IBM Turbonomic vs Spacelift comparison

Read 5 Spacelift reviews

214 Views
70 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

IBM Turbonomic

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

IBM Turbonomic and Spacelift provide solutions in the IT automation and optimization arena. IBM Turbonomic may have an edge in resource efficiency and capacity management, while Spacelift shines in Infrastructure as Code (IaC) deployments with strong Terraform support.

Features: IBM Turbonomic provides smart analytics for environment efficiency, capacity management, and VM rightsizing recommendations with planning modules for scenario testing. Spacelift integrates seamlessly with Terraform, focusing on operational consistency, security, and resilience through cloud infrastructure deployment.

Room for Improvement: IBM Turbonomic needs a more intuitive dashboard, improved reporting, and better documentation. Spacelift users suggest easier notification setups, synchronization with system versions, and Vault system enhancements for secrets management.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Turbonomic is typically used in on-premises setups with hybrid cloud support, and has high customer service ratings for quick, knowledgeable responses. Spacelift excels in public cloud environments and is recognized for its effective and attentive customer service.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Turbonomic's flexible pricing based on sockets and instances is competitive, offering quick ROI through resource efficiency. Spacelift is more cost-effective for infrastructure management compared to alternatives like Terraform Enterprise, providing substantial savings and valued for its ROI potential.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Turbonomic vs. Spacelift Report (Updated: June 2025).

IBM Turbonomic vs. Spacelift

June 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 857,162 peers since 2012

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 (4th), Virtualization Management Tools (2nd), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (4th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (5th)

Spacelift

Ranking in Cloud Management

20th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 5.6%, down from 6.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spacelift is 0.6%, up from 0.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

Dan Ambrose

Infrastructure Engineer 4 at Hyland

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.

Read full review

Moloko Mokubedi

Junior DevOps Engineer at Kartoza (Pty) Ltd

The GitOps feature automatically picks up changes from my GitHub projects

There are a few areas for improvement. For instance, getting notification webhooks is not easy. In the free version, there's no straightforward way to be notified once a deployment is finished. Spacelift requires creating a notification policy, which involves using the open policies framework. However, this feature is not available on the free plan. Additionally, for each new project, I need to create a new IAM role, which is not optimal. It would be better if I could use a single role for all interactions with my AWS account.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is a good holistic platform that is easy to use. It works pretty well."

"We can manage multiple environments using a single pane of glass, which is something that I really like."

"I have the ability to automate things similar to the Orchestrator stuff. I do have the ability to have it do some balancing, and if it sees some different performance metrics that I've set not being met, it'll actually move some of my virtual machines from, let's say, one host to another. It is sort of an automation tool that helps me. Basically, I specify the metric, and if I get a certain host or something being over-utilized, it'll automatically move the virtual machines around for me. It basically has to snap into my vCenter and then it can make adjustments and move my virtual machines around. It also has some very nice reporting tools built around virtual machines. It tells you how much storage, memory, or CPU is being used monthly, and then it gives you a very nice way to be able to send out billing structure to your end users who use servers within your environment."

"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."

"The proactive monitoring of all our open enrollment applications has improved our organization. We have used it to size applications that we are moving to the cloud. Therefore, when we move them out there, we have them appropriately sized. We use it for reporting to current application owners, showing them where they are wasting money. There are easy things to find for an application, e.g., they decommissioned the server, but they never took care of the storage. Without a tool like this, that storage would just sit there forever, with us getting billed for it."

"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."

"We've saved hundreds of hours. Most of the time those hours would have to be after hours as well, which are more valuable to me as that's my personal time."

"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."

More IBM Turbonomic pros

"One key feature is the Spacelift policies, which we can attach to deployments to ensure compliance with our standards."

"A valuable feature of Spacelift is that you can attach labels, and it is a modernized tool for infrastructure deployments. It is pull request-based, and you can see all the Terraform plan and apply logs on the pull request itself, which is not available across any other CI/CD tools."

"Spacelift is like an extension of Terraform, where everything can be visibly managed."

"Knowing the HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) makes it easier to use without issues."

"I appreciate that I just have to connect to my AWS account with my credentials, and Spacelift handles the rest."

Cons

"The GUI and policy creation have room for improvement. There should be a better view of some of the numbers that are provided and easier to access. And policy creation should have it easier to identify groups."

"I would like Turbonomic to add more services, especially in the cloud area. I have already told them this. They can add Azure NetApp Files. They can add Azure Blob storage. They have already added Azure App service, but they can do more."

"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."

"If they would educate their customers to understand the latest updates, that would help customers... Also, there are a lot of features that are not available in Turbonomic. For example, PaaS component optimization and automation are still in the development phase."

"They could add a few more reports. They could also be a bit more granular. While they have reports, sometimes it is hard to figure out what you are looking for just by looking at the date."

"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."

"There is an opportunity for improvement with some of Turbonomic's permissions internally for role-based access control. We would like the ability to come up with some customized permissions or scope permissions a bit differently than the product provides."

"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."

More IBM Turbonomic cons

"If you are a small enterprise organization, below 500 people, I would not recommend it."

