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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
8th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
4.9
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
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (3rd), Cloud Management (4th), Virtualization Management Tools (3rd), IT Operations Analytics (10th), Cloud Analytics (1st), AIOps (17th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the IT Financial Management category, the mindshare of Apptio One is 39.1%, down from 45.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 18.4%, down from 31.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Financial Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Turbonomic18.4%
Apptio One39.1%
Other42.5%
IT Financial Management
 

Featured Reviews

Jerry J - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at IBM
Cost transparency has improved and finance and IT now share detailed TCO insights
I am mostly concerned about the development side. The development side is very user-friendly, so I would not say there are major factors that the product needs improvement in. However, sometimes with the number of users using the system, there might be a lag in system performance. There might be some slowness for the report to load. If a more significant number of users are consolidating on a single report and that single report has not been promoted to production yet, there is a possibility that it could take some time to load. That is the only challenge I have experienced as a developer.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Its most significant value lies in its ease of use which extends to both configuration and the subsequent deployment of additional components."
"In short, it helps finance, business, and IT people speak in a common language."
"The TBM model and the out-of-the-box reporting are the most valuable features of Apptio One."
"Customer Service: Always helpful."
"The solution has a good optimization feature."
"We already had a good return in the first couple of weeks."
"The product has worked great; it has become a set and forget tool for us which is a good thing."
"We used Turbonomic to plan our hardware refresh, and it was right on the money."
"We allow it to do all our VMotion migrations, ensuring our systems are running at their peak performance."
"One of the most valuable features for us was the automation aspect."
"Customer Service: Excellent. My rep always stays in touch and keeps us in the loop when changes are coming."
 

Cons

"However, sometimes with the number of users using the system, there might be a lag in system performance."
"The solution's reporting layer, advanced conditional formatting, and reporting features could be improved."
"Encouraging or providing more out-of-the-box solutions that cater to a wider audience could enhance the overall effectiveness of the application."
"The interface has so much to offer, it is a bit complex and there is a learning curve."
"UI is still maturing. The UI is relatively easy to use but still does not have that professional look to it."
"vCenter integration. Would love to have the ability to manager the infrastructure within one window."
"Have plan data shared across user accounts within Turbonomic. Also more granular permissions."
"Turbonomic's current UI is coded in Flash though they have stated an HTML5 version is coming soon."
"The dashboard is too basic, could use more details."
"The implementation could be enhanced."
"The current Flash user interface is sometimes slow, but the new HTML5 interface is already in development."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Apptio One is an expensive solution."
"It comes with a considerable cost."
"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."
"Licensing is per socket, so load up on the cores rather than a lot of lower core CPUs."
"I have not seen Turbonomic's new pricing since IBM purchased it. When we were looking at it in my previous company before IBM's purchase, it was compatible with other tools."
"I don't know the current prices, but I like how the licensing is based on the number of instances instead of sockets, clusters, or cores. We have some VMs that are so heavy I can only fit four on one server. It's not cost-effective if we have to pay more for those. When I move around a VM SQL box with 30 cores and a half-terabyte of RAM, I'm not paying for an entire socket and cores where people assume you have at least 10 or 20 VMs on that socket for that pricing."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The pricing and licensing are fair. We purchase based on benchmark pricing, which we have been able to get. There are no surprise charges nor hidden fees."
report
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Construction 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 needs improvement with Apptio One?
I am mostly concerned about the development side. The development side is very user-friendly, so I would not say there are major factors that the product needs improvement in. However, sometimes wi...
What is your primary use case for Apptio One?
With Apptio One, we provide IT cost transparency to the end users. We source different data from various sources and maintain them in backend tables. We then perform transformations to align the da...
What advice do you have for others considering Apptio One?
We have different metrics created, and when taking a cost model, it primarily follows TBM Taxonomy, which is based upon the ATUM structure. TBM Taxonomy has several layers. For example, how the cos...
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...
 

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: June 2026.
907,664 professionals have used our research since 2012.