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Cloud waste is on the rise, driven by manual processes, inefficiencies and new data-intensive AI initiatives. Managing cloud costs is a top priority for organizations seeking to get more out of their cloud investments and boost operational efficiency. But with countless platforms available, finding the right platform for your needs can be challenging.
Densify, Economize, and nOps each take distinct approaches to cloud cost management. Densify focuses on workload optimization and predictive analytics, while Economize emphasizes detailed cost visibility and trend analysis. If you’re seeking an end-to-end platform, nOps both visibility and optimization into a unified platform.
This guide breaks down how Densify, Economize, and nOps compare, highlighting their features, strengths, and limitations to help you decide which is best for your team.
What is Densify?
Densify was founded in 1999 to optimize infrastructure utilization for on-premises and virtualized environments and has since transitioned to focus on cloud resource optimization. The Densify platform uses advanced analytics to recommend workload placements and rightsizing strategies. By analyzing resource usage patterns, it identifies inefficiencies and suggests proactive adjustments to maximize utilization and reduce costs. Densify can be used across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
What is Economize?
Economize is a newer startup founded in 2021, specializing in real-time cloud cost insights and lightweight monitoring tailored for small to medium-sized businesses. It is primarily a cloud cost visibility platform designed to provide detailed reports and cost breakdowns, helping organizations monitor and understand their cloud spending. It includes tools for tracking trends, identifying waste, and generating actionable recommendations to reduce costs. Economize is ideal for teams looking for clear insights into their spending, as it focuses primarily on visibility rather than acting on optimization.
nOps: All-In-One Cloud Cost Optimization
Juggling separate tools for visibility, commitment management, Spot, Kubernetes, etc. quickly leads to high costs and management overhead.
That’s why nOps unified all the capabilities you need into one platform for a holistic, end-to-end approach. Having visibility + resource optimization + workload management in one platform means that all of your data is integrated across all sources — for more effective optimization and easy cost allocation and reporting.
Cost Allocation for AWS, Kubernetes & 3rd Party Tools ✔️ | Reports & Budgets
| Workload Optimization (EKS, ECS, ASGs, Batch) ✔️ | Commitment Management
| Spot Management
|
Kubernetes visibility down to node/container ✔️ | Pod/Container Rightsizing ✔️ | Resource Rightsizing
| Resource Scheduling ✔️ | Storage Optimization ✔️ |
nOps manages $2 billion in AWS spend and has saved customers 50%+ on average — book a demo to learn more.
Densify vs Economize vs nOps
Densify, Economize, and nOps all offer a unique set of cloud optimization capabilities.
Let’s briefly compare the features offered by each platform before diving into a more detailed analysis.
Feature | nOps | Densify | Economize |
Visibility & Cloud Management | |||
Cost Allocation | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✔️ |
Automated Tagging | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✔️ |
Budget Management | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✔️ |
Automated Reports & Dashboards | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Break down costs by any Kubernetes concept | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✖️ |
Break down costs by any finance concept | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✔️ |
Kubernetes Costs Unified with All Spend | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
Role-Based Access Control | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Multi-cloud services | ✖️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Commitment Management | |||
Recommendations for Reserved Instances & Savings Plans | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
Fully automated management of RI & SP | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
100% Utilization Guarantee for Commitments | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
Spot & EKS Management | |||
EKS Observability & Management | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✖️ |
Native integration with Karpenter or Cluster Autoscaler | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
Spot Market Monitoring | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✖️ |
Fully Automated Commitment (RI & SP) Management | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
Intelligent Instance Selection | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✖️ |
Graceful Pod Rebalancing | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✖️ |
Real-time Workload Reconsideration | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✖️ |
Same reliability SLAs as AWS On-Demand | ✔️ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
One-click Automated Container Rightsizing | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✖️ |
Deep Container & Node Efficiency Visibility | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✖️ |
Cloud Optimization Automation | |||
Automated Resource Rightsizing | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✖️ |
Automatically Eliminate Idle EC2 | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✖️ |
Automated EBS Optimization | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✖️ |
Automated Resource Scheduling | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✖️ |
Automated GP2 to GP3 | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✖️ |
For a complete comparison of cloud cost optimization platforms across the market, you can check out the full Buyer’s Guide to Cloud Optimization.
1. Free Visibility and Cloud Management Features
nOps Business Contexts is a free platform that makes it easy to understand and allocate 100% of your AWS costs, from your largest resources all the way down to your individual container costs.
With customizable reports, budgets and dashboards; 40+ filters and views; as well as the ability to break down costs by any finance or engineering concept, nOps makes it fast and easy to get visibility into your cloud costs.
It also unifies your Kubernetes costs with the rest of your AWS spend, so you can understand and report on your shared costs without the hassle of reconciling multiple data sources.
Like nOps, Economize also offers cloud visibility features including automated tagging, reports, and dashboards. One key advantage of Economize is that in addition to AWS, it also covers Azure and GCP. However, you’ll need another tool for deep Kubernetes visibility integrated with the rest of your cost data.
