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Apptio One vs IBM Turbonomic comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 2, 2025

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

Apptio One
Ranking in IT Financial Management
2nd
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM Turbonomic
Ranking in IT Financial Management
1st
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (7th), Cloud Management (5th), Virtualization Management Tools (4th), IT Operations Analytics (4th), Cloud Analytics (1st), AIOps (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the IT Financial Management category, the mindshare of Apptio One is 42.1%, down from 46.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 23.7%, down from 38.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Financial Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM Turbonomic23.7%
Apptio One42.1%
Other34.2%
IT Financial Management
 

Featured Reviews

Jerry J - PeerSpot reviewer
A platform that seamlessly unites data, people and process across technology, finance, and business
However, a notable challenge is the requirement to obtain consistent raw data, especially when operating in multiple regions with varying data sets. Each region may have distinct field names or data setups, necessitating the standardization of data before loading it into Apptio One. In Apptio One, there are areas for improvement, particularly in addressing potential bugs. An instance of this is observed when transitioning changes from the development region to the staging or production region. In instances with larger datasets, the calculation process may experience delays. Once the calculation concludes, the process proceeds to the subsequent region, whether it be staging or production.
Dan Ambrose - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The TBM model and the out-of-the-box reporting are the most valuable features of Apptio One."
"Its most significant value lies in its ease of use which extends to both configuration and the subsequent deployment of additional components."
"With Apptio One, the advantage lies in its no-code approach, eliminating the need to write scripts for data retrieval."
"With Turbonomic, we were able to reduce our ESX cluster size and save money on our maintenance and license renewals. It saved us around $75,000 per year but it's a one-time reduction in VMware licensing. We don't renew the support. The ongoing savings is probably $50,000 to $75,000 a year, but there was a one-time of $200,000 plus."
"We can manage multiple environments using a single pane of glass, which is something that I really like."
"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."
"Turbonomic helps us right-size virtual machines to utilize the available infrastructure components available and suggest where resources should exist. We also use the predictive tool to forecast what will happen when we add additional compute-demanding virtual machines or something to the environment. It shows us how that would impact existing resources. All of that frees up time that would otherwise be spent on manual calculation."
"We have a system where our developers automate machine builds, and that is constantly running out of resources. Turbonomic helps us with that, so I don't have to keep buying hardware. The developers always say, "They don't have enough. They don't have enough. They don't have enough," when they just configured it improperly. Therefore, Turbonomic helps us identify configuration issues on their side so it doesn't cost me money on the other end to buy resources that I don't really need."
"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 notifications saying, "This is a corrective action," even though some of them can be automated, are always welcome to see. They summarize your entire infrastructure and how you can better utilize it. That is the biggest feature."
"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."
 

Cons

"Encouraging or providing more out-of-the-box solutions that cater to a wider audience could enhance the overall effectiveness of the application."
"The solution's reporting layer, advanced conditional formatting, and reporting features could be improved."
"However, a notable challenge is the requirement to obtain consistent raw data, especially when operating in multiple regions with varying data sets. Each region may have distinct field names or data setups, necessitating the standardization of data before loading it into Apptio One. In Apptio One, there are areas for improvement, particularly in addressing potential bugs. An instance of this is observed when transitioning changes from the development region to the staging or production region. In instances with larger datasets, the calculation process may experience delays. Once the calculation concludes, the process proceeds to the subsequent region, whether it be staging or production."
"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."
"The deployment process is a little tricky. It wasn't hard for me because I have pretty in-depth knowledge of Kubernetes, and their software runs on Kubernetes. To deploy it or upgrade it, you have to be able to follow steps and use the Kubernetes command line, or you'll need someone to come in and do it for you."
"Some features are only available via changes to the deployment YAML, and it would be better to have them in the UI."
"Recovering resources when they're not needed is not as optimized as it could be."
"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."
"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."
"It would be nice for them to have a way to do something with physical machines, but I know that is not their strength Thankfully, the majority of our environment is virtual, but it would be nice to see this type of technology across some other platforms. It would be nice to have capacity planning across physical machines."
"After running this solution in production for a year, we may want a more granular approach to how we utilize the product because we are planning to use some of its metrics to feed into our financial system."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It comes with a considerable cost."
"Regarding the pricing structure for various products within Apptio, such as APE One or APE One Plus, the cost is intricately tied to the selected license. There are two distinct types of licenses available. Opting for the basic license provides access to APT1, while an alternative license, known as APL One Plus, encompasses additional features like Cloudability and other components. The specific features accessible depend on the chosen license."
"Apptio One is an expensive solution."
"In the last year, Turbonomic has reduced our cloud costs by $94,000."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business41
Midsize Enterprise57
Large Enterprise147
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Apptio One?
Its most significant value lies in its ease of use which extends to both configuration and the subsequent deployment of additional components.
What needs improvement with Apptio One?
As a user, I feel the application's market applicability is narrow. It would be advantageous if they expanded their focus. The current use case seems confined, and the application could benefit fro...
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...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nationwide Building Society, State of Washington, Nationwide Building Society, DIRECTV, CME Group, Swiss Re, Cox Automotive
IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
Find out what your peers are saying about Apptio One vs. IBM Turbonomic and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
870,697 professionals have used our research since 2012.