Understanding cloud costs has always been a challenge, especially as organizations scale across multiple providers and services for cloud, SaaS and AI costs.

Cloudability, acquired by Apptio and now part of IBM, was one of the first platforms to help enterprises get visibility into their cloud spend. It became popular with Finance and FinOps teams for its budgeting, forecasting, and cost allocation features. But as cloud environments have grown more complex — with Kubernetes, containers, and real-time optimization needs — many teams are searching for alternatives. 

Customers also point out that Cloudability’s pricing sits at the higher end of the market, raising questions about ROI when compared to newer, more agile tools.

In this article, we’ll look at the best Apptio Cloudability alternatives available today, breaking down their pros and cons so you can choose the right solution.

1. nOps

With nOps, you gain more than just insights; you get automation that engineers can actually use to keep costs under control every day. Instead of stopping at visibility, nOps continuously acts on cost and usage data—removing waste, rightsizing resources, and making sure commitments are fully utilized. This turns FinOps from a reporting exercise into a system of ongoing savings.

nOps is an all-in-one platform for:

  • Visibility & Reporting across cloud, SaaS, and AI spend, with 100% cost allocation across accounts, teams, and workloads.
  • FinOps Agent: AI trained on your cost data to answer questions and automate tasks like forecasting, anomaly detection, waste reduction, budgeting, and reporting.
  • Commitment Management: Fully automated management of RIs and Savings Plans with a 100% utilization guarantee.
  • Resource Optimization: Continuous, automated rightsizing across compute, storage, and containers.
  • Kubernetes Cost Control: Automated container rightsizing and deep EKS visibility down to the node or container level.

Unlike Cloudability, which requires manual follow-up and financial expertise to act on recommendations, nOps does the work for you—helping both engineers and finance teams see immediate results. 

Pricing is flat and predictable rather than a percentage of your cloud spend, and time to value is just 30 minutes — book a demo to try it out with your own AWS account. 

2. Flexera

Next on the list of Cloudability competitors is Flexera One, a comprehensive cloud cost and IT asset management platform that helps enterprises optimize spend across multi-cloud and on-premises environments. After acquiring CloudCheckr (2021) and Spot by NetApp (2023), Flexera One combined traditional cloud cost governance with optimization capabilities, giving Finance and IT teams a centralized way to manage cloud visibility, budgeting, and compliance.

Pros

  • Strong multi-cloud governance and reporting for large enterprises
  • Integrates with CloudCheckr for deeper AWS commitment coverage
  • Robust dashboards for finance and compliance teams
  • Supports both cloud and on-premises visibility

Cons

  • Complex setup and administration — best suited for enterprises with FinOps expertise
  • Pricing not transparent (requires sales engagement)
  • Can feel heavy for smaller or fast-moving teams

Best For
 Enterprises with large, multi-cloud environments that require strict governance, compliance, and cost allocation across business units.

Year Founded
 2008

Pricing
 Contact Sales — pricing varies depending on enterprise requirements.

3. VMware Aria Cost (formerly Tanzu CloudHealth)

VMware Aria Cost, powered by CloudHealth, is a Cloudability competitor for FinOps. It’s an enterprise-grade cloud cost and governance platform tailored for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. It provides comprehensive cost visibility across public and private clouds, capacity planning, governance automation, and cost optimization aligned with infrastructure and operations teams. The platform also integrates capacity insights to help organizations optimize resource utilization across environments.

Pros

  • Unified visibility across public clouds and VMware-based infrastructures, ideal for complex hybrid environments.
  • Governance automation with policy-driven cost control and alerts
  • Capacity-aware insights with rightsizing recommendations, what-if scenario planning, and intelligent forecasting.

Cons

  • Requires robust tagging and organizational maturity, and lacks unit-level cost visibility such as cost per feature or customer.
  • Steep learning curve and deployment complexity, best suited to enterprises with dedicated FinOps or ITOps resources.
  • Pricing is opaque and contracts can be costly, often using a tiered subscription model based on cloud spend.
  • Less agile compared to newer FinOps-first tools, with limited advanced automation and Kubernetes-native support.

