If controlling cloud costs feels like constant firefighting, you’re not alone. Cloud costs can spiral with no warning due to misconfigured services or forgotten instances — and suddenly you’re scrambling to explain a six-figure bill.
AWS Cloud Optimization is an essential part of any AWS environment, as it allows organizations to get the most value out of their cloud investment while minimizing unexpected costs and runaway spending.
In this complete guide, we’ll take a look at the best tools available to help supercharge your cloud cost optimization and cost savings. But first, let’s go over a few cloud cost optimization basics.
What is Cloud Cost Optimization?
Cloud optimization is critical for companies aiming to accelerate business outcomes, achieve high ROI on spend, and fully leverage their data. Essentially, it involves the continual process of selecting and allocating appropriate resources for specific workloads or applications.
There are two key principles that underlie cloud cost optimization: pay less, and get more cloud resources for every dollar.
Why is Cloud Cost Management So Difficult?
In 2025, teams are dealing with sprawling multi-cloud environments, rising GenAI usage, and multiple SaaS tools — these factors add complexity and make it difficult to get visibility into costs. Reasons why cloud cost management is so difficult today include:
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Too many disconnected data sources
Most teams use multiple cloud accounts, dozens of SaaS tools, and third-party platforms. Without a unified view, it’s impossible to track usage or understand who’s spending what. Engineers end up toggling between dashboards, manually reconciling reports, and missing key cost drivers. -
No clear cost allocation by business need
Executives want to see cost per customer, product, or feature—but most billing data isn’t structured that way. Teams spend hours stitching together AWS Cost Explorer exports or processing CUR data just to produce a basic unit economics report. -
FinOps is hard to operationalize
Frameworks are easy to talk about and hard to execute. There’s rarely a clear owner of cloud costs—finance, engineering, and procurement all touch it, but no one owns it end-to-end. -
Prepaid discounts create risk and confusion
Reserved Instances and Savings Plans give you a discount if you commit to a certain level of spending in advance. But in practice, they only deliver lower costs if carefully managed. Without visibility into workload usage, teams either overcommit and waste money or undercommit and miss out on savings. -
Modern infrastructure doesn’t map to legacy billing
Cloud-native environments like Kubernetes, serverless, and AI platforms don’t alwaus align well with standard cloud bills. It’s hard to assign costs to the actual work being done—like a container running a customer-facing feature—because billing data needs to be manually reconciled in an extremely complex and time-consuming process. -
AI model usage is invisible and growing fast
Because GenAI spending is relatively new, teams often lack the tools to analyze and reduce their spending. With OpenAI, Bedrock, and other GenAI services, costs are often billed by tokens or requests—without context on which team, product, or experiment generated them. That makes it difficult to optimize or even explain the monthly bill. Often, you might be able to switch models and get the same performance for lower costs — but getting the data to know when to make the switch isn’t always simple.
How to Select the Best Cloud Cost Management Tool
The good news is that many of these challenges are technical problems that can be solved with automation tools. Here are the key features to look for in a cloud cost management tool:
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Cost visibility
You need a clear, consolidated view across all cloud accounts, services, and SaaS tools. A good platform should have a thorough list of integrations for your third party spending — such as Databricks, Datadog, Snowflake, etc. The best tools ingest billing and usage data from all sources—not just AWS—and normalize it into a single platform so you can track everything in one place.
A good cloud cost management tool should also have tools to help you break down spend by account, region, service, usage type, or other common finance and engineering filters. -
Cost allocation, showbacks and chargebacks
Look for tools that support granular allocation by team, project, product, or business unit. A platform should automatically make use of tags and other metadata to show who’s driving spend. With showbacks and chargebacks, you can make departments aware of what they are spending and keep them accountable and motivated to reduce costs. -
Automated tagging recommendations
Many cloud bills are under-tagged or inconsistently tagged. A good cloud cost management platform can flag missing or broken tags, suggests fixes, and highlights unallocated spend—so you can clean up cost data without needing a separate governance project. -
Real-time monitoring, anomaly detection, alerts, budgeting and forecasting
Cost spikes shouldn’t be discovered days or weeks later. Choose tools that provide real-time usage monitoring, configurable alerts, robust forecasting capabilities, and AI-driven anomaly detection so teams can respond before budgets are blown. And speaking of budgets, automated tools can make the process a lot easier and better than continually updating a set of spreadsheets. -
Usability and interface
Prioritize platforms with clean dashboards, customizable views, and role-based access, so everyone—from engineers to executives—can get what they need without extra work. -
Automated actions and optimization tools
Insight alone isn’t enough—your platform should help you take action. Look for tools that can automatically rightsize resources, clean up idle infrastructure, or adjust commitments based on usage patterns. Built-in automation helps close the loop between visibility and savings, saving engineers time and reducing manual effort.
18+ Best Cloud Optimization Companies
Let’s dive into the list of the best AWS cost optimization tools for controlling cloud costs and optimizing your cloud spend.
1: nOps: Fully Automated AWS Optimization

