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As cloud costs rise, the need for actionable, engineering- and finance-friendly cost tools has never been greater. Finance teams need accurate allocations and forecasts; engineers need context to make cost-effective architectural decisions.
Vantage, CloudZero and nOps each offer their own approach to making cloud spend more understandable and manageable for technical teams. In this article, we’ll compare all three platforms across more than 40 features—from cost allocation and Kubernetes visibility to commitment automation, Spot management, and waste reduction.
What is Vantage?
Vantage is a self-serve cloud cost management tool that helps teams track and allocate infrastructure costs across AWS, GCP, Azure, and third-party services. It offers dashboards, reports, budgeting tools, and cost breakdowns by services, teams, and Kubernetes concepts.
What is CloudZero?
Founded in 2016, CloudZero is a cost intelligence platform that helps engineering and product teams connect cloud spend to business metrics. Designed to help teams connect cloud costs to features, environments, or customers, CloudZero focuses on cost intelligence, anomaly detection, and mapping spend to business outcomes.
What is nOps?
nOps goes beyond cost visibility with optimization across every savings letter — discounts, commitments, rightsizing, Spot, idle resource cleanup, and more. It helps engineering and FinOps teams automatically manage and reduce cloud costs across compute, Kubernetes, AI workloads, and SaaS services.
It’s the only platform that offers fully automated Reserved Instance (RI) and Savings Plan (SP) management with a 100% utilization guarantee, while also helping engineers continuously optimize containers and EKS clusters. The platform supports integration with many popular infrastructure tools and is used to manage over $2 billion in cloud spend.
Vantage vs CloudZero vs nOps
Each platform differs in its approach to commitment management, the guarantees they offer, and features included in the platform.
Let’s briefly compare the features offered by Vantage, CloudZero and nOps before diving into a more detailed analysis.
For a complete comparison of cloud cost optimization platforms across the market, you can check out the full Buyer’s Guide to Cloud Optimization.
Databricks Workload Optimization: Best Practices for Visibility, Performance and Savings
1. Visibility Features
While all three platforms—Vantage, CloudZero, and nOps—offer strong visibility into cloud costs, each emphasizes a different lens.
Vantage prioritizes self-serve dashboards and infrastructure-level reporting, helping teams slice spend by services, Kubernetes resources, and environments.
CloudZero focuses on aligning engineering activity to business outcomes, offering deep cost allocation by features, customers, and teams.
nOps combines cost visibility with real-time optimization opportunities—surfacing unused resources, container inefficiencies, and cost anomalies in the same view engineers use to take action.
2. Commitment Management
While all three platforms offer visibility into Reserved Instance (RI) and Savings Plan (SP) coverage, only nOps fully automates commitment management. Vantage automates SP purchases but leaves RIs—especially Convertible RIs—up to you. CloudZero offers recommendations, but execution is manual or outsourced to a third party provider.
nOps takes a fundamentally different approach: it continuously purchases, modifies, and optimizes both SPs and RIs (including CRIs) on your behalf, ensuring you get maximum coverage with zero manual effort. To truly maximize your AWS discounts and flexibility, you need both—Savings Plans for broad flexibility, and Convertible RIs for workload-specific savings with the ability to adapt as your needs change.
nOps is also the only platform that offers a 100% utilization guarantee, automatically crediting you for any unused commitments. And it only charges a portion of the savings, making adoption risk-free.
If your team is juggling Spot, RIs, and SPs manually, nOps ensures you maximize savings while freeing up your engineering team’s time to focus on building and innovating.
3. EKS Visibility
Gaining visibility into 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.
Vantage and CloudZero both provide cost breakdowns by Kubernetes constructs, helping teams understand where spend is going across clusters, namespaces, and workloads. However, neither platform offers deep benchmarking to measure how efficient your workloads actually are. In addition, they don’t automate the optimization itself; they only provide visibility.
nOps goes further by pairing EKS visibility with performance benchmarking and container rightsizing automation. The nOps Kubernetes Dashboard delivers Lens-level insights—such as node utilization, container rightsizing, and pod binpacking—while also showing how your workloads stack up against resource efficiency best practices. With nOps, teams don’t just visualize what’s running—they get actionable guidance on how to run it better and tools to automatically optimize.
4. Spot Management
nOps is the only platform on this list that offers automated Spot management. nOps Spot instance management over traditional methods by using machine learning to monitor historical and real-time Spot market pricing and interruption trends. The result is better performance at lower costs (plus, huge time savings for engineering teams).
nOps makes it easy to adopt Spot best practices. The platform dynamically shifts workloads to the most reliable and cost-effective Spot instances available, diversifying instance types and regions to minimize the risk of sudden interruptions. Unlike typical Spot management, which often replaces instances reactively, nOps proactively rebalances workloads based on predictive insights and Spot best practices for more savings and stability. This approach drastically reduces Spot terminations to less than 1%, making it orders of magnitude easier to run on Spot.
5. Cloud Optimization Automation
While visibility is foundational, most engineering teams don’t just want to see waste—they want to get rid of it. Vantage and CloudZero offer recommendations for rightsizing resources but stop short of automated action. Engineers still need to interpret the advice and apply changes manually.
nOps was built to make it seamless and easy for engineers to take action. From automatically terminating idle EC2 instances to migrating EBS volumes from gp2 to gp3 and scheduling resources to shut down during idle hours, nOps does the optimization work for you. These automations cover compute, storage, and containers. With prioritization based on effort and impact, it’s quick and easy to start saving — no need to script a fix, open a Jira ticket, or wait for a sprint.
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!
