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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

"The TBM model and the out-of-the-box reporting are the most valuable features of Apptio One."
"In short, it helps finance, business, and IT people speak in a common language."
"Its most significant value lies in its ease of use which extends to both configuration and the subsequent deployment of additional components."
"It has saved us from purchasing new hardware in four regional offices and had us extend the service for two years, instead of buying new servers (HPE Gen8 and Gen9 servers running on fifth year)."
"Turbonomic has tons of features that we use regularly from reports showing us simple IOPS stats, to showing over/under utilized VMs, and even wasted space on our datastores."
"I've found that the automation of moving VMs for resource allocation is second to none."
"With Turbonomic Operations Manager we automated all virtualization infrastructure (Hyper-V, vSphere, XenServer) with one unique management console and we save our CAPEX working with a plan inside of Operations Manager when we change hardware by lifecycle or when we have new projects with capacity planning."
"Turbonomic is an excellent product as far as we are concerned for managing the pod sizes and determining the best sizing for those pods."
"On a quarterly basis we take the VM right-sizing report and, based on the Turbonomic recommendation, we make the changes to resources."
"It helps us get a consolidated view of all customer spending into a single dashboard, allowing us to identify opportunities to improve their current spending."
"Allowing Turbonomic to take over for vCenter DRS has shown a marked decrease in vMotion of virtual machines to keep our cluster resources balanced."
 

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."
"Yes, after every major update a new bug would cause an issue requiring another update."
"The "consumer and producer" model Turbonomic is based off of can be a bit difficult to understand in the beginning."
"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."
"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."
"Initial setup was complex to get reports we wanted."
"UI can be clunky at times, they have a new UI just not fully released."
"If they would educate their customers to understand the latest updates, that would help customers... Also, there are a lot of features that are not available in Turbonomic. For example, PaaS component optimization and automation are still in the development phase."
"It would be nice if it was easier to remove a host from that we would not want to manage (licenses)."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It comes with a considerable cost."
"Apptio One is an expensive solution."
"Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced."
"I consider the pricing to be high."
"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'm not involved in any of the billing, but my understanding is that is fairly expensive."
"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."
"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."
"In the last year, Turbonomic has reduced our cloud costs by $94,000."
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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
9%
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.
906,781 professionals have used our research since 2012.