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IBM Turbonomic vs Red Hat CloudForms vs VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth 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:
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 5.0%, down from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat CloudForms is 1.5%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth is 1.9%, down from 2.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM Turbonomic5.0%
VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth1.9%
Red Hat CloudForms1.5%
Other91.6%
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Dan Ambrose - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Ilhami Arikan - PeerSpot reviewer
A stable solution that helps to provision servers
We use the solution to provision servers.  I am impressed with the product's ability to create dynamic catalogs.   The solution's provisioning engine needs to be improved.  I would rate the solution's stability an eight out of ten.  I would rate the product's scalability a seven out of ten and…
Steve Staten - PeerSpot reviewer
The solution has excellent scalability, great dashboards, and is stable
I use the solution daily, multiple hours a day to identify possible savings by analyzing the various displays as well as the policies for possible cost savings for our customers CloudHelth has helped our organization with trying to right-size virtual machines based on current utilization and…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Turbonomic can show us if we're not using some of our storage volumes efficiently in AWS. For example, if we've over-provisioned one of our virtual machines to have dedicated IOPs that it doesn't need, Turbonomic will detect that and tell us."
"Using this product helps us to reduce performance risk because it shows us where resources are needed but not yet allocated."
"Turbonomic has helped optimize cloud operations and reduced our cloud costs significantly. Overall, we are at about 40 percent savings, and we spend about three million a year just in Azure. It reduces the size of the VMs, putting them into the right template for usage. People don't realize that you don't have to future-proof a virtual machine in Azure. You just need to build it for today. As the business or service grows, you can scale up or out. About 90 percent of all the costs that we've reduced has been from sizing machines appropriately."
"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."
"We like that Turbonomic shows application metrics and estimates the impact of taking a suggested action. It provides us a map of resource utilization as part of its recommendation. We evaluate and compare that to what we think would be appropriate from a human perspective to that what Turbonomic is doing, then take the best action going forward."
"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 recommendation of the family types is a huge help because it has saved us a lot of money. We use it primarily for that. Another thing that Turbonomic provides us with is a single platform that manages the full application stack and that's something I really like."
"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."
"They are a very mature product."
"Red Hat CloudForms is a stable product. There is no issue with the stability."
"The optimization of the solution is quite interesting."
"Red Hat CloudForms is stable once it is up and running."
"The stability of the solution is very good. We haven't had any issues with it."
"The most valuable features of Red Hat CloudForms are the benefit of the collective functionality."
"I am impressed with the product's reports."
"I am impressed with the product's ability to create dynamic catalogs."
"The solution is good for cloud cost management."
"The most valuable thing I have found is the cost saving recommendations"
"The pricing is rather competitive right now."
"This solution is fast and very easy to understand, even if you are not a technician."
"The solution is useful for cloud transparency and visibility in reports and dashboards that I have generated, especially the pre-populated dashboards."
"We are able to create an internal price of the product that we can then sell to clients. We get the cost plan at a good discount and then resell it with a mark up to our enterprise-level clients. This flexibility in pricing is one of the solution's best features."
"It's stable. For report presentation, it's been fast."
"The product is easy to use in terms of monitoring all the environments. It works for multiple clouds."
 

