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IBM Turbonomic vs Kion comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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 Turbonomic
Ranking in Cloud Management
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (5th), Virtualization Management Tools (5th), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (11th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (16th)
Kion
Ranking in Cloud Management
37th
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 4.1%, down from 5.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Kion is 0.3%. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Turbonomic4.1%
Kion0.3%
Other95.6%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

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.
reviewer2784381 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Centralized cost monitoring has reduced cloud spend and supports proactive budget control
In my experience, Kion is very intuitive and easy to use, allowing you to monitor everything in one place. Everything is monitored via dashboards, and you can also drill down on resources to gain more insights. Kion allows us to reduce infrastructure costs. We saw a spending reduction of 20%.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Limits the amount of time I have to spend staring at a screen to find bottlenecks and slowdowns in my virtual environment."
"Automation, policies, and reports have made a lot of previously manual work now either more efficient or completely automated."
"Overall, from our organization's standpoint, the solution has helped to build our entire migration effort."
"I have found the reporting and management functions of Turbonomic second to none."
"Licensing cost is relatively cost effective."
"ROI can sometimes be quite subjective; however, with Turbonomic it’s genuinely evident from the get-go, with automation working toward maximum optimization, efficiency, and uptime, and capacity and future planning capabilities that offer the ability to generate the what-if scenarios using your own current environment as the model to build on."
"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."
"It has reduced our hardware costs by allowing us to purchase only the necessary resources instead of over purchasing out of caution."
"In my experience, Kion is very intuitive and easy to use, allowing you to monitor everything in one place."
 

Cons

"Technical Support: On a scale of one to 10 it's been a 5."
"It can be more agnostic in terms of the solutions that it provides. It can include some other cost-saving methods for the public cloud and SaaS applications as well."
"The only areas of improvement that I could think of at this moment in time is to just give it a fresh look, their new UI is currently in Beta but it looks very promising."
"The appliance interface doesn’t list the features/capabilities that licenses can be purchased for, so unless you were directly involved in the negotiations, there is no way to tell what feature set you have."
"However, the current versions do not split out headroom by component nor do they indicate where the capacity bottleneck lies (e.g. CPU, memory, or storage)."
"Waiting for the HTML5 GUI since flash has refresh issues."
"We wish Nimble was available as a storage provider."
"We would like to see Turbonomics dive into JVMs and continue to work with HP in the integration with HP OneView 3.0."
"I think nine is a very good score. Ten, from my perspective, is perfection, and I believe Kion can be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"The pricing and licensing are fair. We purchase based on benchmark pricing, which we have been able to get. There are no surprise charges nor hidden fees."
"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."
"The pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."
"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."
"Everybody tells me the pricing is high. But the ROIs are great."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
6%
Construction Company
49%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Insurance Company
7%
Transportation Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business41
Midsize Enterprise57
Large Enterprise147
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Kion?
I think the price is worth it because Kion offers a lot to the customer.
What needs improvement with Kion?
I think nine is a very good score. Ten, from my perspective, is perfection, and I believe Kion can be improved.
What is your primary use case for Kion?
I have used Kion for one project with a duration of approximately one year. The customer wanted to monitor infrastructure spending and try to reduce costs. We centralized the infrastructure bills i...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
No data available
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
Information Not Available
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