full 360-degree product. Additionally, more themes and drag-and-drop interfaces could enhance the user experience. Improved document...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Turbonomic?

The implementation could be enhanced.

See all answers

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

OpenNebula vs CloudStack

Compared 73% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs CloudStack

Compared 8% of the time

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs CloudStack

Compared 7% of the time

VMware Cloud Director vs CloudStack

Compared 5% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs CloudStack

Compared 5% of the time

More CloudStack 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 6% of the time

Cloudability vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 6% of the time

Apptio One vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 5% of the time

More IBM Turbonomic Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

CloudStack

August 2025

Download CloudStack product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Turbonomic

August 2025

Download IBM Turbonomic product report

Also Known As

Vmops, Cloud.com

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

Apache

IBM

Overview

Apache CloudStack is open source software designed to deploy and manage large networks of virtual machines, as a highly available, highly scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform.

Apache

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

GreenQloud, Exoscale, TomTom, ASG, PC Extreme, ISWest, Grid'5000

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

Buyer's Guide

CloudStack vs. IBM Turbonomic

July 2025

Free Report: CloudStack vs. IBM Turbonomic

Find out what your peers are saying about CloudStack vs. IBM Turbonomic and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.

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