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IBM Turbonomic vs Scalr 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 (3rd), Virtualization Management Tools (3rd), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (10th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (16th)
Scalr
Ranking in Cloud Management
25th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 4.7%, down from 5.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Scalr is 0.8%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Turbonomic4.7%
Scalr0.8%
Other94.5%
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.
Shubham Mandavkar - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Technical Consultant at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Modern API design has transformed documentation workflows and supports interactive testing
Scalr helps with API testing and client functionality, which includes a built-in Try It tool similar to Postman, allowing developers to test endpoints, manage environment variables, and see request history. The faster response is due to the CI/CD workflow integrating with GitHub Actions and another tool to automatically update and version documentation as the codebase evolves. Other features include data formatting, where I can convert strings to uppercase, trim white spaces, or concatenate first and last names into a full name field. In scientific contexts, a scalar is a physical quantity described only by magnitude with no direction. In environmental aspects, monitoring and measuring temperature, pressure, or humidity, resource tracking, and calculating mass, volume, density, or time duration reflect the best impact on my organization. One specific outcome I have noticed is scholarly publishing. Scalr is also an open-source platform for born-digital, media-rich publishing, allowing scholars to create interactive online books that integrate high-resolution media with sophisticated archival structures.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Better than DRS to load balance VMs across hosts, allowing us to release 30% more computing resources."
"We purchased this product because it was the best that we evaluated and I'm very happy with our choice."
"Turbonomic is hands down one of the best products; it does a really excellent job of reporting, handling placement, measuring resources, and increasing or decreasing those resources, and overall the product just sells itself while being very helpful in the cloud and on-premise."
"Turbonomic's ability to automatically load balance my storage and hosts has saved a lot of time."
"Customer Service: Excellent. My rep always stays in touch and keeps us in the loop when changes are coming."
"I like Turbonomic's built-in reporting. It provides a ton of information out of the box, so I don't have to build panels for the monthly summaries and other reports I need to present to management. We get better performance and bottleneck reporting from this than we do from our older EMC software."
"Turbonomic has helped optimize cloud operations and reduced our cloud costs significantly, with overall savings of about 40 percent on our roughly three million dollars a year Azure spend, primarily by right-sizing machines instead of overprovisioning."
"Using this product helps us to reduce performance risk because it shows us where resources are needed but not yet allocated."
"I was able to deal with requests without needing every server on; I could turn them off."
"After all the years of helping enterprises implement API strategies at SmartBear, I can confidently say Scalr is what the industry has been waiting for."
 

Cons

"There are a few things that we did notice. It does kind of seem to run away from itself a little bit; it does seem to have a mind of its own sometimes, and it goes out there and just kind of goes crazy."
"Turbonomic is not easy to use out of the box."
"The dashboard is too basic, could use more details."
"While old dashboard view is good, keep improving on the new Dashboard as I feel it is much better."
"Waiting for the HTML5 GUI since flash has refresh issues."
"Had 1 issue during a service pack that required me to redeploy and lose all previous history."
"A more interactive dashboard with integrated features."
"The graph and report outputs could be improved."
"We did use AWS autoscaling but Rackspace left something to be desired."
"Regarding licensing, if I buy a licensing key, it is beneficial, but if I have a lesser standing, it is not as good."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"It was an annual buy-in. You basically purchase it based on your host type stuff. The buy-in was about 20K, and the annual maintenance is about $3,000 a year."
"The pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."
"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."
"I'm not involved in any of the billing, but my understanding is that is fairly expensive."
"We felt the pricing was very fair for the product. It is in no way prohibitive for larger deployments, unlike other similar product on the market."
"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."
"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
24%
Computer Software Company
11%
Construction Company
11%
University
9%
 

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 needs improvement with Scalr?
Scalr can be improved by logical simplification, wrapping complex logic into reusable functions to keep main queries readable. Data validation using functions like is null provides default values w...
What is your primary use case for Scalr?
Scalr refers to several distinct technologies, with the most common modern use case involving API documentation and database function. Scalr is a modern alternative to Swagger UI used for creative ...
What advice do you have for others considering Scalr?
Scalr is deployed on-premises only because Scalr is a physical quantity fully described by magnitude value. Regarding the mathematical engine and scripting language, the core features are generally...
 

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.
JPL, Expedia, Samsung, Acxiom, Accenture, Sony, Merkle, Autodesk
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Turbonomic vs. Scalr and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
899,258 professionals have used our research since 2012.