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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 (2nd), Virtualization Management Tools (3rd), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (10th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (2nd), AIOps (17th)
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 August 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 4.6%, down from 5.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Scalr is 0.9%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Turbonomic4.6%
Scalr0.9%
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

"I typically see a 30%-40% ROI in the first year."
"Limits the amount of time I have to spend staring at a screen to find bottlenecks and slowdowns in my virtual environment."
"We have used the planning feature to retire ESXi hosts and move hosts from one datacenter to another."
"Turbonomic stepped in and helped manage all the things that we needed to do to increase responsiveness and lower costs."
"The Turbonomics team is always looking for ways to improve their product."
"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."
"The most important feature to us is an objective measurement of VM headroom per cluster. In addition, the ability to check for the right-sizing of VMs."
"Overall, Turbonomic has had a positive effect on our application performance, helping on many different levels, including toward the resolution of problems and even flat out preventing problems from happening in the first place."
"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

"The arithmetic of optimizing the resources of VMs based on the workload. Some of workload are by a monthly basis. Need to consider the month-end or quarterly-end workload."
"The other area would be visibility into bandwidth utilization."
"I seem to find a new bug with each new version."
"Personally, I find the interface, especially for a new user, to be less than user friendly."
"Certain versions have had glitches in the past but they've usually been fixed or patched within a matter of days."
"When upgrading prior versions, I sometimes lost prior performance data. Even support was not able to retrieve it."
"One of the areas of improvement are the UI."
"Better hardware utilization and point VM and apps on demand to better working places."
"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

"What I can advise is to trial the product, taking advantage of the Turbonomic pre-sales implemention support and kickstart training."
"Everybody tells me the pricing is high. But the ROIs are great."
"IBM Turbonomic is an investment that we believe will deliver positive returns."
"I'm not involved in any of the billing, but my understanding is that is fairly 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 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."
"Contact the Turbonomic sales team, explain your needs and what you're looking to monitor. They will get a pre-sales SE on the phone and together work up a very accurate quote."
"Licensing is per socket, so load up on the cores rather than a lot of lower core CPUs."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Construction Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
22%
Computer Software Company
10%
Construction Company
10%
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: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.