Cons

"It sometimes does get false positives. Sometimes, it'll move something when it really wasn't a performance metric. I've seen it do that, but it's pretty much an automated tool for performance. We've only got about 500 virtual machines, so lots of times, I'm able to manage it physically, but it's definitely a nice tool for a larger enterprise that might be managing 2,000 or 3,000 virtual machines."
"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."
"It would be nice for them to have a way to do something with physical machines, but I know that is not their strength Thankfully, the majority of our environment is virtual, but it would be nice to see this type of technology across some other platforms. It would be nice to have capacity planning across physical machines."
"The old interface was not the clearest UI in some areas, and could be quite intimidating when first using the tool."
"The deployment process is a little tricky. It wasn't hard for me because I have pretty in-depth knowledge of Kubernetes, and their software runs on Kubernetes. To deploy it or upgrade it, you have to be able to follow steps and use the Kubernetes command line, or you'll need someone to come in and do it for you."
"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."
"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."
"Some features are only available via changes to the deployment YAML, and it would be better to have them in the UI."
"Red Hat CloudForms could improve by allowing more customization of reports. We have to do a lot of coding to accomplish what we want. Additionally, the compatibility with the multi-cloud could improve. The latter versions of the solution removed Google support and the cost comparison between other clouds was high."
"The complexity of the solution is a bit high in comparison to VMware."
"The solution is still quite immature."
"Because the solution needs to integrate with other products that surround it, there is a lot of configuration required, and this can be quite complex. It's not as easy as it is with, for example, VMware."
"All of the areas of Red Hat CloudForms could improve. It doesn't do half of the things that it says it can do out of the box. It takes configuration to make any of it work, which is not uncommon for solutions similar to this. However, it is frustrating."
"Our clients had challenges or issues with the updates. Its updates should be better managed. They should provide quicker and more stable updates. Its stability can also be better. We initially faced ease-of-use and compatibility issues while integrating it. We had a lot of compatibility issues with other products. Our clients are concerned about whether it is under IBM or it is still Red Hat. Clients are not very clear about the support, and they're not really happy with it. Currently, they're getting support from Red Hat, but going forward, they're not really clear about what would be the life cycle of the product, which is a concern for them."
"The solution's provisioning engine needs to be improved."
"The problem is that the platform requires it to be maintained and updated. Also, a few cases are still pending with the Red Hat support team since they are not closed yet."
"The export features regarding CSV files and specifically around identifying savings plans have room for improvement, as well as the drill-down features for reservation utilization."
"They should provide information or tools to tune the cloud resources according to the environment size."
"CloudHealth needs to start building out Turbonomics-types of features that help the customers who are using CloudHealth really understand everything down to the server level, the virtual machine level."
"It would be helpful to have a mobile version or a tablet version, especially for people who are outside of the office."
"The performance and accuracy of Cloud Health need to be improved."
"If you are working with the OS you need help and other connectors to get more information."
"I would like to see better integration from CloudHealth to create easier setup and implementation."
"The Perspectives feature could be better."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"I have not seen Turbonomic's new pricing since IBM purchased it. When we were looking at it in my previous company before IBM's purchase, it was compatible with other tools."
"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."
"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."
"It's worth the time and money investment if you can afford it."
"IBM Turbonomic is an investment that we believe will deliver positive returns."
"In the last year, Turbonomic has reduced our cloud costs by $94,000."
"I'm not involved in any of the billing, but my understanding is that is fairly expensive."
"Red Hat CloudForms has a subscript-based pricing model. The cost is approximately $20,000 annually which allows you to use as many users as you want."
"It is definitely cheaper than VMware. Everything is included. There is no challenge there."
"The price of Red Hat CloudForms was not competitive, it was expensive."
"Red Hat CloudForms is a bit expensive."
"The product's licensing is based on the number of servers."
"There could be flexibility in pricing for the product."
"The licensing fees depend on how big the company is. If you are a larger company then you have a better contract with a better price. The price is different for a small company."
"I give the cost of the solution an eight out of ten."
"The pricing is competitive and while other products are good they are considerably more expensive."
"CloudHealth has a subscription-based model."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
7%
Computer Software Company
20%
Manufacturing Company
16%
Government
8%
University
8%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business41
Midsize Enterprise57
Large Enterprise147
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise4
 

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...
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...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What do you like most about CloudHealth?
The product is easy to use in terms of monitoring all the environments. It works for multiple clouds.
What needs improvement with CloudHealth?
There could be flexibility in pricing for the product. They should provide information or tools to tune the cloud res...
What advice do you have for others considering CloudHealth?
I rate VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth an eight out of ten.
 

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
No data available
Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth, CloudHealth
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
Cox Automotive, Penn State, FICO, G-ABLE, Seneca College, ITandTEL, The Paris Lodron University of Salzburg (PLUS), MyRepublic, Macquarie, The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, CBTS, Network Data Solutions (NDS)
Pinterest, Dow Jones, RhythmOne, Ziff Davis, Acquia, Mentor Graphics, Lookout, Veracode, SwiftKey, Amtrak, Shi, Imgur, SumoLogic, NewsUK, Cloudera, Canvas
Find out what your peers are saying about Nutanix, VMware, IBM and others in Cloud Management. Updated: September 2025.
868,288 professionals have used our research since 2012.