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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

"Its most significant value lies in its ease of use which extends to both configuration and the subsequent deployment of additional components."
"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."
"Turbonomic is a great tool that seeks to optimize your IT environment."
"This is an overall great and easy to use product and has been very helpful in our organization, definitely recommend it!"
"If you're looking for a solution to give you a deeper dive into how your VM environment is being utilized and to provide some optimization; then you can't go wrong with Turbonomic!"
"We have been able to use the planning feature to consolidate VMs on few hosts and have been able to show savings of several hundred thousands."
"I highly recommend this product, particularly if you have a heterogeneous virtual environment."
"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.""
"Our ROI occurred in less than 6 months by allowing us to avoid a costly server upgrade that was planned for parts of our VMware infrastructure."
"We have saved money on licensing and availability of our applications."
 

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."
"Would like some better canned reports allowing for average utilization of VMs in the environment during a defined range of hours."
"The GUI is not always user friendly and some settings are not where you would expect."
"I have found the interface not to be intuitive."
"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."
"The flash interface looks dated and is a little cluttered making navigating the portal less than optimal."
"I am not a giant fan of the new interface. I still use the older interface."
"They need an updated UI - perhaps HTML5? The dashboard could use a cosmetic update."
"We were affected by a bug in a release. This did result in unplanned downtime for us."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Apptio One is an expensive solution."
"It comes with a considerable cost."
"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."
"I'm not involved in any of the billing, but my understanding is that is fairly expensive."
"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 is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not 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."
"The pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
7%
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...
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Also Known As

No data available
Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
 

Interactive Demo

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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.
910,350 professionals have used our research since 2012.