Apptio One vs IBM Turbonomic comparison

Apptio and IBM are both solutions in the IT Financial Management category. Apptio is ranked #2, while IBM is ranked #1 with an average rating of 9.1. Apptio holds a 39.6% mindshare in IFM, compared to IBM’s 18.8% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Apptio users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Apptio One

Read 3 Apptio One reviews

1,081 Views
195 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

IBM Turbonomic

Read 205 IBM Turbonomic reviews

7,181 Views
215 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Apptio One

IBM Turbonomic

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 2, 2025

Apptio One and IBM Turbonomic compete in IT financial management and operations. Apptio One has an advantage with its intuitive pricing model and strong support, whereas IBM Turbonomic appears superior due to its powerful features justifying its cost.

Features: Apptio One provides cost transparency, decision support, and comprehensive financial insights into IT investments. IBM Turbonomic focuses on resource optimization, application performance, and offers dynamic automated resource management, enhancing efficiency.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Apptio One has a straightforward deployment process and responsive customer support, simplifying its integration. IBM Turbonomic is recognized for diverse adaptable deployment models supporting various IT environments, despite a more complex setup.

Pricing and ROI: Apptio One offers a clear pricing structure with a moderate initial setup cost, generating ROI through better financial management and cost reductions. IBM Turbonomic requires a higher initial investment, promising ROI via resource efficiency and operational improvements.

To learn more, read our detailed Apptio One vs. IBM Turbonomic Report (Updated: January 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Apptio One vs. IBM Turbonomic

January 2026

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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

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
Product	Market Share (%)
IBM Turbonomic	18.8%
Apptio One	39.6%
Other	41.599999999999994%

IT Financial Management

Featured Reviews

Neil Anson

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.

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Dan Ambrose

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.

Read full review

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."

"With Apptio One, the advantage lies in its no-code approach, eliminating the need to write scripts for data retrieval."

"Its most significant value lies in its ease of use which extends to both configuration and the subsequent deployment of additional components."

"Rightsizing is valuable. Its recommendations are pretty good."

"The ability to monitor and automate both the right-sizing of VMs as well as to automate the vMotion of VMs across ESXi hosts."

"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."

"We can manage multiple environments using a single pane of glass, which is something that I really like."

"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.""

"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."

"The most valuable features are the cluster utilization reports and the resource capacity planning. We can simulate how much capacity we can add to the current resources. The individual DM reports and VM-facing recommendations report are also helpful."

"On-premises, one advantage I find particularly appealing is the ability to create policies for automatic CPU and memory scaling based on demand."

More IBM Turbonomic pros

Cons

"Encouraging or providing more out-of-the-box solutions that cater to a wider audience could enhance the overall effectiveness of the application."

"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 solution's reporting layer, advanced conditional formatting, and reporting features could be improved."

"There are a few things that we did notice. It does kind of seem to run away from itself a little bit. It does seem to have a mind of its own sometimes. It goes out there and just kind of goes crazy. There needs to be something that kind of throttles things back a little bit. I have personally seen where we've been working on things, then pulled servers out of the VMware cluster and found that Turbonomic was still trying to ship resources to and from that node. So, there has to be some kind of throttling or ability for it to not be so buggy in that area. Because we've pulled nodes out of a cluster into maintenance mode, then brought it back up, and it tried to put workloads on that outside of a cluster. There may be something that is available for this, but it seems very kludgy to me."

"There is an opportunity for improvement with some of Turbonomic's permissions internally for role-based access control. We would like the ability to come up with some customized permissions or scope permissions a bit differently than the product provides."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"It can be more agnostic in terms of the solutions that it provides. It can include some other cost-saving methods for the public cloud and SaaS applications as well."

"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."

More IBM Turbonomic cons

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."

"Licensing is per socket, so load up on the cores rather than a lot of lower core CPUs."

"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."

"I consider the pricing to be high."

"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."

"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'm not involved in any of the billing, but my understanding is that is fairly expensive."

"The pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."

"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."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

10%

Government

University

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	41
Midsize Enterprise	57
Large Enterprise	147

Questions from the Community

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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 ...

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What needs improvement with Turbonomic?

The implementation could be enhanced.

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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...

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Comparisons

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Compared 27% of the time

Flexera Cloud Cost Management vs Apptio One

Compared 14% of the time

YaRKEN vs Apptio One

Compared 8% of the time

Yuki Snowflake Optimization Platform vs Apptio One

Compared 7% of the time

PerfectScale vs Apptio One

Compared 6% of the time

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VMware Aria Operations vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 7% of the time

Densify vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 6% of the time

Spot by Flexera vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 5% of the time

VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 4% of the time

NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 3% of the time

More IBM Turbonomic Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Apptio One vs. IBM Turbonomic

January 2026

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Buyer's Guide

IBM Turbonomic

January 2026

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Also Known As

No data available

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

Apptio

IBM

Overview

ApptioOne unifies financial and operational data into a unified model built on the industry-standard taxonomy of cost categorization. Utilizing sophisticated allocation rules along with focused metrics and KPIs, we enable organizations to answer the most strategic questions about investments and accelerate budgeting and forecasting processes. By explaining investments and variance to plan more quickly to constituencies and executive management, organizations can uncover opportunities to optimize cost structures, reduce risk, and accelerate growth.

Apptio

IBM Turbonomic enhances IT efficiency with automation, capacity planning, and reporting features, enabling organizations to optimize resource utilization and improve performance through advanced workload management and scenario analysis.

IBM Turbonomic equips organizations with robust capabilities for dynamic resource allocation and informed decision-making. Its planning module provides scenario analysis, right-sizing recommendations, and a customizable dashboard for tailored insights. Automation features improve workload placements and resource efficiency, while forecasting capabilities enhance performance. Simulation of environments helps in decision-making, leading to significant savings in cloud and hardware management. There is a need for a more intuitive interface, enhanced navigation, and improved customization in reporting with integration potential with third-party applications. Transition to the HTML5 interface and stronger training resources are among anticipated improvements.

What are the key features of IBM Turbonomic?

Automation: Automates workload placement and dynamic resource allocation to boost efficiency.
Capacity Planning: Provides scenario analysis and right-sizing for optimal resource use.
Customizable Dashboard: Offers tailored insights for organization needs.
Forecasting: Enhances decision-making through resource-use predictions.
Simulation Capabilities: Aids in assessing savings and performance gains.

What benefits and ROI should be evaluated?

Cost Optimization: Reduces spending on cloud and hardware resources.
Enhanced Performance: Promotes consistent application performance and resource efficiency.
Improved Decision-Making: Supports informed choices with scenario simulation.
Flexibility and Scalability: Assists with workload migrations and resource management across environments.

IBMTurbonomic is implemented across industries such as cloud management and virtualization, helping organizations balance clusters, optimize virtual machine performance, and manage Azure configurations. In resource-monitored environments like VMware and XenServer, its features facilitate load balancing, VM rightsizing, and automation shutoffs. Industries can rely on its insights for cost-saving measures, ensuring efficient resource allocation for hybrid and cloud environments.

IBM

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.

Buyer's Guide

Apptio One vs. IBM Turbonomic

January 2026

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