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IBM Turbonomic vs Red Hat CloudForms 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
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 (11th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (16th)
Red Hat CloudForms
Ranking in Cloud Management
36th
Average Rating
6.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 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 Red Hat CloudForms is 1.9%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Turbonomic4.7%
Red Hat CloudForms1.9%
Other93.4%
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.
Ilhami Arikan - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Services Automation Technologies Manager at Garanti Teknoloji
A stable solution that helps to provision servers
We use the solution to provision servers.  I am impressed with the product's ability to create dynamic catalogs.   The solution's provisioning engine needs to be improved.  I would rate the solution's stability an eight out of ten.  I would rate the product's scalability a seven out of ten and…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"With over 2500 ESX VMs, including 1500+ XenDesktop VDI desktops, hosted over two datacentres and 80+ vSphere hosts, firefighting has become something of the past."
"It helps us get a consolidated view of all customer spending into a single dashboard, allowing us to identify opportunities to improve their current spending."
"Automation options for moving and resizing VMs as necessary have been crucial for our environment's performance."
"Dashboards for critical servers. When there is an issue, we can get to critical data quickly."
"Customer Service: Great. Always very helpful, above and beyond most companies."
"I like the dashboard; I don't have to search around or create reports for issues or items I should be looking at, as it all just comes to the front."
"We implemented directly with Turbonomic and it was one of the easiest implementation we have had."
"The automated memory balancing, where it looks at whether it's being used in the most efficient way and adds or takes away memory, is the best part. If it didn't do that, it would be something that I would have to do. We have too many machines for one person to do that. The automation helps me in that it is done in a really efficient way and a balanced way because of the policies. It really helps."
"Red Hat CloudForms is stable once it is up and running."
"The optimization of the solution is quite interesting, as it means we can prepare a bunch of VMs with self-service provisioning."
"The stability of the solution is very good, and we haven't had any issues with it."
"The most valuable features of Red Hat CloudForms are the benefit of the collective functionality."
"The multi-tenancy feature has been very helpful for our clients, it has been working fine and seamlessly for them, its interface is also very simplified, and it is also an open and easy-to-scale solution."
"Red Hat CloudForms is a stable product. There is no issue with the stability."
"The integration with other open-source tools is pretty good; it integrates particularly well with Kubernetes and Docker, and they are a very mature product."
"I am impressed with the product's reports."
 

Cons

"The issue for us with the automation is we are considering starting to do the hot adds, but there are some problems with Windows Server 2019 and hot adds. It is a little buggy. So, if we turn that on with a cluster that has a lot of Windows 2019 Servers, then we would see a blue screen along with a lot of applications as well. Depending on what you are adding, cores or memory, it doesn't necessarily even take advantage of that at that moment. A reboot may be required, and we can't do that until later. So, that decreases the benefit of the real-time. For us, there is a lot of risk with real-time."
"It would be nice for them to have a way to do something with physical machines, but I know that is not their strength."
"It would be great if Turbonomic allowed us to get the report for VM with RDM with its compatibility mode."
"Built-in, context-sensitive Help would be useful."
"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."
"They need an updated UI - perhaps HTML5? The dashboard could use a cosmetic update."
"The new HTML5 version is not as user friendly as I had hoped."
"We were affected by a bug in a release. This did result in unplanned downtime for us."
"The solution's provisioning engine needs to be improved."
"Because the solution needs to integrate with other products that surround it, there is a lot of configuration required, and this can be quite complex. It's not as easy as it is with, for example, VMware."
"The complexity of the solution is a bit high in comparison to VMware."
"The complexity of the solution is a bit high in comparison to VMware."
"All of the areas of Red Hat CloudForms could improve. It doesn't do half of the things that it says it can do out of the box."
"It is difficult to create a complete dashboard that includes all the needed features or catalogs."
"Because the solution needs to integrate with other products that surround it, there is a lot of configuration required, and this can be quite complex. It's not as easy as it is with, for example, VMware."
"I have issues with the solution's permissions. Unlike VMware, the product doesn't allow folder-type permissions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"It's worth the time and money investment if you can afford it."
"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."
"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."
"Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"It is definitely cheaper than VMware. Everything is included. There is no challenge there."
"Red Hat CloudForms has a subscript-based pricing model. The cost is approximately $20,000 annually which allows you to use as many users as you want."
"The price of Red Hat CloudForms was not competitive, it was expensive."
"The product's licensing is based on the number of servers."
"Red Hat CloudForms is a bit expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Construction Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business41
Midsize Enterprise57
Large Enterprise147
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Large Enterprise7
 

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...
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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.
Cox Automotive, Penn State, FICO, G-ABLE, Seneca College, ITandTEL, The Paris Lodron University of Salzburg (PLUS), MyRepublic, Macquarie, The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, CBTS, Network Data Solutions (NDS)
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Turbonomic vs. Red Hat CloudForms and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
892,487 professionals have used our research since 2012.