Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

AWS Cost Explorer vs CloudCheckr comparison

Sponsored
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

IBM Turbonomic
Sponsored
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (5th), Cloud Management (4th), Virtualization Management Tools (4th), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (4th), Cloud Analytics (1st), AIOps (5th)
AWS Cost Explorer
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
11th
Average Rating
10.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.3
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
CloudCheckr
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
10th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (27th), Managed Cloud Services (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Cloud Cost Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 14.2%, up from 14.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Cost Explorer is 2.0%. The mindshare of CloudCheckr is 3.9%, up from 3.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Cost Management
 

Featured Reviews

Keldric Emery - PeerSpot reviewer
Saves time and costs while reducing performance degradation
It's been a very good solution. The reporting has been very, very valuable as, with a very large environment, it's very hard to get your hands on the environment. Turbonomic does that work for you and really shows you where some of the cost savings can be done. It also helps you with the reporting side. Me being able to see that this machine hasn't been used for a very long time, or seeing that a machine is overused and that it might need more RAM or CPU, et cetera, helps me understand my infrastructure. The cost savings are drastic in the cloud feature in Azure and in AWS. In some of those other areas, I'm able to see what we're using, what we're not using, and how we can change to better fit what we have. It gives us the ability for applications and teams to see the hardware and how it's being used versus how they've been told it's being used. The reporting really helps with that. It shows which application is really using how many resources or the least amount of resources. Some of the gaps between an infrastructure person like myself and an application are filled. It allows us to come to terms by seeing the raw data. This aspect is very important. In the past, it was me saying "I don't think that this application is using that many resources" or "I think this needs more resources." I now have concrete evidence as well as reporting and some different analytics that I can show. It gives me the evidence that I would need to show my application owners proof of what I'm talking about. In terms of the downtime, meantime, and resolution that Turbonomic has been able to show in reports, it has given me an idea of things before things happen. That is important as I would really like to see a machine that needs resources, and get resources to it before we have a problem where we have contention and aspects of that nature. It's been helpful in that regard. Turbonomic has helped us understand where performance risks exist. Turbonomic looks at my environment and at the servers and even at the different hosts and how they're handling traffic and the number of machines that are on them. I can analyze it and it can show me which server or which host needs resources, CPU, or RAM. Even in Azure, in the cloud, I'm able to see which resources are not being used to full capacity and understand where I could scale down some in order to save cost. It is very, very helpful in assessing performance risk by navigating underlying causes and actions. The reason why it's helpful is because if there's a machine that's overrunning the CPU, I can run reports every week to get an idea of machines that would need CPU, RAM, or additional resources. Those resources could be added by Turbonomic - not so much by me - on a scheduled basis. I personally don't have to do it. It actually gives me a little bit of my life back. It helps me to get resources added without me physically having to touch each and every resource myself. Turbonomic has helped to reduce performance degradation in the same way as it's able to see the resources and see what it needs and add them before a problem occurs. It follows the trends. It sees the trends of what's happening and it's able to add or take away those resources. For example, we discuss when we need to do certain disaster recovery tests. Over the years, Turbo will be able to see, for example, around this time of year that certain people ramp up certain resources in an environment, and then it will add the resources as required. Another time of year, it will realize these resources are not being used as much, and it takes those resources away. In this way, it saves money and time while letting us know where we are. We've saved a great deal of time using this product when I consider how I'd have to multiply myself and people like me who would have to add resources to devices or take resources away. We've saved hundreds of hours. Most of the time those hours would have to be after hours as well, which are more valuable to me as that's my personal time. Those saved hours are across months, not years. I would consider the number of resources that Turbonomic is adding and taking away and the placement (if I had to do it all myself) would end up being hundreds of hours monthly that would be added without the help of Turbonomic. It helps us to meet SLAs mainly due to the fact that we're able to keep the servers going and to keep the servers in an environment, to keep them to where (if we need to add resources) we can add them at any given time. It will keep our SLAs where they need to be. If we were to have downtime due to the fact that we had to add resources or take resources away and it was an emergency, then that would prevent us from meeting our SLAs. We also use it to monitor Azure and to monitor our machines in terms of the resources that are out there and the cost involved. In a lot of cases, it does a better job of giving us cost information than Azure itself does. We're able to see the cost per machine. We're able to see the unattached volume and storage that we are paying for. It gives us a great level of insight. Turbonomic gives us the time to be able to focus on innovation and ongoing modernization. Some of the tasks that it does are tasks that I would not necessarily have to do. It's very helpful in that I know that the resources are there where they need to be and it gives me an idea of what changes need to be made or what suggestions it's making. Even if I don't take them, I'm able to get a good idea of some best practices through Turbonomic. One of the ways that Turbonomic does to help bring new resources to market is that we are now able to see the resources (or at least monitor the resources) before they get out to the general public within our environment. We saw immediate value from the product in the test environment. We set it up in a small test environment and we started with just placement and we could tell that the placement was being handled more efficiently than what VMware was doing. There was value for us in placement alone. Then, after we left the placement, we began to look at the resources and there were resources. We immediately began to see a change in the environment. It has made the application and performance better, mainly due to the fact that we are able to give resources and take resources away based on what the need is. Our expenses, definitely, have been in a better place based on the savings that we've been able to make in the cloud and on-prem. Turbonomic has been very helpful in that regard. We've been able to see the savings easily based on the reports in Turbonomic. That, and just seeing the machines that are not being used to capacity allows us to set everything up so it runs a bit more efficiently.
CM
Maximized budget efficiency with accurate cost forecasting and responsive support
Primarily, I use AWS Cost Explorer to maintain cost and current budget constraints. Our FinOps team provides us with a budget for the month, and we track our spending to identify where funds are allocated. We have billing alerts set up to notify us when our infrastructure exceeds a certain amount…
Nigel Mullings - PeerSpot reviewer
Beneficial granular reporting, highly stable, and excellent support
I have worked in the cost-management tools from many cloud providers, such as Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Services, and Azure. CloudCheckr CMx High Security has a lot more detail than the native cloud service cost-management tools. If you want an enterprise-grade solution, CloudCheckr CMx High Security would be a good fit. If you want something simple, out of the box, then you can use the cloud service's native tools.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"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."
"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."
"We have VM placement in Automated mode and currently have all other metrics in Recommend mode."
"On-premises, one advantage I find particularly appealing is the ability to create policies for automatic CPU and memory scaling based on demand."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"We have seen a 30% performance improvement overall."
"I find the forecasting feature particularly valuable as it helps predict future expenses."
"The best feature I like about CloudCheckr CMx High Security is its simplicity. I love that it's not rocket science to use the solution. Even if you're not familiar with the cloud, you can easily figure out how to use CloudCheckr CMx High Security. You can use AWS, you can use Azure, and you can use GCP with the solution because the integration is quite simple. You can also use multi-cloud with it, and you could see the billing part. You'll have complete visibility into your cost which I love about the solution. I also love that data on any security issues and vulnerabilities are available on the go with CloudCheckr CMx High Security. You don't need to do anything different. Just run the scan and you'll have all these open findings in the tool, in terms of the priority level, so if it's critical, it will tell you, "It's critical," and you need to fix it right away."
"The recommendation section is pretty helpful."
"It will automatically suggest areas for optimization."
"It's one of the leading players for cloud optimization. It's hard to find anything better."
"The solution is mostly stable."
"The solution is scalable for our purposes."
"The most valuable feature of CloudCheckr CMx High Security is granular reporting. Additionally, the user interface is easy to use."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
 