nOps is a ML-powered FinOps automation platform that helps AWS users reduce their costs by up to 50% on autopilot. It is an end-to-end platform with all of the features discussed above.
With nOps, users can benefit in two key ways. First, you get better performance at a lower price without the financial risk. nOps charges based on a fraction of your savings, so you only pay if you save.
Second, nOps offers an all-in-one suite of solutions tailored to your preferred tools and services. nOps makes it simple and easy for engineers to take action on cost optimization, so that their time is freed to focus on building and innovating. Its features include:
Business Contexts
Business Contexts helps you understand 100% of your AWS bill with cost allocation, chargebacks, showbacks, and tagging. It integrates with multicloud, GenAI, and SaaS tools so you can get visibility on 100% of your unified spending.

Compute Copilot
Compute Copilot automatically selects the optimal compute resource at the most cost-effective price in real time for you.

Commitment Management:
nOps offers automatic life-cycle management of your Reserved Instance and Savings Plan commitments, with a guarantee that you’ll utilize 100% of the commitments we manage on your behalf.
Cloud Optimization Essentials
Automation tools integrate with your IaC to help you automatically rightsize EC2 instances, schedule resources, pause unused resources, and optimize your EBS storage.

AWS MAP Management
nOps offers a platform to help you maximizes MAP funding, automatically tags resources, and tracks credits for efficient cloud migration.
nOps processes over $2 billion dollars in cloud spend and was recently named #1 by G2 in the cloud cost management category. Book a demo to find out how nOps can help you start saving today.
2: Amazon Web Services (AWS): AWS-native Cloud Cost Optimization Tools
If you’re looking to get started with some AWS-native tools to manage your cloud spend, a range of options are available to help you access, organize, understand, control, and optimize your costs. Let’s discuss some of the most important.
- AWS Cost Explorer: This tool provides detailed visualizations of your AWS cloud spend and usage cost trends. Cost Explorer enables you to analyze your AWS usage patterns across different AWS services, identify trends, and pinpoint cost drivers. It also offers forecasting capabilities to predict future cloud spend.
- AWS Budgets: AWS Budgets allows you to set custom budgets to monitor and manage your cloud costs and usage. It sends alerts when your cloud spend or usage exceed predefined thresholds — helping you stay within your financial operating limits and prevent overspending on your cloud budget.
- AWS Trusted Advisor: This service scans your AWS environment to offer recommendations that can help you follow best practices. Trusted Advisor covers various aspects including cost optimization, where it suggests ways to reduce wasted spend, improve system performance, and enhance security.
- AWS Compute Optimizer: AWS Compute Optimizer recommends optimal AWS resources for your workloads based on utilization data. This service helps you choose the right configurations for your Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon EBS volumes, and AWS Lambda functions, which can lead to cost savings and performance improvements.
While AWS services are an essential part of your toolbox, third-party tools can help simply and automate some of these processes, helping you to aggregate and analyze data in an intuitive way. Some third party tools also offer more aggressive or varied strategies for cost savings, such as more dynamic resource allocation methods, detailed cost allocation and chargeback to cost center features, and sophisticated commitment management (like handling Reserved Instances across multiple accounts or services, or offering a risk-free buyback guarantee).
The Ultimate Guide to AWS Commitments

3: Cloudability: Cloud Cost Management Platform

Apptio Cloudability is a cloud cost optimization solution that enhances control and visibility over cloud expenses. It allows enterprises to efficiently manage their cloud spending in terms of associated costs, performance, and quality.
The platform features comprehensive tools for budgeting, forecasting, and rightsizing as part of its financial management offerings. A key strength of Cloudability is its emphasis on FinOps, assisting leaders in aligning cloud expenses with business outcomes and enabling finance departments to track costs effectively for precise budget planning and resource allocation back to each cost center and business unit.
Although Cloudability excels in financial management and budgeting, it is somewhat less focused on integrating cost adjustments and suggestions directly with the operational tasks of engineering teams. After Cloudability issues recommendations, the responsibility to evaluate and implement these suggestions rests primarily with the engineering staff.
4: Densify: Cloud and Container Cost Visibility and Resource Management