Best For

Large enterprises already invested in VMware infrastructure, seeking integrated cost visibility, capacity planning, and governance across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Year Founded

2012 (CloudHealth Technologies, acquired by VMware in 2018).

Pricing

VMware does not publish standard pricing, but typical structures are subscription-based, tiered by monthly cloud spend with additional overage fees. Multi-year commitments are available with modest discounts.

4. CloudZero

CloudZero is a cloud cost intelligence platform built for software-driven organizations that want to relate cloud spend not just to infrastructure but to business outcomes. The platform ingests spend data across cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure), Kubernetes, and certain SaaS tools, then applies cost allocation and anomaly detection to surface insights and drive cost accountability across engineering workflows.

Pros

  • Offers unit-cost visibility (e.g., cost per customer, feature, or team), enabling engineering and product teams to see precisely how design choices affect margins.
  • Tag-less allocation: automatically allocates spend when tagging is incomplete
  • Ease of use with rapid onboarding and adoption.

Cons

  • Forecasting and advanced reporting capabilities are relatively basic compared to mature platforms; deep financial modeling may require supplemental tools.
  • Limited customization in dashboards—users may rely on CloudZero’s built-in views or work with support to build new ones.
  • Initial setup might be complex for teams unfamiliar with defining business-aligned cost dimensions (e.g., product, customer, etc.).

Best For

SaaS, tech, and engineering-focused organizations that value cloud cost tied to business metrics.

Year Founded

2016

Pricing

CloudZero uses a tiered pricing model, with options that scale based on spend volume.

5. Datadog

Datadog....

Next on the list of best Cloudability alternatives is Datadog, a unified observability platform that integrates cloud cost management—called Cloud Cost Management (CCM)—directly into its suite of infrastructure, application, log, and container monitoring tools. This allows both engineering and FinOps teams to see cost data alongside performance metrics, with visibility into cloud and SaaS spending through dashboards, notebooks, and monitors. 

Pros

  • Integrated cost + observability: Engineers can view cost insights within the same interface used for monitoring, tracing, and alerting, encouraging accountability and faster action.
  • Automated cost recommendations: Provides rightsizing guidance and one-click actions, with the ability to integrate recommendations into workflows.
  • Granular multi-cloud & SaaS attribution: Supports detailed tagging and allocation rules, including cost visibility down to containers and workloads.

Cons

  • Pricing complexity and growth: Datadog’s modular pricing model can become expensive as usage scales, requiring close monitoring.
  • Observability-first depth: Organizations seeking a pure FinOps tool may find the breadth of observability features unnecessary.
  • Learning curve: While dashboards are powerful, the wide feature set can be overwhelming for new users.

Best For

Organizations already using Datadog for observability, or those seeking a single platform where cost insights are seamlessly combined with infrastructure and application monitoring—especially useful for engineering-led FinOps practices.

Year Founded

2010

Pricing

Datadog uses a modular pricing model, with charges based on hosts, data volume, and product features:

  • Infrastructure monitoring starts at around $15 per host/month (with free usage up to 5 hosts).

  • Additional modules like APM, log ingestion, and synthetic monitoring are billed separately and can significantly increase costs.

  • Enterprise pricing is available for larger environments with custom needs.

6. CloudChekr

CloudCheckr dashboard

CloudCheckr (now part of Spot by NetApp) is a comprehensive cloud management platform designed for enterprise FinOps teams and managed service providers. It combines deep cost visibility with governance, security, and compliance, allowing organizations to optimize resources, automate policy enforcement, and efficiently manage spend across multi-cloud and hybrid environments. 

Pros

  • Extensive governance and security checks to improve cloud posture and enforce policies at scale.
  • Detailed visibility and reporting: Offers granular breakdowns of cost and usage by account, region, service, tag, or cost center, including chargeback/showback reporting.
  • Strong MSP support: Ideal for managed service providers needing multi-tenant visibility and cost allocation per client.

Cons

  • Complex onboarding and configuration unless you have dedicated FinOps or platform engineering support.
  • Price and licensing opaque: Requires direct engagement with sales to get pricing details. Can be a heavy lift for smaller teams.
  • UI may feel dated: Some users report the interface can be less intuitive compared to newer, more modern tools—especially for visualizing dashboards.

