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Azure Cost Management vs Densify comparison

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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

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)
Azure Cost Management
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Densify
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
11th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (12th), Cloud Management (32nd), Virtualization Management Tools (9th), Cloud Analytics (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Cloud Cost Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 16.8%, up from 14.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Azure Cost Management is 11.5%, down from 14.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Densify is 4.4%, up from 4.3% 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.
Joy Maitra - PeerSpot reviewer
Continuous monitoring and predictive analytics help provide insights into utilization
Continuous monitoring helps me detect anomalies in the pipeline, preplan resource scalability, and assist with cost management by offering good visibility into resource utilization. It also offers predictive analytics and some existing features, including dashboards. The AI prediction feature helps forecast based on current utilization trends and suggests improvements like the GenAI feature for interactive inquiries.
Amit Kantia - PeerSpot reviewer
Its most valuable feature is the ability to capture attributes in the console, but it is not a stable solution
I recommend others to use Densify. They can not only use it for reporting but for automation as well. They can implement the policies on the console easily during the build-out procedure. Stability is the primary concern to us as it is causing lots of problems. We can only make significant decisions if Densify allows us, and it takes lots of time. Thus, I rate the tool as a six out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The primary features we have focused on are reporting and optimization."
"Using this product helps us to reduce performance risk because it shows us where resources are needed but not yet allocated."
"On-premises, one advantage I find particularly appealing is the ability to create policies for automatic CPU and memory scaling based on demand."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The recommendation of the family types is a huge help because it has saved us a lot of money. We use it primarily for that. Another thing that Turbonomic provides us with is a single platform that manages the full application stack and that's something I really like."
"The tool provides the ability to look at the consumption utilization over a period of time and determine if we need to change that resource allocation based on the actual workload consumption, as opposed to how IT has configured it. Therefore, we have come to realize that a lot of our workloads are overprovisioned, and we are spending more money in the public cloud than we need to."
"The most valuable feature is that it helps us to better forecast and reduce costs."
"It is a fully scalable product with the potential to enhance our application and increase our servers. All cloud-based solutions are fully scalable."
"I like the granularity of the tools."
"The features that I have found most valuable, are the trend analysis and the budgetary trigger."
"Microsoft Azure Cloud Cost Management is easy to use and we have a lot of insights about all of our goals."
"The most valuable aspect of the solution is the fact that it's extremely customizable. It makes it very flexible in terms of usage."
"During the two years I've been working with this solution, it has only been down once or twice. Thus, I would rate the stability of the solution at nine out of ten."
"I like the fact that you can set alerts on the predicted cost in Azure Cost Management."
"The Control Console is an incredible way to give a quick view of current capacity utilization allowing technical people to drill down quickly and allowing business/management people to get a quick overview of the environment."
"The ability to increase server density inside of my environment, which has helped me drive reduction in costs."
"The Densify Control Console, and Environment Status."
"The tool will come back and tell us that we can operate with 1,000 minutes as an example, save 90% on the contractual rate and not run into any issues."
"The Control Console provides a very easy to read dashboard of "too little/just right/too much" resources both for current data and on a historical or predictive basis."
"One would be the automatic rebalancing of the environment. That was one feature which helped. With that, we could improve our efficiency of our VMware infrastructure."
"I would say that the initial thing is that it provides us with a technological basis to expand capacity management beyond Excel."
"Densify's ability to aggregate multiple on-premise vCenters and multiple cloud accounts, gives it a level of visibility not found in many places."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"Turbonomic doesn't do storage placement how I would prefer. We use multiple shared storage volumes on VMware, so I don't have one big disk. I have lots of disks that I can place VMs on, and that consumes IOPS from the disk subsystem. We were getting recommendations to provision a new volume."
"Remove the need for special in-house knowledge and development."
"The automation area could be improved, and the generic reports are poor. We want more details in the analysis report from the application layer. The reports from the infrastructure layer are satisfactory, but Turbonomic won't provide much information if we dig down further than the application layer."
"I like the detail I get in the old user interface and will miss some of that in the new interface when we perform our planned upgrade soon."