"Spacelift currently lacks features that can help with complex type deployments and coordination for major deployments."

"The self-hosted version does not have a lot of features compared to the SaaS version, such as cloud integrations for Azure and GCP."

"Synchronization can be difficult when using older and newer versions with Kubernetes and HashiCorp."

"In the free version, there's no straightforward way to be notified once a deployment is finished."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Everybody tells me the pricing is high. But the ROIs are great."

"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not 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."

"What I can advise is to trial the product, taking advantage of the Turbonomic pre-sales implemention support and kickstart training."

"It's worth the time and money investment if you can afford it."

"When we have expanded our licensing, it has always been easy to make an ROI-based decision. So, it's reasonably priced. We would like to have it cheaper, but we get more benefit from it than we pay for it. At the end of the day, that's all you can hope for."

"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."

"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."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

"It is a bit expensive product."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Management solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

857,162 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

14%

Educational Organization

12%

Hospitality Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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 Spacelift?

I've never checked the pricing because I enjoy using it for free. Besides the notification feature, I haven't needed any paid features.

What needs improvement with Spacelift?

What is your primary use case for Spacelift?

I use Spacelift to deploy my applications, particularly AWS applications and infrastructure to my personal AWS account.

VMware Aria Operations vs IBM Turbonomic

Comparisons

Compared 16% of the time

Azure Cost Management vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 11% of the time

VMware vSphere vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 7% of the time

Cloudability vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 6% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 5% of the time

More IBM Turbonomic Competitors

env0 vs Spacelift

Compared 74% of the time

Scalr vs Spacelift

Compared 26% of the time

More Spacelift Competitors

Product Reports

Download IBM Turbonomic product report

IBM Turbonomic

June 2025

Download Spacelift product report

May 2025

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager

No data available

Interactive Demo

IBM

Demo not available

Overview

IBM Turbonomic offers automation, planning, and right-sizing recommendations to streamline resource management, improve efficiencies, and optimize costs across virtualized environments and cloud platforms.

IBM Turbonomic is valued for its capability to optimize resource allocation and monitor virtual environments efficiently. It facilitates automated decision-making in VM sizing, load balancing, and cost optimization for both on-premises and cloud deployments. Users can leverage insights for workload placement, ensure peak performance assurance, and effectively right-size across VMware and Azure. The ongoing transition to HTML5 aims to improve visual and navigational ease, while expanded reporting features are anticipated. Opportunities for improved training, documentation, and integrations enhance platform usability and functionality.

What Are the Key Features?

Automation: Streamlines resource allocation and VM management.
Planning Tools: Supports capacity management and growth projections.
Right-Sizing: Optimizes VM configurations for efficient resource use.
Customizable Dashboards: Provides quick insights into environment health.
Reporting Capabilities: Offers valuable data for informed decision-making.
Cloud Integration: Ensures cost-effective resource utilization.

What Benefits Should Be Looked For?

Performance Enhancement: Improves application performance efficiency.
Cost Reduction: Minimizes operational expenses through optimizations.
Infrastructure Efficiency: Maximizes use of IT infrastructure resources.

In finance, IBM Turbonomic aids in maintaining platform efficiency during market fluctuations. Healthcare organizations leverage its capability for resource optimization during high-demand periods to enhance patient care support. Retailers use it for planning in peak seasons, ensuring resources align with fluctuating demand to maintain performance continuity.

IBM

Spacelift provides a sophisticated infrastructure management platform with key features such as Drift Detection and Terraform integration, simplifying complex deployments and enhancing user workflows through an intuitive interface.

Spacelift excels in modernizing infrastructure management by integrating smoothly with Terraform, using a pull request-based approach for visibility into logs. It automates change detection using GitOps from GitHub and supports AWS connectivity with credential management. Despite its strengths, some users find room for improvement in supporting smaller enterprises and offering more seamless cloud integrations with self-hosted versions. Handling of HashiCorp Vault secrets and cumbersome notification webhooks may require additional setup effort.

What are the most valuable features?

Drift Detection: Ensures user edits are managed effectively, reducing configuration discrepancies.
Terraform Integration: Seamless compatibility with Terraform for robust infrastructure management.
GitOps: Automates change detection from GitHub, ensuring efficient workflows.
Compliance Policies: Helps maintain infrastructure within regulatory guidelines.
Stack Execution: Enables runs with label attachments for organized operations.

What benefits or ROI can users expect?

Improved Deployment Control: Default plan prompts support structured and controlled deployments.
Streamlined Terraform Management: Enhanced visibility into logs aids in transparent and efficient operations.
Efficient AWS Interactions: Credential management simplifies connections, making operations more fluid.
Dynamic Infrastructure Handling: Supports significant projects by replacing tools like Terraform Enterprise.

In specific industries, Spacelift is primarily utilized for infrastructure management and deployment across platforms like AWS, Azure, and GCP. In banking architecture, it replaces Terraform Enterprise, ensuring secure and efficient operations. Projects like Google Fiber benefit from its capability to import and manage data effectively, engaging users with HashiCorp Language and GitHub for CI/CD integration.

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.

Information Not Available