Densify, also known as Intel Cost Optimizer powered by Densify, offers automatic optimization for Kubernetes environments and cloud instance configuration. This platform’s subscription may be included by Intel for eligible organizations.
A notable feature of Densify is its application of Machine Learning to thoroughly analyze the behaviors of workloads and the offerings of cloud providers. This continuous analysis ensures optimal alignment of cloud services and applications with the most suitable cloud infrastructure. The platform is versatile, supporting various cloud services and is ideal for both multicloud and hybrid cloud setups.
5: ProsperOps: Commitment Management Platform

ProsperOps is an automated optimization service that manages purchase commitments (such as AWS Reserved Instances and Savings Plans) on AWS and GCP. The service monitors usage of your resources and automatically adjusts discount instruments.
For example, it manages AWS Reserved Instance and Savings Plan commitments on your behalf, analyzing your usage to purchase and sell commitments as needed to maximize savings outcomes while preserving sufficient flexibility.
While ProsperOps does not manage your Spot instances (in contrast to tools such as Spot by NetApp or Xosphere), its algorithms are Spot-aware.
6: Datadog: Cloud Monitoring Tools

Datadog stands out as a leading monitoring and observability platform, gathering metrics and events from across the entire DevOps stack. While primarily known for its capabilities helping you monitor cloud computing spend, Datadog’s Cloud Cost Management feature also plays a crucial role in helping manage cloud expenditures. It provides engineers with vital cost information alongside specific resource data such as CPU usage, memory, and requests, all within the context of their specific services and applications, enabling effective cost management actions.
Moreover, Datadog facilitates detailed insights into your AWS or Azure expenditures, aiding in the accurate allocation of cloud costs and enhancing decision-making confidence regarding spending. In a strategic move to bolster this capability, Datadog has recently teamed up with nOps. This partnership aims to streamline the process for engineers looking to implement rightsizing recommendations, making it more accessible and actionable.
7: Zesty: Cloud Spend Optimization

Zesty is an advanced cloud cost optimization tool that employs an AI-driven model to enhance the efficiency of cloud resource utilization. This model is developed from a combination of real and simulated data on cloud resource consumption, allowing it to predict the exact resources an application will need in real-time, including CPU cores and storage specifications.
Utilizing these accurate predictions, Zesty automates various operations such as resizing, scaling up or down, adjusting storage volumes, and managing the acquisition or release of public cloud instances. Currently, Zesty’s capabilities are focused specifically on optimizing EC2 instances, leveraging its insights to drive cost savings and efficiency in cloud deployments.
8: FinOut: FinOps Cloud Costs Management

Finout is a FinOps focused cloud cost optimization and observability platform that streamlines the financial monitoring of cloud resources. By integrating real-time data analytics, Finout provides organizations with precise insights into their cloud spending across various services and platforms. This tool is particularly adept at breaking down expenses by individual resources, departments, or projects, enabling detailed tracking and allocation of costs.
Finout’s platform supports proactive cost management through features such as custom alerts for budget thresholds and predictive analytics for forecasting future spending.
9: Flexera: IT and Cloud Cost Optimization

Flexera is dedicated to enhancing the visibility, allocation, and efficiency of cloud expenditures on a large scale. It offers actionable insights, budget management tools, and cost control policies designed to help organizations manage their cloud spending more effectively and avoid unexpected costs.
A key advantage of Flexera is its suite of automation tools that facilitate the implementation of its recommendations, thereby making cost optimization and governance more manageable and scalable.
10: Kubecost: Kubernetes cost management and monitoring

Kubecost provides real-time cost analysis and optimization for Kubernetes, offering insights into how resources are being utilized and where savings can be made.
It integrates directly into your Kubernetes environment in AWS, GCP, Azure or on-prem, delivering detailed reports on costs by namespace, deployment, or other common Kubernetes concepts, enabling teams to understand the financial impact of their Kubernetes workloads.
Kubecost also offers features for finance teams that allow you to allocate costs, map costs back to cost centers, analyze your monthly spend, and set alerts that help organizations to implement cost-saving measures and avoid budget overruns.
11: CloudZero: Cloud Cost Optimization Platform

