Introduction
As an IT leader tasked with managing your organization's cloud spend, staying on top of costs and optimizing resources is critical to success.
With more and more workloads being deployed in public clouds like AWS and Azure, cloud costs can quickly spiral out of control if not properly monitored and managed.
You need tools that provide visibility into your cloud usage and spending, help identify waste or unused resources, allow budget setting and alerting, and help you make data-driven decisions to improve efficiency.
This article provides an in-depth review of the 10 best cloud cost management tools available today.
The tools on this list will help give you the control and confidence you need to manage your organization's cloud costs effectively. Read on to find the solution that best fits your needs and budget.
Sanka
Sanka is a digital transformation platform that offers a suite of business applications and automated workflows aimed at improving productivity and reducing costs, especially related to IT processes.
With a range of integrated apps and customizable features, Sanka allows businesses to optimize costs and resources across various departments, such as sales, support, recruiting, and IT.
Sanka does not focus specifically on cloud cost management, as it does not offer detailed cloud expenditure analysis, budgeting, or forecasting that standard Cloud Cost Management tools usually provide.
But, it can be customized as per your requirement to streamline workflows, centralize applications, and automate various tasks in an effort to reduce overall expenses and improve operational efficiency.
Key Features:
- Suite of Business Apps: Sanka provides a comprehensive set of over 20 business apps, including CRM, invoicing, order management, automated workflows, and others. These apps centralize your functions, optimizing and simplifying business operations.
- Automated Workflows: The platform empowers businesses with a wide array of automated workflows, reducing the need for manual inputs and considerably cutting down on time and errors.
- Unlimited Customizations: Sanka provides the opportunity to connect with popular cloud services, enabling you to tailor automation workflows, specific to your organization's needs.
- Dedicated Support: The platform not only assures 24/7 support but also offers free consulting, helping businesses define their requirements and assisting in tool selection and customization.
- ROI Focused: With its various tools and automation benefits, Sanka.io focuses on delivering the best IT investment ROI for businesses.
Azure Cost Management
Azure Cost Management, part of Microsoft's comprehensive Azure cloud ecosystem, is a resource that offers multi-functional capabilities around controlling and optimizing your organization's cloud spend.
It provides a suite of utilities for cost analysis, export, budgeting, and cloud optimization.
It operates seamlessly with Azure-cloud services and notably, it's also compatible with AWS.
Key Features:
- Cost Analysis: Azure Cost Management provides deep-dive cost breakdown reports by resource configuration, location, service, and multiple other parameters. It enables organizations to understand and manage their cloud spending better and isolate areas for cost reduction effectively.
- Budgets and Forecasting: This aspect of Azure Cost Management allows you to create, manage, and monitor budgets that align with your corporate cloud spending policies. It also provides forecasting features so you can project future costs.
- Cost Allocation: Azure cost allocation helps businesses distribute costs across multiple departments, projects, or regions. It offers detailed cost allocation reports for declaring and splitting costs.
- Azure Advisor Recommendations: Integrated with Azure Advisor, Azure Cost Management provides personalized recommendations based on your resources and configuration, suggesting actions to optimize costs and improve efficiency.
- Exports: Azure Cost Management facilitates the export of cost data for analysis and usage in external tools. It supports both manual and scheduled exports for flexible data management.
- Integration with AWS: In addition to managing Azure-specific costs, Azure Cost Management also supports cloud cost management for AWS, offering a comprehensive analysis for multi-cloud environments.
CloudHealth by VMware
CloudHealth by VMware is a leading cost management platform thousands of organizations use.
It offers advanced analytics to optimize cloud spending across AWS, Azure, and GCP. Key features include cost allocation, chargeback reports, and custom dashboards.
It provides an easily understandable cost visualization and reporting system, making regular auditing and cost optimization easier for businesses.
Key Features:
- Cloud Financial Management: CloudHealth provides businesses detailed visibility into their cloud expenses across different platforms. It offers cost allocation, chargeback, and showback capabilities, allowing users to understand and control their costs effectively.
- Cloud Operations Management: This feature enables organizations to maintain peak performance and availability by optimizing cloud infrastructure and streamlining operations.
- Security and Compliance: CloudHealth's security service aims to protect and maintain the security of your cloud by detecting potential vulnerabilities, mitigating threats, and ensuring compliance with regulations.
- Cloud Governance: Governance in CloudHealth allows businesses to define and enforce operational policies, ensuring the overall health and success of the cloud environment.
