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IBM Kubecost vs Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 10, 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

IBM Kubecost
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
30th
Average Rating
9.4
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
114
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (4th), Cloud Management (1st), Virtualization Management Tools (2nd), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Cloud Cost Management category, the mindshare of IBM Kubecost is 2.3%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is 1.8%, down from 2.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Cost Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)1.8%
IBM Kubecost2.3%
Other95.9%
Cloud Cost Management
 

Featured Reviews

DIRK UYTTERHOEVEN - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Enterprise Architect at DV Consulting
Identifies and eliminates overprovisioning of expensive resources like storage, highly scalable and offers performance
I like the overall product because I can select what monitoring should be enabled and whatnot. In our case, we really focus on performance because it's clear that the price is related to most performance setups. So the more performance, the more expensive. So we look into the performance that the customer needs, and then based upon that feedback from the remote control, we change the parameters. And even the end user will not notice it is not using it, so we just make money without any impact on the end users.
Phani Venkata Sai BKD - PeerSpot reviewer
Technology Lead at Thomson Reuters
Manages hybrid infrastructure seamlessly with flexible cluster scaling and comprehensive oversight
The most important aspect of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is that it helps us manage the infrastructure as a hyperconverged infrastructure in HCI mode. If I have different physical servers, I can map them into a cluster and manage the storage together. It provides flexibility to make use of storage in a clustered format instead of using it in an individual storage endpoint. We have the flexibility to have Nutanix-based licensing based on the core model, instead of having a specific cost on the cluster. The costing on a core model gives customers flexibility to add multiple cores to a single physical host and adjust the infrastructure accordingly, and we can scale up the cluster as needed. While other cloud providers, AWS or Azure, are mostly into cloud-based solutions, and Azure has introduced Azure Stack HCI for managing on-premises infrastructure, Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) provides flexibility from day one. We can manage both on-premises and Azure solutions using a single pane of glass, eliminating the need to navigate different windows or screens. It provides a comprehensive view of the infrastructure and highlights specific areas through alerts, giving us good visibility of infrastructure conditions.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I mostly like the dashboards."
"The price is reasonable, considering the value it delivers."
"It offers a detailed examination of your cluster, including the types of instances utilized, allocated CPU and RAM, and resource distribution for specific applications."
"Cloud Manager's data protection policies are nice. Sometimes our customers provision their own workloads. Regardless of whether they provision their workloads, we need to know that the data protection policies automatically protect their VMs locally and/or to another cluster. We don't need to have a conversation about data protection. It's already there."
"The unified platform is also very user-friendly and clickable, similar to the Windows environment, making it easier for users to navigate and maintain."
"I would describe my experience with deploying Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) as very simple."
"The solution's most valuable features revolve around the single pane of glass it provides, which helps me see all my infrastructure and quickly manage VM operations without having to go to individual clusters."
"The blueprints and templates are very nice and easy to use. They are very valuable because we can configure the entirety of an environment as a template and reuse it multiple times."
"Nutanix Cloud Manager has increased our productivity higher than what it used to be. We used to spend four hours on server checking. Nutanix gave us three and a half hours back from those four hours to do normal work."
"You can see the health status of the clusters in one view. There is one view of the health of your systems which helps you to have an overview any time you have a problem. You can dig into the tools that Prism Pro has to give you all the options to take on the problem. You can monitor things and manage the cluster really easily."
"The tool is easy to use."
 