CloudZero is a cloud cost optimization tool that helps provide detailed breakdowns of cloud expenditures, allowing you to understand the specifics of where, when, and how your cloud resources are being spent. It features automated tagging and Slack notifications to facilitate the tracking and attribution of cloud costs across different teams, customers, key performance indicators, and product features.
The platform supports real-time cost monitoring for Kubernetes and Snowflake, covering various cloud environments including public, private, hybrid, and multicloud systems. Additionally, CloudZero offers coaching support to guide and enhance your cost optimization strategies, helping you make informed decisions to effectively manage and reduce cloud spending.
12: Nutanix: Hybrid Multicloud Management

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is an integrated multi-cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform that facilitates the creation of a self-service portal for IT resource consumption. It is particularly focused on offering a unified platform to help you seamlessly integrate and manage infrastructure across public clouds, hybrid clouds, and private cloud environments.
NCM enables Systems Administrators and Architects to easily define VMs and applications using straightforward blueprints, which manage all aspects of the application lifecycle, including provisioning, scaling, and cleanup.
13: CloudBolt: Cloud Management Platform

CloudBolt is a cloud management platform designed to simplify the orchestration, automation, and management of cloud resources across multiple cloud providers. It serves as a helpful tool for enterprises aiming to optimize their cloud operations and enhance financial governance. CloudBolt provides a unified interface that allows IT teams to manage public, private, and hybrid cloud resources seamlessly, making it an ideal solution for multi-cloud strategies.
The platform excels in offering visibility into cloud spend and usage with detailed analytics and reporting features, helping organizations understand and control their monthly cloud spend effectively. It also has automation capabilities enabling users to rapidly provision and deprovision resources, enforce compliance policies, and implement measures to reduce costs across their cloud environments.
14: AppDynamics: Cloud Observability and Application Performance Management

AppDynamics is a comprehensive application performance management (APM) and IT operations analytics tool that helps businesses ensure that their applications perform optimally, are highly available, and deliver exceptional user experiences. AppDynamics offers a real-time, end-to-end insight into application performance, from the user interface through the network to the database. This holistic view is powered by its dynamic baselining and machine learning capabilities, which automatically detect anomalies and pinpoint root causes of performance issues.
AppDynamics additionally offers business performance monitoring, tying technical metrics to business outcomes. This unique approach allows companies to directly correlate application performance with business metrics, providing clear visibility on how application changes and performance impact business results. Additionally, AppDynamics supports a variety of environments including cloud, on-premises, and hybrid, and integrates seamlessly with other Cisco technologies for enhanced network visibility and security insights.
15: Virtana Optimize

Unlike many of the AWS cost optimization services on this list, Virtana Optimize focuses on infrastructure rightsizing and cost control for hybrid and multicloud environments. It collects performance and usage data from both cloud and on-prem resources to recommend cost-saving actions without sacrificing application performance. Unlike tools that only operate in the cloud, Virtana is designed for organizations in transitional or hybrid states. It offers detailed forecasting, idle resource detection, and policy-based recommendations to help teams automate cleanup and planning.
Virtana also emphasizes integration with existing ITSM and CMDB workflows, making it easier for enterprise IT teams to incorporate optimization into daily operations. Its strength lies in bridging financial insights with infrastructure intelligence across complex environments.
16: Harness Cost Management

Harness Cloud Cost Management is built with engineering teams in mind, offering deep cost visibility directly within CI/CD pipelines. It connects cloud spend to specific microservices, applications, and deployments—making it easier for developers to understand and optimize the cost impact of their changes. Harness supports multi-cloud environments and integrates with Kubernetes to surface container-level cost data without relying on perfect tagging. The platform includes anomaly detection, budgeting, and governance tools, but its standout feature is how seamlessly it ties cost accountability to software delivery.
Unlike finance-first tools, Harness embeds cost data where engineers work. This makes it a strong fit for DevOps-driven organizations that want to bake FinOps into day-to-day workflows.
17: Xosphere

Xosphere specializes in automated Spot Instance management for EC2, helping teams cut compute costs without the risk of interruptions. Its Instance Orchestrator dynamically shifts workloads between On-Demand and Spot based on availability and policy rules, maintaining uptime while maximizing savings. Unlike tools that simply recommend Spot usage, Xosphere executes failovers in real time. It integrates directly into your infrastructure without requiring major application changes. This makes it ideal for organizations that want to safely adopt Spot at scale without burdening engineering teams.
18: Cast.ai

