IBM Turbonomic vs Zesty comparison

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IBM Turbonomic

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

IBM Turbonomic and Zesty both compete in the cloud optimization space. IBM Turbonomic has an edge in feature offerings, while Zesty is more attractive in pricing.

Features: IBM Turbonomic provides advanced automation for cloud resources, optimizing costs using real-time analytics and performance monitoring. It offers a wide range of features appealing to businesses looking for comprehensive solutions. Zesty focuses on automatically adjusting cloud resources to reduce costs while maintaining performance, providing simplicity and automatic adjustments that are more suitable for those seeking a straightforward approach.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Turbonomic offers a robust deployment model with extensive customer support, ideal for complex environments. Zesty emphasizes quick integration and efficiency, offering a straightforward deployment process. IBM's tailored approach benefits larger enterprises, while Zesty suits businesses seeking fast implementation and minimal setup hassle.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Turbonomic requires higher initial setup costs but can provide significant ROI over time with its comprehensive solutions. Zesty's pricing is more flexible, offering immediate cost savings and quick returns, making it ideal for businesses needing immediate cloud cost optimization benefits.

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

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IBM Turbonomic vs. Zesty

May 2025

Helped 858,435 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

Ranking in Cloud Cost Management

1st

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), AIOps (5th)

Zesty

Ranking in Cloud Management

23rd

Ranking in Cloud Cost Management

8th

Average Rating

9.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.9

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 Zesty is 0.3%, down from 0.7% 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.

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Jeffery Smith

Vice President at Centro, Inc.

Effortless cost management with automated instance adjustment and helpful support

There are different resource types that we would like to leverage and get reserved instances for, such as RDS instances. Currently, no mechanism within Zesty allows this, but this may be due to AWS limitations. Another point is that Zesty needs to react to any changes AWS makes, but they have been proactive in their communication regarding material impacts.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Rightsizing is valuable. Its recommendations are pretty good."

"The biggest value I'm getting out of VMTurbo right now is the complete hands-off management of equalizing the usage in my data center."

"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 automation and orchestration components are definitely the best part, as you can tell it what it can do and when, and just let it be."

"We have seen a 30% performance improvement overall."

"The tool provides the ability to look at the consumption utilization over a period of time and determine if we need to change that resource allocation based on the actual workload consumption, as opposed to how IT has configured it. Therefore, we have come to realize that a lot of our workloads are overprovisioned, and we are spending more money in the public cloud than we need to."

"It has automated a lot of things. We have saved 30 to 35 percent in human resource time and cost, which is pretty substantial. We don't have a big workforce here, so we have to use all the automation we can get."

"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."

More IBM Turbonomic pros

"One of the reasons we decided to onboard Zesty was that it started supporting Windows instances."

"The turnkey aspect of Zesty is very valuable."

Cons

"The implementation could be enhanced."

"The one point is the reporting. We do have reports out of it, but they're not the level of graphical detail I would like."

"Enhanced executive reporting standard with the tool beyond the reports that can be created today. Something that can easily be used with upper management on a monthly or quarterly basis to show the impact to our environment."

"We're still evaluating the solution, so I don't know enough about what I don't know. They've done a lot over the years. I used Turbonomics six or seven years ago before IBM bought them. They've matured a lot since then."

"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."

"It would be good for Turbonomic, on their side, to integrate with other companies like AppDynamics or SolarWinds or other monitoring softwares. I feel that the actual monitoring of applications, mixed in with their abilities, would help. That would be the case wherever Turbonomic lacks the ability to monitor an application or in cases where applications are so customized that it's not going to be able to handle them. There is monitoring that you can do with scripting that you may not be able to do with Turbonomic."

"Recovering resources when they're not needed is not as optimized as it could be."

"I do not like Turbonomic's new licensing model. The previous model was pretty straightforward, whereas the new model incorporates what most of the vendors are doing now with cores and utilization. Our pricing under the new model will go up quite a bit. Before, it was pretty straightforward, easy to understand, and reasonable."

More IBM Turbonomic cons

"I would like to get RDS-reserved instances that I could buy and sell, but that's a limitation on AWS."

"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 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."

"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."

"Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced."

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

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

"The solution’s pricing is reasonable."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Real Estate/Law Firm

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 Zesty?

Their pricing is brilliant. It is a percentage of what they save us by using reserved instances. If they save us $25,000, they might charge five percent of that, which is work we wouldn't do on our...

What needs improvement with Zesty?

What is your primary use case for Zesty?

We predominantly use Zesty to manage our spend in AWS, specifically around reserving instances for our compute workload. Our workload is dynamic, and it would be cumbersome and difficult for us to ...

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Product Reports

Download IBM Turbonomic product report

IBM Turbonomic

June 2025

Download Zesty product report

Cloud Management

June 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

Zesty is used for optimizing cloud infrastructure costs, automating resource scaling, providing real-time visibility into spending, and managing unused resources efficiently. It helps maintain budget control while scaling operations, making cloud deployment cost-effective.

Zesty offers a comprehensive approach to cloud cost management, focusing on real-time optimization, resource scaling automation, and spending visibility. Designed to reduce wastage and ensure efficient cloud operations, it integrates seamlessly with existing systems, providing detailed analytics and actionable insights. Users find Zesty's intuitive dashboard and effective cost-saving tools instrumental in maintaining budget control. However, improvements are needed in performance speed, functionality, and support responsiveness. Limited customization options and insufficient onboarding resources also present challenges for new users.

What are Zesty's key features?

Real-time optimization: Continuously adjusts resources to minimize costs.
Automated resource management: Scales resources automatically based on demand.
Intuitive dashboard: Offers user-friendly interface for easy monitoring and management.
Detailed analytics: Provides insights into spending and resource usage.
Seamless integration: Fits smoothly with existing systems without disruption.
Scalability: Supports efficient resource allocation as operations expand.
Customer support: Available for assistance, although sometimes noted as unresponsive.

What benefits and ROI should users look for?

Cost reduction: Significant savings by minimizing unnecessary cloud expenses.
Efficiency: Automation reduces manual intervention and improves resource management.
Budget control: Enhanced visibility into spending helps maintain financial oversight.
Time savings: Streamlined operations free up time for other strategic tasks.
Improved scalability: Supports growth without compromising performance or costs.

Zesty is implemented across industries that demand efficient cloud cost management and resource optimization. For tech companies, it streamlines scalability and supports rapid growth without ballooning costs. Financial services use it for budget control and to maintain operational efficiency. Educational institutions benefit from its ability to manage large-scale deployments economically. Each industry finds Zesty's automation and analytics crucial for staying competitive and maintaining lean operations.

Sample Customers

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

Walkme, Wiz, Gong, Grubhub, Singular