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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
10th
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 (2nd), Cloud Management (4th), Virtualization Management Tools (3rd), IT Operations Analytics (10th), Cloud Analytics (1st), AIOps (17th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the IT Financial Management category, the mindshare of Apptio One is 39.6%, down from 45.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 18.8%, down from 31.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Financial Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Turbonomic18.8%
Apptio One39.6%
Other41.599999999999994%
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

"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."
"Its most significant value lies in its ease of use which extends to both configuration and the subsequent deployment of additional components."
"It became obvious to us that there was a lot more being offered in the product that we could leverage to ensure our VMware environment was running efficiently."
"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."
"Customer Service: Always helpful."
"The automation of balancing VMware cluster workloads ensures that my VMware clusters are always running in an optimal state and the streamlined automation is what sold me on this product."
"I have seen nothing in my infrastructure career that was as great as this product when it comes to resource utilization."
"We really take advantage of the PLAN feature, as forecasting and planning resources is imperative for effective and efficient operations management."
"Customer service always responds quickly, and is knowledgeable and thorough."
"Today we have found the forecasting of the environment and optimization the most beneficial."
 

Cons

"The solution's reporting layer, advanced conditional formatting, and reporting features could be improved."
"However, sometimes with the number of users using the system, there might be a lag in system performance."
"Encouraging or providing more out-of-the-box solutions that cater to a wider audience could enhance the overall effectiveness of the application."
"The other area would be visibility into bandwidth utilization."
"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."
"Reports: Have a wider variety of canned reports ready to go."
"The reporting needs to be improved. It's important for us to know and be able to look back on what happened and why certain decisions were made, and we want to use a custom report for this."
"The UI could be a little more user friendly and less buggy."
"GUI is ugly."
"I'd like to see the creation of custom dashboards become a little more streamlined."
"Wish the storage move accounts for possible VMware snapshots that existed on some host."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Apptio One is an expensive solution."
"It comes with a considerable cost."
"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 consider the pricing to be high."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."
"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."
report
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
6%
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: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.