CAST AI focuses on automated Kubernetes cost optimization, offering real-time rightsizing, autoscaling, and Spot Instance automation across AWS, GCP, and Azure. It continuously monitors your workloads and infrastructure, then takes direct action—such as removing idle nodes, shifting to cheaper compute, or consolidating workloads. The platform doesn’t just alert; it remediates. CAST AI also includes commitment management, cost reporting, and security checks, but its core strength is hands-off Kubernetes savings. It’s especially useful for teams that want to reduce costs without relying on internal scripts or manual FinOps processes. CAST AI is a strong fit for high-scale, container-heavy environments that need optimization to happen automatically.
Benefits of Cloud Cost Optimization Services
Here are some key perks of successful cloud cost optimization services:
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See what you’re actually spending—and where
Clear visibility across accounts, services, and tools helps teams understand usage patterns and catch surprises early. Successful cloud management should help you understand the who, what, when, where, and why of cloud spending. -
Cut waste without breaking things
Identifying underused resources, idle compute, and duplicate services lets you reduce spend safely—without compromising reliability or engineering velocity. -
Get more out of what you’ve already paid for
Cloud cost optimization services and tools help you monitor and maximize Savings Plan and RI utilization, so you’re not leaving prepaid discounts unused—or double-paying with Spot. -
Make cost ownership part of every team’s workflow
With built-in showbacks, tagging, and chargebacks, teams can see the cost of what they run—and act on it without waiting for finance to escalate the issue. -
Replace manual reporting with real-time answers
Dashboards and automated reporting can help you track cost by product, customer, or feature—without exporting spreadsheets or running SQL on CUR data. -
Stay ahead of cost spikes and anomalies
Real-time monitoring and anomaly alerts give you a chance to act before costs spiral—helping you avoid budget overruns without slowing anything down. Realtime visibility and alerts are needed so that you can stop overspending BEFORE you run up thousands on idle EC2 or excessive S3 bucket requests. -
Reduce planning guesswork
With accurate forecasts based on actual usage, it’s easier to set realistic budgets, adjust commitments, and align spend with business priorities. -
Support modern infrastructure without added complexity
From containers and serverless to GenAI and SaaS, the right platform brings it all together so you can get visibility over all of your unified costs without multiple logins, dashboards, and hours of your engineering team’s time spent on data reconciliation.
Which Is The Best Cloud Cost Optimization Company for You?
Most teams today are stuck managing cloud spending with multiple cost tools, manual reconciliation, and too much valuable engineering spent on tedious optimization tasks.
That’s why platforms like nOps are built differently. nOps integrates with your cloud and SaaS environments, organizing spend by the dimensions you care about, and automating all the work of optimization. From cost allocation and commitment management to GenAI and Kubernetes visibility, nOps is an end-to-end platform. That means you don’t have to deal with multiple subscriptions, multiple logins, or conflicting optimizations.
About nOps
nOps is an AI-powered FinOps automation platform that helps AWS users optimize their cloud infrastructure for minimal engineering effort.
nOps was recently ranked #1 in G2’s cloud cost management category, and we optimize $2 billion in cloud spend for our customers.
Join our customers using nOps to understand your cloud costs and leverage automation with complete confidence by booking a demo today!
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
What is optimization in AWS?
Optimization in AWS means identifying and eliminating waste, improving resource efficiency, and aligning cloud usage with business goals. AWS cloud cost optimization services can help with rightsizing instances, scaling workloads dynamically, automating shutdowns, and selecting the most cost-effective pricing models like Spot Instances or Savings Plans—ensuring performance while lowering unnecessary spend.
Which AWS service can help you optimize your AWS environment?
AWS Compute Optimizer helps identify under- or over-provisioned EC2, Lambda, and Auto Scaling resources using actual utilization metrics. Trusted Advisor and AWS Cost Explorer offer further recommendations. However, for enterprise-grade optimization across services, teams often layer in third-party tools that provide automation and deeper financial accountability.
What are the four pillars of cost optimization in AWS?
The four pillars of cost optimization in AWS are:
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Right-size workloads
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Increase elasticity
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Choose the right pricing model
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Optimize storage
Together, these strategies ensure AWS resources are aligned with actual demand. You can implement these pillars with the help of a cloud management tool or cloud cost optimization services.
How much does AWS Compute Optimizer cost?
Compute Optimizer is free for EC2, Lambda, and Auto Scaling Group recommendations. For EBS volume insights, you’ll pay $0.000336 per volume-hour. Exporting recommendations to S3 costs standard S3 storage rates—around $0.023 per GB per month. Most teams use it at no cost unless they need storage-intensive exports or EBS optimization.