Cons

"There is a significant potential for enhancing it through the incorporation of advanced technologies like AI and generative AI."
"The integration with other solutions could be improved."
"Faster monitoring could potentially improve overall stability in the production environment."
"I think one of the points to improve is having the platform with multiple languages, for example Spanish, seriously, one point to consider is a valid point for me, my native language is Spanish, being in Venezuela."
"I would like to see integrated analytics in the dashboard that accurately displays graphics, such as CPU usage, the overall health of the infrastructure, and specific virtual machines that we refer to frequently."
"Nowadays, we see systems breaking a lot. I know that the current features of Nutanix Cloud Manager help to monitor the container world and modern applications, but as more microservices are getting deployed, more micro-management of those services needs to be done."
"NCM is a mature technology product, but it is more costly than some of the other solutions available, which leaves room for improvement."
"Azure has a public cloud offering, and it also has a CSP model that allows Microsoft partners to provide Azure as a service to their customers. Cost Governance only works on the standard public cloud, not the CSP model. When I was at my previous company, we frequently got requests for Azure CSP support. We also got some requests for Alibaba Cloud and Oracle Cloud, but Azure CSP was the biggest one."
"Its licensing can be better."
"While using Nutanix, we need to switch off the VM in case we are doing an update. We have to turn off the VM if we are updating the memory or hard disk space. In a normal scenario, we switch off the VM, update it and then update the RAM. Once updated, we need to switch on the machine and wait for the RAM to initialize. The same goes for hard drives as well."
"LCM could be our second favorite feature right up there with One-Click Upgrades if it worked as smoothly but We have had a few issues with LCM but those appear to have been related to OEM hardware vendor not in sync with Nutanix software, not sure how this could be improved in the future."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost of the tool may seem nominal compared to the potential savings in infrastructure expenses."
"The real savings come from using Kubecost features like autoscaling and serverless functions to optimize your resource usage. If you treat it like a data center migration without fine-tuning, it might cost more."
"The cost is cheap. Kubecost has an open-source core."
"The product is expensive...When I have to sell the tool to a customer, I would say that it is not very expensive and can be termed priceless."
"Don't unlicense your Prism licensing. Pro is the strict minimum for real infrastructure. Go with at least Pro and not with the starter. Ultimate was the best choice for me."
"The pricing was quite competitive and a lot lower compared to other solutions. It wasn't cheap, but it was not as expensive."
"I think it can be more cost-effective."
"I rate Cost Governance an eight out of 10 for pricing. There are different plans, so you can pay monthly or yearly. You can also sign a three-year contract. It's quite flexible. I can't give it a perfect 10, because customers always want a cheaper solution."
"It's always difficult to discuss Nutanix pricing because the cost varies wildly depending on the customer and the region. Desktop virtualization is simpler because there is a defined scope. You can tell the Nutanix salesperson how many users you have. In a more traditional environment, it's always best to have NCM for monitoring because you'd be crazy not to."
"The product is very cheap."
"Nutanix costs more than Hyper-V, but the price is reasonable for the features we're getting. We have better support, analytics, reporting, and other capabilities that we didn't have before. That is more than enough to justify the cost. The hardware we purchased from Nutanix was priced fairly. The primary costs are software and support. It's a subscription-based service, which can be bad or good, depending on how you look at that. For me, it makes perfect sense. We get regular updates and can get support when we need it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Computer Software Company
17%
Marketing Services Firm
14%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business26
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise66
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
Which set of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) features do you find to be the most useful?
For me, the features related to cost savings are the best part of NCM. Of course, the whole product is worth using and when it comes to cloud management, there is a reason why it is favored by so m...
Are the setup process and further maintenance of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) difficult?
When I came into my current organization, NCM was already set up. According to the team that dealt with it, the product was fairly easy to set up. Compared to other products, our IT rates are set u...
Is Nutanix Cloud Manager’s Intelligent Operations feature effective?
Yes, this is a highly effective feature and the rebranding only made things better as they introduced more improvements. You can benefit from Zero coding task automation Automated optimization Tic...
 

Also Known As

Kubecost - Amazon EKS cost monitoring
Nutanix Cloud Manager Intelligent Operations, Nutanix Cloud Manager Self-Service, Nutanix Cloud Management Cost Governance, Nutanix Cloud Manager Security Central, Nutanix Software Subscription
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
JetBlue, International Speedway Corporation, Volkswagen SAIC, Brighton and Hove City Council, Foresters Financial, Janus International Group, Cloud Comrade, Serco
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Kubecost vs. Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,757 professionals have used our research since 2012.