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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
9th
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 (3rd), Cloud Management (4th), Virtualization Management Tools (4th), IT Operations Analytics (5th), Cloud Analytics (1st), AIOps (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 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 37.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Financial Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM Turbonomic18.8%
Apptio One39.6%
Other41.599999999999994%
IT Financial Management
 

Featured Reviews

Neil Anson - PeerSpot reviewer
Global IT Financial Architect at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
A highly stable and scalable solution that provides good out-of-the-box reporting
I am using the latest version of Apptio One. Apptio One is deployed on-cloud in our organization. Apptio One's maintenance involves validating the model and the monthly data loads. I would recommend Apptio One to other users. Before choosing Apptio One, users should ensure they align their use cases to achieve specific and measurable targets. Overall, I rate Apptio One ten out of ten.
Dan Ambrose - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Engineer 4 at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
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."
"The most important feature to us is an objective measurement of VM headroom per cluster. In addition, the ability to check for the right-sizing of VMs."
"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."
"In our organization, optimizing application performance is a continuous process that is beyond human scale. We would not be able to do the number of actions that Turbonomic takes on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. It is humanly impossible with the little micro adjustments that it can make. That is a huge differentiator. If you just figure each action could take anywhere very conservatively from five to 10 minutes to act upon, then you multiply that out by thousands of actions every month, it is easily something where you could say, "I am saving a couple of FTEs.""
"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."
"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."
"Turbonomic has helped optimize cloud operations and reduced our cloud costs significantly. Overall, we are at about 40 percent savings, and we spend about three million a year just in Azure. It reduces the size of the VMs, putting them into the right template for usage. People don't realize that you don't have to future-proof a virtual machine in Azure. You just need to build it for today. As the business or service grows, you can scale up or out. About 90 percent of all the costs that we've reduced has been from sizing machines appropriately."
"On-premises, one advantage I find particularly appealing is the ability to create policies for automatic CPU and memory scaling based on demand."
"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."
 

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."
"They could add a few more reports. They could also be a bit more granular. While they have reports, sometimes it is hard to figure out what you are looking for just by looking at the date."
"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."
"Before IBM bought it, the support was fantastic. After IBM bought it, the support became very disappointing."
"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."
"I like the detail I get in the old user interface and will miss some of that in the new interface when we perform our planned upgrade soon."
"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."
"We're still evaluating the solution, so I don't know enough about what I don't know. They've done a lot over the years. I used Turbonomics six or seven years ago before IBM bought them. They've matured a lot since then."
"It sometimes does get false positives. Sometimes, it'll move something when it really wasn't a performance metric. I've seen it do that, but it's pretty much an automated tool for performance. We've only got about 500 virtual machines, so lots of times, I'm able to manage it physically, but it's definitely a nice tool for a larger enterprise that might be managing 2,000 or 3,000 virtual machines."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"It comes with a considerable cost."
"Apptio One is an expensive solution."
"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."
"The pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."
"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."
"I'm not involved in any of the billing, but my understanding is that is fairly expensive."
"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 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."
"Licensing is per socket, so load up on the cores rather than a lot of lower core CPUs."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
11%
Government
9%
University
7%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
6%
 

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

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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: January 2026.
881,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.