AWS Cost Explorer
AWS Cost Explorer, a cloud cost management service by Amazon Web Services (AWS), offers deep insights into your AWS cost and usage patterns.
Designed specifically for AWS users, AWS Cost Explorer allows deep dives into your cost and usage data, providing detailed reports.
This tool's key features include forecasting capabilities, API access, and customizable visibility settings.
Although its scope is limited to AWS environments and it may take time to master, it's a valuable asset for organizations using AWS cloud services.
Key Features:
- Detailed Cost Analysis: AWS Cost Explorer provides powerful analytics capabilities, serving up comprehensive and detailed visibility into AWS costs and usage patterns, with the ability to drill down data by various dimensions.
- Customizable Forecasting: This feature allows organizations to forecast future AWS spending based on historical data, enabling predictive cost analysis and better budgeting.
- Reservation Recommendations: It offers spot-on suggestions for EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) Reserved Instances, which can significantly reduce costs for long-term workloads.
- Cost Allocation Tagging: AWS Cost Explorer supports AWS resource tagging, which can help identify and track costs for individual projects, departments, or business units.
Apptio Cloudability
Apptio Cloudability is a cloud cost management platform designed to provide comprehensive cost insights and optimizations across various cloud providers.
It empowers organizations to manage and optimize cloud costs effectively, enhancing visibility, and control of expenses.
Cloudability specializes in cost monitoring and optimization across AWS and Azure. It gives businesses a clear view of cloud costs through detailed reports, charts, and dashboards.
Notable features include budget alerts, anomaly detection, and resource scheduling to avoid unused instances. Cloudability is known for its intuitive interface and affordable pricing.
Key Features:
- Multicloud Cost Management: Apptio Cloudability supports cost management across multiple cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, offering a comprehensive overview of multi-cloud environments.
- True Cost™ Analytics: Delivering real-time, rightsized cost adjustments and incorporating discounts, Apptio Cloudability's True Cost™ Analytics allows better decision-making through accurate visibility into spend.
- Cost Optimization: Apptio Cloudability provides extensive cost-saving recommendations by identifying unused or underutilized resources and highlighting opportunities for reservations or savings plans.
- Budget Tracking and Forecasting: The platform enables organizations to track costs against budgets and predict future expenditures by leveraging machine learning (ML) forecasting models.
- Rightsizing: Apptio Cloudability offers rightsizing recommendations that identify optimal resource configurations, reducing costs and increasing efficiency.
Densify
Densify is a versatile cloud and container resource management tool, designed to effectively optimize cloud spend while ensuring optimal application and workload performance.
Ideal for controlling both cloud and container costs, Densify introduces a ground-up approach to cost management by bringing alignment and strategic buy-in from engineering early on.
Moreover, Densify provides cloud resource optimization by driving changes that improve financial visibility and resource efficiency.
Sub-optimal instances can be both cost and performance disasters, leading to unnoticed low utilization and wasted resources.
Densify addresses this by closely examining workload patterns as well as reducing and expanding cloud resources as necessary.
Key Features:
- Cloud Cost Optimization: By understanding workload patterns, Densify provides recommendations to scale cloud resources up or down, optimizing cost while maintaining performance.
- Predictive Analytics: Densify leverages machine learning to predict future cloud demands and costs, driving efficient resource allocation and budget planning.
- Multicloud and Container Support: Densify provides support for multicloud environments, including AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure, as well as container technologies such as Kubernetes.
- Granular Cloud Cost Reporting: This tool allows for detailed cost allocation, providing visibility of expenses, and helping identify areas for cost reduction.
- Continuous Optimization: Densify performs ongoing analysis of resource utilization, enabling continuous cloud cost optimization and proactive adjustments as needed.
Turbonomic
Turbonomic provides real-time cost monitoring and optimization for AWS and Azure. It uses AI to analyze cloud costs and resource utilization, providing recommendations to improve efficiency.
Turbonomic offers policy enforcement, budget tracking, and custom dashboards to gain visibility into cloud spend.
Key Features:
- AI-Driven Automation: Turbonomic leverages AI to automate real-time decisions, ensuring continuous performance, lowering costs, and eliminating performance risks.
- Multicloud Support: Offering support for multicloud operations, Turbonomic enables businesses to manage and optimize costs across AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and more.
- Workload Optimization: It provides application resource management, ensuring that applications always get the resources they need to perform at their best.
