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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 (4th), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (11th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (15th)
Red Hat CloudForms
Ranking in Cloud Management
34th
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 April 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 4.0%, down from 5.7% 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 Turbonomic4.0%
Red Hat CloudForms1.9%
Other94.1%
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

"Turbonomic is fantastic at scalability! It has great built in tools to plan scaling."
"The automation in Turbonomic is priceless, and all the dashboards, native or custom build, give a complete virtual and physical hardware performance view."
"I would say we recouped our investment within two months."
"We have seen a 30% performance improvement overall."
"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."
"It is a good holistic platform that is easy to use. It works pretty well."
"Using this product helps us to reduce performance risk because it shows us where resources are needed but not yet allocated."
"The automation has been great, as Turbonomic automatically moved VMs that were running slow due to high IO on their LUNs, correcting the problem and greatly improving our server performance while continuously adjusting to keep everything running smoothly as the environment changes."
"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."
"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."
"The optimization of the solution is quite interesting."
"Red Hat CloudForms is a stable product. There is no issue with the stability."
"Red Hat CloudForms is stable once it is up and running."
"I am impressed with the product's ability to create dynamic catalogs."
"The most valuable features of Red Hat CloudForms are the benefit of the collective functionality."
"The stability of the solution is very good. We haven't had any issues with it."
 

Cons

"Recovering resources when they're not needed is not as optimized as it could be."
"We did see a few issues on a previous version with reporting."
"VM level granularity on some of the automation actions such as adding memory/CPU. That would allow an admin to schedule the exact time for the specific action for any given VM."
"In Azure, it's not what you're using. You purchase the whole 8 TB disk and you pay for it. It doesn't matter how much you're using. So something that I've asked for from Turbonomic is recommendations based on disk utilization. In the example of the 8 TB disk where only 200 GBs are being used, based on the history, there should be a recommendation like, "You can safely use a 500 GB disk." That would create a lot of savings."
"I have found the interface not to be intuitive."
"The graph and report outputs could be improved."
"The only area of improvement that I can think of is re-sizing recommendations are not able to be based upon working hours of a day or typical load times."
"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."
"The solution is still quite immature."
"The complexity of the solution is a bit high in comparison to VMware."
"Our clients had challenges or issues with the updates. Its updates should be better managed."
"Our clients had challenges or issues with the updates. Its updates should be better managed. They should provide quicker and more stable updates. Its stability can also be better. We initially faced ease-of-use and compatibility issues while integrating it. We had a lot of compatibility issues with other products. Our clients are concerned about whether it is under IBM or it is still Red Hat. Clients are not very clear about the support, and they're not really happy with it. Currently, they're getting support from Red Hat, but going forward, they're not really clear about what would be the life cycle of the product, which is a concern for them."
"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."
"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."
"The problem is that the platform requires it to be maintained and updated. Also, a few cases are still pending with the Red Hat support team since they are not closed yet."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."
"I consider the pricing to be high."
"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."
"It's worth the time and money investment if you can afford it."
"I'm not involved in any of the billing, but my understanding is that is fairly expensive."
"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."
"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."
"It is definitely cheaper than VMware. Everything is included. There is no challenge there."
"The product's licensing is based on the number of servers."
"Red Hat CloudForms is a bit expensive."
"The price of Red Hat CloudForms was not competitive, it was 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
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Construction 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.
886,576 professionals have used our research since 2012.