2. Comprehensive Commitment Management
Savings Plans (SP) and Reserved Instances (RI) offer discounts of up to 72% on all of your AWS compute in exchange for committing to a certain level of EC2 usage. But purchasing commitments can tricky — it’s difficult to know how much to commit to, and your dynamic usage keeps changing.
nOps offers a fully automated commitment management solution, so you don’t have to spend time manually managing your discounts and juggling between SP, RI and Spot. nOps backs you with a 100% commitment utilization guarantee (or we’ll credit you back at the end of the month) so you can be absolutely confident every dollar you spend is working for you.
Currently, Densify and Economize do not offer automated commitment management. However, Densify provides reports and analytics that you can use to get visibility into how optimized your Reserved Instance and Savings Plan utilization is. These recommendations are based on analysis of your billing data and CloudWatch.
3. Comprehensive Spot Management
nOps makes it easy to leverage Spot best practices at scale. The platform continuously and automatically reallocates workloads to reliable and cost-efficient Spot instances, strategically diversifying instance types, instance lifetimes, and regions to reduce the likelihood of disruptions.
Unlike traditional Spot management, which tends to respond to interruptions after they occur, nOps uses predictive insights to proactively rebalance workloads, ensuring greater cost savings and stability. This proactive strategy slashes Spot terminations to under 1%, making it significantly easier to run workloads on Spot.
nOps also provides complete visibility into your savings. Log in to see your effective savings, Spot termination rates, cluster costs over time, and other critical performance metrics at a glance.
Densify’s Spot management is primarily focused on enabling cloud teams to identify and provision Spot Instances based on workload requirements. While it provides some visibility into cost-saving opportunities, its functionality is less extensive when it comes to advanced Spot orchestration.
Another key advantage of nOps is its all-in-one Spot and commitment management. Many Spot management solutions risk putting your workloads onto too much Spot — which will end up costing you more in the long run because you are effectively wasting your prepaid commitments and paying twice for the same compute. That’s why you need to optimize your Spot and your SP and RI together for maximum savings.
4. EKS Visibility & Cost Optimization
nOps provides end-to-end EKS visibility and optimization.
Gaining visibility into Kubernetes workloads often requires multiple tools like Datadog, Cost Explorer, and Lens, complicating access to real-time insights on costs, performance, and workloads. For example, Lens provides detailed Kubernetes insights, but it is resource-intensive and requires elevated access and multiple steps to use.
With nOps, this complexity is streamlined. The nOps Kubernetes Dashboard offers the same visibility power as Lens — plus node monitoring, container rightsizing, workload troubleshooting, and binpacking — all in one tool. Monitor and trouble all your workloads in one place: gain a status overview, click into clusters, get insights, explore, and quickly understand what action to take.
Densify offers Kubernetes visibility and optimization capabilities that focus on analyzing workload patterns and resource utilization to recommend rightsizing and placement strategies. A key advantage is its multi-cloud support, allowing organizations to optimize Kubernetes clusters across AWS, Azure, and GCP. This multi-cloud approach is a key advantage for teams managing Kubernetes environments across diverse cloud ecosystems.
Economize also provides Kubernetes cost visibility, offering insights into cluster spending trends and resource usage. However, it lacks advanced optimization tools like container rightsizing or workload management. Its lightweight approach suits businesses seeking basic cost monitoring across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
5. Cloud Optimization Automation
In an ideal world, you would rightsize your resources, optimize storage, and clean up idle resources before committing to Reserved Instances and Savings Plans.
nOps makes it easy to tackle time-consuming cost optimization tasks, with automation tools for resource rightsizing, idle EC2 and EBS cleanup, resource scheduling, one-click GP2 to GP3 migration, EBS snapshot cleanup, and more.
nOps integrates with your preferred monitoring tools (Datadog, CloudWatch, etc.) for high-resolution recommendations that can be implemented in one click.
By making it quick and easy to take action on cost optimization, nOps frees up your engineering team’s time to focus on building and innovating.
Densify also offers recommendations for rightsizing, storage optimization, and other optimizations to streamline resource utilization.
6. Free AWS Optimization Tools
While Densify and Economize emphasize multi-cloud capabilities for Azure and GCP, nOps specializes in AWS and Kubernetes. This focus allows nOps to deliver deep integration and automation for AWS-specific programs like MAP and WAFR, making it the ideal choice for teams prioritizing AWS optimization.
nOps offers free tools that simplify two of the most critical AWS programs: the Well-Architected Framework Review (WAFR) and the Migration Acceleration Program (MAP). With automation and real-time tracking, nOps eliminates the manual effort these processes traditionally require.
For WAFR, nOps scans your infrastructure, auto-filling reports, identifying misconfigurations, and prioritizing high-risk issues for remediation. Progress tracking and direct AWS integration make it easy to conduct and document reviews while ensuring compliance with frameworks like HIPAA, SOC2, and CIS.
For MAP, nOps automates tagging, tracks credits in real time, and provides migration progress insights, helping you maximize your MAP funding while staying on schedule. The platform also prevents untagged resources from jeopardizing your credits, saving both time and money.
About nOps
nOps was recently ranked #1 with five stars in G2’s cloud cost management category, and we optimize $2 billion in cloud spend for our customers.
At nOps, our mission is to make it easy for engineers to optimize. Join our customers using nOps to understand your cloud costs and leverage automation with complete confidence by booking a demo today!