Best For

Large enterprises and managed service providers that require integrated cost management, compliance, and security capabilities at scale across multi-cloud and hybrid environments.

Year Founded

Originally founded over a decade ago, CloudCheckr has evolved through numerous integrations, now forming part of the Spot by NetApp portfolio.

Pricing

Pricing is not publicly disclosed and is customized based on enterprise needs. Prospective users must contact the vendor for quotes, which typically consider factors like cloud spend, usage tiers, and organizational complexity.

7. Kubecost

Kubecost dashboard

Kubecost is a Kubernetes-native cost monitoring and optimization platform, designed from the ground up for teams running containerized workloads. It delivers real-time visibility into cluster spending—across Kubernetes constructs like namespaces, pods, services, and nodes—reconciling these costs with your cloud provider’s billing. 

Pros

  • Deep Kubernetes-native visibility: Tracks cost across all Kubernetes resources—namespaces, pods, deployments, containers, and more—along with out-of-cluster services for full-stack cost attribution.
  • Quick installation: Can be deployed via Helm in minutes, with both free and enterprise-grade options available.
  • Flexible deployment models: Offers self-hosted (on-prem or managed clusters) or cloud-hosted (SaaS) deployment, depending on operational preference.

Cons

  • Kubernetes-only scope: Focuses exclusively on Kubernetes spend, lacking broader visibility into non-cluster cloud services.
  • Potential cost overhead: Usage-based pricing (e.g., per container-hour) or node-based licensing may add unexpected costs, especially for large or dynamic workloads.
  • Limited cost granularity in free tier: The free plan has shorter metric retention and relies on list prices, which may reduce billing accuracy.
  • Documentation and setup can be tough: Teams without strong Kubernetes experience may find setup, metric retention tuning, or alert configuration challenging.

Best For

Engineering-led teams and platform engineering groups managing production Kubernetes workloads. Ideal for organizations that need precise, real-time cost insights into container infrastructure and want actionable recommendations at the cluster and pod level.

Year Founded

Started as an open-source project and later commercialized—now part of Apptio/IBM’s toolset. The original open-source project (pre-Apptio acquisition) launched in the early 2020s.

Pricing

  • Self-Hosted: Pricing is typically based on node count and includes full control.
  • Managed SaaS (via AWS Marketplace or Kubecost Cloud): Usage-based billing, for example ~$3.42 per container-hour, with flexibility to cancel anytime.
  • Enterprise contracts: Annual licensing available with volume-based pricing and feature bundles like unlimited clusters, advanced retention, and governance tools.

8. Turbonomic

IBM Turbonomic Dashboard

Turbonomic (formerly VMTurbo), now part of IBM, is an AI-driven application resource management platform designed to continuously optimize performance and cost across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. It analyzes resource demand in real time and automates scaling of compute, storage, containers, and databases. 

Pros

  • End-to-end resource automation: Aligns supply to application demand across workloads—from VMs and containers to databases.
  • Broad platform support: Works across AWS, Azure, GCP, on-prem infrastructure, Kubernetes clusters, and even GPU workloads.
  • SLO-driven actions: Offers optimization pathways that respect application service-level objectives, reducing manual tuning.
  • Workload parking: Automatically identifies and halts idle resources during off-hours, reducing unnecessary spend.

Cons

  • Complex setup and management: Full value requires deployment across varied environments and tuning, often needing specialized teams.
  • Pricing opacity and high cost: Tier-based pricing (Essentials vs. Standard vs. Hybrid) varies by environment complexity and cloud spend—often requiring direct sales engagement.
  • UI and performance constraints: In large-scale environments, the interface can feel sluggish, and syncing Kubernetes metrics at scale may introduce delays.

Best For

Enterprises operating across hybrid or multi-cloud environments or data centers that need continuous, AI-driven automation of resource management and cost control—especially where performance and compliance are critical.

Year Founded

Founded in 2008 as VMTurbo and rebranded to Turbonomic in 2017. Acquired by IBM in 2021, it has since expanded its hybrid-cloud optimization capabilities under IBM.