Cons

"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."
"It would be good for Turbonomic, on their side, to integrate with other companies like AppDynamics or SolarWinds or other monitoring softwares. I feel that the actual monitoring of applications, mixed in with their abilities, would help. That would be the case wherever Turbonomic lacks the ability to monitor an application or in cases where applications are so customized that it's not going to be able to handle them. There is monitoring that you can do with scripting that you may not be able to do with Turbonomic."
"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."
"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."
"The reporting needs to be improved. It's important for us to know and be able to look back on what happened and why certain decisions were made, and we want to use a custom report for this."
"I do not like Turbonomic's new licensing model. The previous model was pretty straightforward, whereas the new model incorporates what most of the vendors are doing now with cores and utilization. Our pricing under the new model will go up quite a bit. Before, it was pretty straightforward, easy to understand, and reasonable."
"Additional interfaces would be helpful."
"While there is always room for improvement, any needs for enhancement depend on specific requirements at the time. Currently, I cannot pinpoint any specific improvements needed."
"The solution must improve its user interface."
"CloudCheckr CMx High Security is complex. There are a lot of menus, and if you do not know what you are looking for you can get lost. However, the interface is self-explanatory. It's easy to understand where to go to get what you want."
"The reporting and analytic capabilities are very limited."
"Self-healing could be a bit smoother and a bit cleaner, easier to access and more functional. That would help."
"The performance of the tool really needs to be improved."
"Many features still need to be implemented in this tool."
"What needs to be improved in CloudCheckr CMx High Security is integration. All the clouds are going quite fast, for example, all the cloud providers: Microsoft, Google, etc. CloudCheckr CMx High Security is good with AWS, no doubt about it, but with Azure and Google Cloud, I find that the solution is slow in that direction. If the vendor planned for CloudCheckr CMx High Security to be automated just for AWS, then it does make sense. If not, if the vendor is also targeting good integration with Google and Microsoft, then CloudCheckr CMx High Security integration needs improvement, in particular, it has to be faster. At the moment, its integration with Azure is not as good as its integration with AWS. With GCP, integration is nowhere."
"The solution needs to work better with larger capacities of data."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."
"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."
"Licensing is per socket, so load up on the cores rather than a lot of lower core CPUs."
"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."
"Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced."
"What I can advise is to trial the product, taking advantage of the Turbonomic pre-sales implemention support and kickstart training."
Information not available
"The cost is on par with other providers."
"The solution is reasonably priced."
"A license is needed to use CloudCheckr CMx High Security, but because we are a managed service provider, the price of the license would vary. It depends on the type of cloud users we have, for example, it would be some type of percentage or monthly billing, etc."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Cost Management solutions are best for your needs.
847,625 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
7%
No data available
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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...
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS Cost Explorer?
AWS Cost Explorer is part of the AWS package, so the cost is not directly associated with it. If you are using AWS se...
What needs improvement with AWS Cost Explorer?
While there is always room for improvement, any needs for enhancement depend on specific requirements at the time. Cu...
What is your primary use case for AWS Cost Explorer?
Primarily, I use AWS Cost Explorer to maintain cost and current budget constraints. Our FinOps team provides us with ...
What do you like most about CloudCheckr ?
The recommendation section is pretty helpful.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CloudCheckr ?
The price depends on the actual Azure consumption and what we feed into it. The cost is on par with other providers.
What needs improvement with CloudCheckr ?
We are not happy with the product’s reporting capabilities. We are planning to change the solution. The security comp...
 

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
No data available
CloudCheckr CMx High Security, CloudCheckr CMP
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
Information Not Available
Accenture, Logitech, Ingram, Cloudar, Infor, DXC, Cornell University, DLT, Lumen, Lightstream, Choice Hotels, B-Tech, SmileShark, PTP, Explicity, JCH Technology, Siemens Mobility
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM, Microsoft, Nutanix and others in Cloud Cost Management. Updated: March 2025.
847,625 professionals have used our research since 2012.