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Azure Cost Management vs Spot comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 8, 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
Spot
Ranking in Cloud Cost Management
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (28th), Server Virtualization Software (14th), Cloud Operations Analytics (3rd), Cloud Analytics (3rd), Compute Service (9th), Containers as a Service (CaaS) (6th)
 

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 Azure Cost Management is 8.0%, down from 13.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spot is 4.1%, up from 4.0% 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.
Manpreet_Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
Used to manage Kubernetes infrastructure, but it doesn't have support from OCI
Spot Ocean is deployed on the cloud in our organization. I would recommend the solution to other users. You need to have an experience with Kubernetes, or else this product is of no use. It is not difficult to learn to use Spot Ocean. Overall, I rate the solution a seven 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

"I have the ability to automate things similar to the Orchestrator stuff. I do have the ability to have it do some balancing, and if it sees some different performance metrics that I've set not being met, it'll actually move some of my virtual machines from, let's say, one host to another. It is sort of an automation tool that helps me. Basically, I specify the metric, and if I get a certain host or something being over-utilized, it'll automatically move the virtual machines around for me. It basically has to snap into my vCenter and then it can make adjustments and move my virtual machines around. It also has some very nice reporting tools built around virtual machines. It tells you how much storage, memory, or CPU is being used monthly, and then it gives you a very nice way to be able to send out billing structure to your end users who use servers within your environment."
"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."
"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."
"Using this product helps us to reduce performance risk because it shows us where resources are needed but not yet allocated."
"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."
"Before implementing Turbonomic, we had difficulty reaching a consensus about VM placement and sizing. Everybody's opinion was wrong, including mine. The application developers, implementers, and infrastructure team could never decide the appropriate size of a virtual machine. I always made the machines small, and they always made them too big. We were both probably wrong."
"Turbonomic can show us if we're not using some of our storage volumes efficiently in AWS. For example, if we've over-provisioned one of our virtual machines to have dedicated IOPs that it doesn't need, Turbonomic will detect that and tell us."
"Rightsizing is valuable. Its recommendations are pretty good."
"Microsoft Azure Cloud Cost Management is easy to use and we have a lot of insights about all of our goals."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of Azure Cost Management is cost optimization."
"The most valuable features of Azure Cost Management are the ability to set standards or tagging policies and initiatives. You can achieve higher cost optimization."
"Microsoft's technical support is good."
"The tool is very stable."
"Azure Cost Management is user-friendly compared to other competitors."
"The resource forecasting feature is invaluable. Secondly, the ability to drill down to the regional and resource level is incredibly helpful for pinpointing where my costs are accruing."
"The solution helps us to manage and scale automatically whenever there is a limit to the increase in the application workflow."
"The solution offers both block access and file access, making it a nice solution for customers."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"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."
"The implementation could be enhanced."
"The planning and costing areas could be a little bit more detailed. When you have more than 2,000 machines, the reports don't work properly. They need to fix it so that the reports work when you use that many virtual machines."
"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."
"Enhanced executive reporting standard with the tool beyond the reports that can be created today. Something that can easily be used with upper management on a monthly or quarterly basis to show the impact to our environment."
"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 policy-based remediation is probably the biggest area where Azure is lacking and that's why we sell a lot of our technology to our customers."
"I would like the developers to add more features about migration, like how much it would cost to migrate from, let's say, AWS to Azure."
"We have encountered delays in support."
"There are significant issues with Power BI integration at the moment, particularly with built-in applications for course management. Multiple features don't allow for efficient report generation. This is one primary concern. The second issue relates to reporting, even when using Power BI templates for course management. There are problems with data import that require manual entry. So, these are the two main challenges I'm currently facing. Another matter to consider is the removal of the markup option for partners. I'm not sure if it will be added back, but it used to allow marking up Azure usage for enterprise customers. I'm uncertain if there's an alternative way to achieve the same function. Partners need to mark up services when selling to customers, and it's currently unavailable for some products or services."
"There are certainly areas for improvement in terms of labeling the inventory. That's because right now, we use a number of services. But it's difficult when you look at the billing limiters and how they are named. We can't correlate those names to the actual services there. So, I can't click on an item and see if I'm still using this service or not. So it just rolls up and gives me values and figures, but I can't really correlate them to actual services on the Azure platform."
"The product's licensing cost could be improved."
"The technical support could be improved."
"Azure Cost Management is a little complicated, and the learning curve is somewhat steep."
"The solution doesn't have support from OCI, and it should start working to onboard OCI."
"There are no particular areas for improvement I can identify."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 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."
"IBM Turbonomic is an investment that we believe will deliver positive returns."
"The pricing and licensing are fair. We purchase based on benchmark pricing, which we have been able to get. There are no surprise charges nor hidden fees."
"I'm not involved in any of the billing, but my understanding is that is fairly 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."
"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."
"The tool's licensing costs are monthly."
"The product is not cheap, but it is not expensive either."
"The subscription fees are primarily tailored to larger enterprises, potentially leaving smaller and medium-sized customers with limited options."
"Based on the transitional cost we charge, it's not expensive, but could be better."
"We are using pay-as-you-go licenses mostly for our customers."
"Pricing isn't applicable as it's included with the subscription. It depends on the services used. If you acquire any services on Azure, you pay for the subscription, and the billing or cost management is included for free."
"The tool's pricing is yearly."
"I rate the tool's pricing a seven out of ten."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
7%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Energy/Utilities Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
24%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Real Estate/Law Firm
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 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 Spot Ocean?
The solution helps us to manage and scale automatically whenever there is a limit to the increase in the application ...
What needs improvement with Spot Ocean?
There are no particular areas for improvement I can identify.
What is your primary use case for Spot Ocean?
Spot by NetApp is primarily used for backup and also for Fiservware.
 

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
Microsoft Azure Cost Management, Cloudyn
Spot Ocean, Spot Elastigroup, Spot Eco
 

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.
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
Freshworks, Zalando, Red Spark, News, Trax, ETAS, Demandbase, BeesWa, Duolingo, intel, IBM, N26, Wix, EyeEm, moovit, SAMSUNG, News UK, ticketmaster
Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Cost Management vs. Spot and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
846,617 professionals have used our research since 2012.