If you are fine using a conventional cloud cost management tool, Apptio’s Cloudability can be a helpful tool. It promises to enable DevOps, IT, and finance to optimize cloud resources for quality, speed, and cost.
A large business with a high cloud spend, a team of 5-10 engineers, and a budget for expert guidance is an ideal match for Cloudability. With Cloudability, you can get a fast overview of your cloud costs, navigate between multiple accounts, manage Reserved Instances, and decommission unused resources.
Except Cloudability Is Not Perfect
But you are here in search of top Cloudability alternatives.
Cloudability users often complain that it has a steep learning curve, the UI is overwhelming, and the amount of data it produces is so overwhelming they don’t know where to start. In their experience, finding specific data to make informed, actionable, and timely decisions is usually tricky without expert guidance, which can be costly.
Customers also view Cloudability’s pricing model as one of the more expensive options available. Wouldn’t you prefer a Cloudability competitor that pays for itself in a matter of weeks or months rather than years — or never?
This guide explores seven of the best alternatives to Cloudability. Our goal isn’t to conclude which tool is better or worse. Instead, it is about helping you select a cloud cost tool that matches your needs.
1. CloudZero
Traditional cloud cost management tools only show you a high-level picture of your cloud spend. CloudZero offers a new approach to controlling cloud cost — cloud cost intelligence. Built for software-driven companies, we put engineers in control of cloud cost by connecting technical decisions to business outcomes.
If growing your margins is an area of focus for you, we might be a great fit. Here’s where we excel:
- If you are looking to understand your cost of goods sold (COGS), we can give you a complete view of cost across your business, including AWS and Snowflake.
- If you want to build a culture of cost conscious engineering, we help you provide relevant views of product features, dev teams, and more — with context for teams to easily explore which costs are changing and why.
- If tagging, shared resources, or Kubernetes costs are a source of pain, we make it simple to align cost to your business — without tagging.
- If you are looking to measure unit cost, like cost per feature, cost per customer, and more — we can help you align cloud cost to your important business metrics.
Year Founded: 2016
Category: Cloud Cost Intelligence
Best choice for companies of all sizes that want to correlate cloud spending to actual business activities to make data-driven, accurate, and actionable decisions.
CloudZero Pricing: Fixed annual pricing (not a percentage of spend)
Visit our demo page to see how CloudZero enables engineering teams to deploy a cost-first approach to innovation and finance teams to decode their AWS bill and improve their FinOps programs.
2. CloudHealth
CloudHealth is a traditional cloud cost management platform suitable for companies with high cloud spend. CloudHealth may also be a good choice for increasing cost visibility in hybrid or multi-cloud environments.
As a product owned by VMware, CloudHealth also promotes itself as a suitable tool for improving cloud security, compliance, operations, and cloud reporting. Cloudability also offers cloud financial management must-haves such as rightsizing and AWS reservation purchasing.
Year Founded: 2012
Category: Traditional Cloud Cost Management
Best for enterprises looking for a tool that can serve as a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud security and compliance platform.
CloudHealth Pricing: Flat rate up to 100,000 monthly cloud spend, then 3% of monthly spend
3. Harness
With Cloud Cost Management (CCM) from Harness, IT and finance teams can work towards improving their cloud cost visibility. Depending on resource allocation and changes in business strategy, FinOps teams can also use CCM to prioritize software development projects.
Users also praise Harness’s ability to provide more detailed data visualizations with other cloud providers, such as Microsoft’s Azure Cloud and Google Cloud. Teams can also create and enforce cost policies to stay in control of cloud spending. Those who complain about the tool’s pricing model say it can be costly, depending on cloud infrastructure configuration.
Year Founded: 2016
Category: Automated Cloud Cost Management
Best for companies wanting more detailed cloud cost reporting in a multi-cloud environment.
Harness Pricing: Percentage of cloud spend; 2.25% of spend (Teams) and 2.5% (Enterprise)
4. Flexera Optima
Flexera aims to maximize the functionality of multi-cloud governance teams. Teams can use their automated budget controls with automated actions to eliminate waste and prevent costly surprises.
Cloud cost management teams can also analyze and report on cloud infrastructure costs based on different factors, such as account, cloud provider, and region. Despite this, the tool takes a traditional approach to cloud cost management, combining billing data, sending optimization recommendations, and using tags to track and report on specifics.
Year Founded: 2016
Category: Traditional Cloud Cost Management
Best for companies that have a perfect tagging strategy.
Pricing: Contact Sales
5. CloudCheckr
CloudCheckr is ideal if you want a cloud cost management tool that also supports cloud security and compliance management. It may also be a good choice if optimizing resource utilization across single and multi-cloud infrastructure is a priority for you.
It also helps cost governance teams to analyze RIs and Savings Plans to maximize volume discounts, reduce waste, and prevent cost overruns by rightsizing and alerting.
Year Founded: 2011
Category: Traditional Cloud Cost Management
Best solution for companies seeking comprehensive security and compliance (cloud governance), along with cost management.
CloudCheckr Pricing: 3% of cloud spend (exclusive of any training)
6. AWS Cost Management Services
Amazon Web Services offers a variety of free cloud computing tools. AWS native tools such as AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, and AWS Cost and Usage reports provide a starting point for businesses with small workloads, and low cloud spend. AWS cost services features include rightsizing, Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, and Spot Instances.
Because AWS collects data from multiple AWS services, cloud cost teams can gain a high-level view of their AWS public cloud costs. However, users complain that the AWS bill could be more transparent and require less tagging to derive reliable cost insights.
Year Founded: 2014
Category: AWS Native Cloud Management Tools
Best choice for cloud-based companies that are still figuring out how to optimize their AWS spend.
AWS Pricing: Free with AWS
7. CloudBolt Kumolus
With CloudBolt’s Kumolus, users are able to manage costs across multiple cloud environments directly from the cloud cost management portal. As an example, you can purchase Reserve capacity right from the platform’s portal. Furthermore, it provides visibility into reservations, forecasting and budgets, and usage reporting (shared as PDF or CSV).
With this tool, you can monitor your crucial cost indicators in both public and private clouds.
Year Founded: 2012
Category: Multi-cloud Cost Management
Best for companies with medium-scale use cases who don’t necessarily want to analyze their cloud bills that closely.
Switch To Cloud Cost Intelligence
Chances are that your competition is using the latest tools to eat into your market share. Knowing your COGS and unit cost economics will enable you to develop better pricing, performance, and features so that you can beat your competitors.
Engineers can use CloudZero to nurture a cost-aware culture without reducing innovation. Meanwhile, finance and FinOps can get the answers they need to understand what, when, and who is driving these cloud costs, so they can make strategic business decisions to remain competitive. 
to see CloudZero in action.
The Cloud Cost Playbook
The step-by-step guide to cost maturity