"The GUI and policy creation have room for improvement. There should be a better view of some of the numbers that are provided and easier to access. And policy creation should have it easier to identify groups."
"In Azure, it's not what you're using. You purchase the whole 8 TB disk and you pay for it. It doesn't matter how much you're using. So something that I've asked for from Turbonomic is recommendations based on disk utilization. In the example of the 8 TB disk where only 200 GBs are being used, based on the history, there should be a recommendation like, "You can safely use a 500 GB disk." That would create a lot of savings."
"Stability is an area in the solution that lacks in certain areas. So, it needs to be improved."
"If it worked better with other cloud providers it would be better."
"Be wary of unnecessary costs."
"I would like to see better customization."
"All the offers should be on the console. You shouldn't need to select from different tabs."
"The product's licensing cost could be improved."
"It would be nice if they could introduce connections to other clouds. It would be good to connect to AWS and Oracle cloud."
"The solution's technical support should be faster, more knowledgeable, and customer-friendly."
"Some parts of the interface are rather complex and require a bit of time to navigate, but this has never stopped us as a Densify advisor is readily available to help with our "how to" queries."
"In terms of integration, the tool has great data. However, it's not always meaningful because the true business attributes of how most Fortune 500 companies operate are not maintaining in one tool, they're in a school of many tools."
"Unfortunately the tools and mechanisms which really came to maturity in the cloud, and were not mainstream on-premise, are still not implemented."
"The solution's stability is the primary concern for me."
"A closer integration to the service management processes."
"Initially we talked about some custom reporting, wherein our customer expected certain reports on a few areas, like how the storage is allocated, how the network performance is doing, and how the network utilization is happening for a virtual machine."
"Normalization of CPU utilization is required. At present, the data is available based on entitlement level."
"It seems that the mechanism for integration is, it goes so far but I think there could be some standard integration to normal remedy service now etc. I think that should be out of the box."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"IBM Turbonomic is an investment that we believe will deliver positive returns."
"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."
"Licensing is per socket, so load up on the cores rather than a lot of lower core CPUs."
"I consider the pricing to be high."
"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."
"Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced."
"Everybody tells me the pricing is high. But the ROIs are great."
"I rate the tool's pricing a six out of ten - the price could be lower."
"We are using pay-as-you-go licenses mostly for our customers."
"I rate the tool's pricing a seven out of ten."
"The tool's licensing costs are monthly."
"I think the solution was free initially."
"Azure Cost Management comes as a part of other solutions. You need to pay as per your requirement based on the pay-as-you-go model."
"It's free out of the box."
"Compared to competitors, it's cost-effective. I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten, with ten being expensive."
"Cost is always involved, but then I feel that this solution is better than other products that we have."
"There was some sticker shock, as this is not just another software product to spit out graphs."
"Densify has licensing setup so you can collect data without licensing. It gives you the ability to collect on everything, then choose later what you would like to license."
"Setup cost is negligible, as it scales fairly well."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
8%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Energy/Utilities Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
27%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
13%
Retailer
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 do you like most about Azure Cost Management?
Gives visibility into the cost of cloud-based solutions.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Cost Management?
The pricing is cost-effective, and I have not encountered any extra expenses attached after purchasing the service.
What needs improvement with Azure Cost Management?
Azure Cost Management is a little complicated, and the learning curve is somewhat steep. An enhancement recommendatio...
What do you like most about Densify?
The solution's tech support is excellent.
What needs improvement with Densify?
Densify is not a stable tool. Every time the support gets investigated, it takes much time to get refreshed.
What is your primary use case for Densify?
We are using Densify to produce reports and to get recommendations that can contribute to the area of our expertise.
 

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
Microsoft Azure Cost Management, Cloudyn
No data available
 

Learn More

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Interactive Demo

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
Quixey, Infomedia, Panaya, Wix.com, Mirabeau, Mi9, GetTaxi, Outsmart Studios, Bownty, BlazeMeter: The Load Testing Cloud, Irdeto, Effective Measure, Totango, Nextdoor, BranchOut, The BioTeam, Evolven, Netotiate, ClickSoftware
AIG, Bank of America, Cigna, Citi
Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Cost Management vs. Densify and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
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