- Container Optimization: Turbonomic aids in managing and optimizing container platforms, including Kubernetes, guaranteeing containers and pods have the resources they need, at the lowest possible cost.
- Cost Visibility & Reporting: It provides detailed visibility into cloud costs with reports showing cost-saving opportunities, enabling businesses to understand and reduce their cloud spend.
Nutanix
Nutanix Beam delivers intelligent cost governance across multiple clouds including AWS, Azure, and GCP.
It provides a single dashboard to monitor budgets, analyze spending patterns, and set thresholds to prevent overspending.
Nutanix Beam also offers “what-if” modeling to forecast the costs of new workloads.
As a hybrid cloud infrastructure management tool, it allows businesses to manage and optimize their private, public, and distributed cloud environments effectively.
Key Features:
- One-Click Infrastructure Management: Nutanix offers a simple, centralized dashboard for managing and controlling cloud environments, including networking, storage, and virtualization, with one-click simplicity.
- Automated Cost Optimization: Nutanix automates the placement of applications in your infrastructure, reducing waste and ensuring resources are used efficiently to minimize costs.
- Predictive Budgeting and Forecasting: Leveraging AI and machine learning, Nutanix provides predictive budgeting and cost forecasts to help businesses better plan their cloud spending.
- Multicloud Support: Nutanix supports a range of public and private clouds, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, as well as on-premises environments.
- Security and Compliance” Nutanix incorporates built-in security features to maintain data integrity, and it automates compliance checks to ensure regulatory requirements are met.
CloudCheckr
CloudCheckr provides real-time monitoring and cost optimization for AWS and Azure.
It offers budget alerts, cost anomaly detection, and automated policy enforcement to avoid wasted spend. CloudCheckr is known for its simple yet powerful interface.
Despite a few usability challenges, its extensive capabilities make it a robust and beneficial tool for managing expenses and maintaining control over cloud environments.
Key Features:
- Cloud Cost Management: CloudCheckr provides tools for cost monitoring, allocation, spotting usage inefficiencies, and right-sizing resources to optimize cloud costs.
- Security and Compliance: With over 550 built-in best practice checks and automated fixes, it offers robust security and compliance capabilities to ensure data security and meet regulatory requirements.
- In-Depth Analytics: Advanced reporting and analytics tools offer granular insights about assets, utilization, cost, security, and compliance across cloud environments, helping drive decision-making.
- Multicloud Support: It supports multicloud environments, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, offering a holistic approach to cloud management and cost optimization.
- Reserved Instance Management: CloudCheckr helps businesses strategically purchase and manage Amazon EC2 and RDS Reserved Instances, driving cost savings and efficiency.
Flexera One
Flexera One, formerly RightScale, is a leader in multi-cloud management. Its cost management capabilities provide insights into cloud costs and resource utilization across AWS, Azure, GCP, and other clouds.
It is designed to help organizations manage IT costs, maximize the value of their assets, and ensure budget visibility across multi-cloud environments.
Key features include budget alerts, chargeback reporting, and custom dashboards with data visualization tools.
Key Features:
- Unified IT Management: Flexera One offers a comprehensive solution for managing public and private clouds, on-premises environments, hardware, software, and SaaS solutions.
- Cloud Cost Optimization: The platform provides cost optimization features such as rightsizing, budget management, and recommendations for allocation, helping businesses minimize their cloud spending.
- Real-time Analytics: Flexera One delivers real-time analytics, enabling businesses to monitor IT-related costs, assets, and performance closely and make informed decisions.
- Security and Compliance: Integrated security and compliance management features provide organizations with a secure and compliant IT environment, lowering risk, and ensuring adherence.
- Software License Optimization: Flexera One's software license optimization capabilities help organizations manage and optimize their software licenses, preventing over-licensing costs.
Conclusion
As organizations continue to adopt cloud computing at an accelerating rate, the need to gain visibility and control of cloud costs becomes increasingly critical.
The cloud cost management tools detailed in this article provide robust functionality to help enterprises optimize their cloud spending through analysis, allocation, governance, and automation.
With a mix of both free and paid options, there are solutions for organizations of any size and budget.
By implementing one of these top tools, you can gain the insights needed to make informed decisions about your cloud usage and truly maximize the value of your investment in this transformative technology.
The time to take action is now - don't let cloud costs continue spiraling out of control and start reaping the benefits of an effective cost management strategy today.
