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IBM Turbonomic vs Zesty comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
2nd
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), AIOps (17th)
Zesty
Ranking in Cloud Management
17th
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
15th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
5
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 Zesty is 1.0%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Turbonomic4.6%
Zesty1.0%
Other94.4%
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.
Srinivas Rayudu  - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at Zensa Technologies
Managing complex onboarding has been challenging but automated cost optimization delivers strong savings
Zesty is a good solution; however, the learning curve can be complex for new users without a solid tech background, posing a challenge in training and the initial setup process. I would deduct one point for this aspect since everything else is fine. A specific example of where the learning curve caused issues is when we introduced Zesty to our new development team, which struggled to understand the platform while working on a project related to AI and ML. Our system architects explained how Zesty works, but I believe a more proactive approach to training and foundational data could help teams be more self-sufficient and less reliant on internal support.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"In the first month, we ran this as a POC, and it saved us over 5k a month in costs by implementing its recommendations."
"Great product and we use it extensively, from setting up VMturbo to load balance our VM's across a cluster, implementing right sizing recommendations, policy rules, memory/storage and CPU trends and plans for future projections in order to determine how we can reduce our hardware and licensing footprints."
"Customer Service: Excellent. My rep always stays in touch and keeps us in the loop when changes are coming."
"I evaluated a slew of solutions and Turbonomic (then VMTurbo) was heads and tails above the competition."
"With Turbonomic, we can scale a production (or proposed) use case based on normalized real data, and know exactly the horsepower it will need."
"Less downtime due to small issues becoming big because we didn't see them, and the VMs are running at their optimal performance."
"Customer service has been excellent, and during our very lengthy PoC they were always willing to answer questions quickly and offer ideas about how to tackle issues in our environment."
"We purchased this product because it was the best that we evaluated and I'm very happy with our choice."
"Zesty has positively impacted our organization by providing a good return on investment, with a total reported percentage of savings around 40 to 50%."
"I think Zesty is a really useful tool, it is really quick, it is really powerful, they are always improving it, and the customer service is flawless."
"The turnkey aspect of Zesty is very valuable."
"One of the reasons we decided to onboard Zesty was that it started supporting Windows instances."
"From a metrics perspective, Zesty reduced our Kubernetes infrastructure spend by about 24% in the first six months, we also cut wasted storage costs by roughly 18% and improved saving plan utilization by around 12%, and on the operational side, we saved roughly 40 to 50 hours a month in manual cloud cost tuning."
 

Cons

"The product is administered using a web based interface. This interface was written in Adobe's Flash product which requires the Adobe Flash plugin to be installed on any device accessing it."
"Waiting for the HTML5 GUI since flash has refresh issues."
"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."
"The planner can be complex to complete."
"I would love to see Turbonomic analyze backup data. We have had people in the past put servers into daily full backups with seven-year retention and where the disk size is two terabytes. So, every single day, there is a two terabyte snapshot put into a Blob somewhere. I would love to see Turbonomic say, "Here are all your backups along with the age of them," to help us manage the savings by not having us spend so much on the storage in Azure. That would be huge."
"Additional interfaces would be helpful."
"The way it handles updates needs to be improved."
"Decrease the cost."
"Zesty is a good solution; however, the learning curve can be complex for new users without a solid tech background, posing a challenge in training and the initial setup process."
"I would like to get RDS-reserved instances that I could buy and sell, but that's a limitation on AWS."
"The biggest area for improvement is still reporting depth."
"It would be really useful if Zesty had more code snippets that were easy to use, an easier library instead of their documentation, and something that provided an automated finish to insert code so it could give you code hints."
"There are different resource types that we would like to leverage and get reserved instances for, such as RDS instances."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"I consider the pricing to be high."
"In the last year, Turbonomic has reduced our cloud costs by $94,000."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The solution’s pricing is reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Construction Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Insurance Company
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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zesty?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was great, as we had a great account manager that we did not have to query too much about it. The free one was nearly good enough to start with...
What needs improvement with Zesty?
I find myself using the online editor the most often, and what would be better is if you could have multiple windows open to work in, something like an actual program rather than having to shift be...
What is your primary use case for Zesty?
My main use case for Zesty is the CMS. For our corporate website, my team uses Zesty's CMS to allow users from any point in the company to upload content, add posts, add pages, and promote the comp...
 

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.
Walkme, Wiz, Gong, Grubhub, Singular
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Turbonomic vs. Zesty and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,858 professionals have used our research since 2012.