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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

"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 TBM model and the out-of-the-box reporting are the most valuable features of Apptio One."
"It also brings up a list of machines and if something is under-provisioned and needs more compute power it will tell you, 'This server needs more compute power, and we suggest you raise it up to this level.' It will even automatically do it for you. In Azure, you don't have to actually go into the cloud provider to resize. You can just say, 'Apply these resizes,' and Turbonomic uses some back-end APIs to make the changes for you."
"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."
"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.""
"I only deal with the infrastructure side, so I really couldn't speak to more than load balancing as the most valuable feature for me. It provides specific actions that prevent resource starvation. It always keeps things in perfect balance."
"I like the analytics that help us optimize compatibility. Whereas Azure Advisor tells us what we have to do, Turbonomic has automation which actually does those things. That means we don't have to be present to get them done and simplifies our IT engineers' jobs."
"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."
"It has automated a lot of things. We have saved 30 to 35 percent in human resource time and cost, which is pretty substantial. We don't have a big workforce here, so we have to use all the automation we can get."
"On-premises, one advantage I find particularly appealing is the ability to create policies for automatic CPU and memory scaling based on demand."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"The way it handles updates needs to be improved."
"We don't use Turbonomic for FinOps and part of the reason is its cost reporting. The reporting could be much more robust and, if that were the case, I could pitch it for FinOps."
"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."
"Additional interfaces would be helpful."
"The one point is the reporting. We do have reports out of it, but they're not the level of graphical detail I would like."
"Since the introduction of a HTML 5 based interface, our main - but minor - criticism of a less than intuitive operation managers' GUI would be the area of improvement."
"While the product is fairly intuitive and easy to use once you learn it, it can be quite daunting until you have undergone a bit of training."
"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."
 

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."
"I'm not involved in any of the billing, but my understanding is that is fairly expensive."
"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."
"IBM Turbonomic is an investment that we believe will deliver positive returns."
"Contact the Turbonomic sales team, explain your needs and what you're looking to monitor. They will get a pre-sales SE on the phone and together work up a very accurate quote."
"It's worth the time and money investment if you can afford it."
"Everybody tells me the pricing is high. But the ROIs are great."
"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not 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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
9%
University
7%
Financial Services Firm
10%
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.
881,565 professionals have used our research since 2012.