Pricing

  • Essentials (SaaS): Starts around $40,000/year, suited for businesses with up to ~$2M annual cloud spend.
  • Standard & Hybrid editions: Charged based on percentage of spend or via managed virtual server counts—pricing varies with environment size and scope.

9. Harness

Harness dashboard

Harness is best known as a CI/CD and developer platform, but it also offers a Cloud Cost Management (CCM) module. Harness CCM is designed to give engineering and FinOps teams real-time visibility into cloud costs, with a focus on actionable insights for Kubernetes and multi-cloud environments. The platform integrates cost data directly into developer workflows, helping teams manage cloud spend as part of their delivery pipeline. 

Pros

  • Policy-based governance: Teams can define cost policies to prevent overspending, including auto-shutdowns and limits on resource consumption.
  • Developer-friendly integration: Surfaces cost data within the same ecosystem developers already use for CI/CD, encouraging cost-aware engineering decisions.
  • Rich visualizations: Interactive dashboards that make it easier to drill into cost trends and anomalies.

Cons

  • Premium pricing model: Uses a percentage-of-cloud-spend approach, which can become costly as infrastructure scales.
  • Learning curve: Feature-rich dashboards and policy tools may require dedicated FinOps ownership to set up effectively.
  • Limited automation depth: While policies are strong, some cost optimization actions still require manual follow-up compared to automation-first tools.

 

Best For

Organizations already invested in the Harness ecosystem or those seeking cost visibility tightly coupled with CI/CD workflows. Also a fit for engineering-driven teams that want detailed visualizations and strong governance controls across Kubernetes and multi-cloud setups.

Year Founded

2016

Pricing

Harness CCM pricing is based on a percentage of cloud spend.

  • Teams plan: ~2.25% of monthly spend
  • Enterprise plan: ~2.5% of monthly spend

 

The Bottom Line

Cloudability is best suited for enterprises that want traditional cost visibility and reporting. It provides dashboards for cloud spend and account navigation, but its capabilities largely stop there: optimization requires manual effort, Kubernetes visibility doesn’t include efficiency benchmarking, and commitment management is focused on basic RI and Savings Plan tracking.

nOps builds on the same visibility foundation but goes further—automating optimization across commitments, compute, storage, and containers. It not only shows waste but removes it, with flat pricing instead of usage-based fees. That keeps costs predictable as your environment grows while savings continue to compound.

nOps also provides both a free trial and a free tier, regardless of spend. The free tier includes tools like the MAP Tracker, optimization opportunity discovery, and cost explorer with 15+ dimensions—valuable for anyone looking to understand and manage cloud spend.

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 — book a demo with one of our AWS experts to try it out for yourself.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Let’s dive into some FAQ about Cloudability alternatives (2025). 

Is Apptio a FinOps tool?

Yes. Apptio offers FinOps capabilities through its cloud financial management products, including Cloudability. It provides visibility, allocation, and budgeting for cloud spend. However, many teams supplement or replace Apptio with newer FinOps tools that emphasize real-time automation, Kubernetes visibility, and faster ROI compared to traditional reporting platforms.

Is Cloudability Apptio?

Yes. Cloudability was acquired by Apptio in 2019 and is now part of Apptio’s portfolio of IT financial management tools. In 2023, IBM acquired Apptio, making Cloudability an IBM-owned solution. Despite ownership changes, Cloudability continues to operate as a core Apptio FinOps offering.

Is Flexera better than Cloudability?

Flexera and Cloudability serve similar enterprise FinOps use cases, but their strengths differ. Flexera emphasizes IT asset management, compliance, and multi-cloud governance, particularly after integrating CloudCheckr. Cloudability, by contrast, is finance-focused with budgeting and forecasting features. Whether one is “better” depends on organizational priorities, scale, and FinOps maturity.

What is the difference between CloudHealth and Cloudability?

CloudHealth, now VMware Aria Cost, focuses on governance, security, and policy-driven multi-cloud management, often used by IT operations. Cloudability, part of Apptio, is finance-oriented, emphasizing budgeting, cost allocation, and forecasting. Both provide visibility and rightsizing, but CloudHealth leans toward governance, while Cloudability targets financial reporting and FinOps workflows.